Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Tell me, do you guys do street fairs, farmers markets, community events? Right there. There are these things in every, every market, every, you know, small towns, big cities, there are events where you will go out into the community. And so you go beyond your four walls. And if you're just going there to try and sell as much food as possible and make some money, you're doing it wrong. On today's episode of Restaurant Strategy, I'm going to tell you the thing that you should actually be trying to do. And I'm going to give you a simple tactic to accomplish that. All of that. On today's episode of Restaurant Strategy.
[00:00:30] There's an old saying that goes something like this. You'll only find three kinds of people in the world. Those who see, those who will never see, and those who can see when shown. This is Restaurant Strategy, a podcast with answers for anyone who's looking.
[00:01:01] Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in. My name is Chip Close. This is Restaurant Strategy, a podcast dedicated to helping you build a more profitable restaurant, therefore a more sustainable restaurant. Each week I leverage my 25 years in the industry to help you build that more profitable and sustainable business. Sustainability. Profitability will help you provide for your family. If you have a struggling restaurant, you are in the right place. If you struggle with profitability, meaning you're not making what you deserve to be making at your restaurant, you're in the right place. If you want more guidance, more, more handholding, more one on one, then I want you to, I want you to set up a call to learn about the P3 mastermind. It's a group coaching program that I run. We've put together an Incredible community. Nearly 150 members of the program currently enrolled, spread across four different groups. You get started, you begin that dialogue by visiting our website, restaurantstrategypodcast.com schedule grab some time on the calendar. We'll get to ask each other a bunch of questions and see if you think, see if we think you're a good fit again. Restaurantstrategypodcast.com schedule and yes, that link is in the show notes.
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[00:03:34] Okay, so each and every summer, right, we're coming into spring and summer. It's going to get beautiful outside. There will be farmers markets and street fairs and other community events, art shows. You will, you will be invited to participate in those. Your restaurant will want to participate in those. Why? Because there will be thousands of people collected in a central loc. And if you are doing this and trying to make money, meaning you bring a bunch of food and you try to sell out all your food so you can make money, I'm here to tell you you're doing it wrong. What you actually need to be doing is making connections, making friends, introducing yourself to the community, right? You get a chance to go out into the community, to leave your four walls rather than trying to bring them to you all the time, you're going to where they are at. You have to try and make friends, introduce yourself to the community and most importantly, importantly, collect their information and drive them to your restaurant. So if I were going to do one of these street fairs, right? So some sort of community event, you know, where they shut down the street. It's an art fair. It's a. Whatever, whatever it is. If I had my restaurant, I was going there, right? So let's say I got a taco restaurant and I'm going to put up a little stand and I'm going to make my street tacos all day from like 10 to 5 and try to feed as much people as possible, try to generate a lot of revenue. The point is not to make money. Of course, I hope you do make money so you don't lose money. At least break even. I think you could be profitable. But the main thing you need to focus on is collecting customer data and inviting them down to the restaurant. So what I would do, if I were you, if I ran this fictional taco restaurant, I would set up my whole thing. I would make a really beautiful setup. I would make it so it was really efficient. Wouldn't have a ton of options, just, you know, couple of options that I could sling really quickly, get the food executed quickly. And what I would do is I would try to collect information. So now how would I do that? One of the things that I would do is I would say, hey, let's say tacos are four bucks a piece, right? Tacos are four bucks a piece. Buy, you know, buy a taco for four bucks. If you want a third one, just sign up for our list and then you buy two and you get your third for free. As long as you sign up for our list, it's an easy thing that I would, that I would do. Or you say, right, 10% off your entire order if you sign up for our list. So it doesn't matter how many you order, 40 tacos, right? We'll give you 10% off that whole thing. I would do something like that. An immediate benefit they get for signing up to the list. Now you can either collect it on a piece of paper, right? You can do a giant fishbowl where people put in their name, their email, their phone number, and they put them in the big fishbowl. There are digital ways to do it. It's very easy to create a landing page, even a Google form, right? You create a Google form, you generate a, you know, make a little piece of paper, right? Put it in a frame, a little poster or something, and you put a QR code and you say, hey, if you scan this, join our email list, we'll take 10% off your, off your order right now, or we'll give you your, your third taco free. Something to that effect. Whoever signs up, just show us, prove to us that you signed up and we'll send you your, we'll give you your third taco for free. So for me, I'm cutting into profitability there. If I give 10% off or if I give that third taco for free. But I am collecting potentially hundreds or thousands of, of email addresses that over the course of that six, seven, eight hour day. So I would be willing to dig into profitability as long as I was growing my list and then what I would do, right? And so here's the other, here's the other thing you could also say, right? Sign up for our list, get your third taco for free and at the end of the day we're going to draw a name and that person gets $100 gift certificate to the restaurant, right? Or we're going to pull three names out of the hat. Three people are going to get a hundred dollar gift card, right? This is actually how I would do it. So I would say get 10% off or your third taco for free. And also everybody who enters is going to have a chance to win a hundred dollar gift card, right? You follow me? This is how we do it. Now I'm going to explain how we finish this off in just a minute after a word from another one of our sponsors.
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[00:09:36] Okay, so we're doing the street fair. We're trying to sling as many tacos as we can. We said the number one goal of the day is to make friends, right? To get contact information, right? So introduce ourselves to people who may not know us, grow our email list, and ultimately invite people down to the restaurant. Now we're going to piece it all together. So we were introducing ourselves over the course of the street fair, you know, serving tacos, making friends, showing our logos, giving out business cards, postcards, all of that. Mission accomplished. Number two, we are either doing a fishbowl or a digital fishbowl where we're collecting as many names as possible. We're giving them an immediate benefit for actually doing this. And then we're telling them that there's some grand prize to make it that much, to incentivize them that much more to enter our contest. So everybody who fills it out, they show you their phone, they show you that they did it, and they get that third taco for free or they get 10% off their order. Great. What happens at the end of the day? You collect all those emails and you literally draw them out of a hat, right? Now you could do this on like an Instagram Live or a Facebook Live. You could record a video where you actually pick the names out of a hat. Or however you're going to do it, what you're going to do is you're going to email all, each three of those people, right, one by one, and say, hey, congratulations, we pulled your name out of the hat. You are the winner of a hundred dollar gift card. We have the gift card waiting at our restaurant in an envelope. Come by anytime in the next two weeks to pick it up. What you're doing is you're not going to email it to them, you're not going to mail it to them. They have to come down to your restaurant if they've never been down there. We're making it obvious and easy to facilitate that, to make that happen. Then what you're going to do, and this is absolutely key because you gathered, let's say, 500 names over the course of the day. Three people won gift cards. They're going to come down and pick up their gift cards, but you have 497 other people who bought from you and liked you enough to enter a contest. What you're going to do is you're going to send an email to all of them, those 497 people, and you're going to use some version of the script. You're going to say, well, you didn't win, but you're still a winner. We already gave out the three $100 gift cards, but we're giving out a $10 gift card to everybody who entered and didn't win. Just come by, show this next time you're down at the restaurant, or click this link and use the code XYZ to get $10 off your order. Right? Valid now and, you know, valid for the next 30 days. And putting an expiration date on that gift card, that $10 gift card is absolutely crucial. Now look at what you did. You did this community event. You bought a table, right? You put up a tent, you sold a bunch of food, right? So you made money that day. Then you introduced yourself to maybe hundreds or thousands of people that didn't know who you were or had never been introduced to your brand. Great, win. So win number one, you made money. Win number two, you introduced yourself to a whole bunch of people who may not have known you beforehand. Win. Win number three, you collected all of this contact information. Win number four, you drove three people down. You gave them all kinds of warm squishies. Because you gave them $100 gift card, they're going to come down. And then to 497 other people, you gave them a $10 gift card. And I promise you, you will get redemptions on that. Now, you might have to send a couple of reminder emails to them to make sure it happens, but I promise you, I promise you, it will work. That's how you crush these street fairs, these community events, these farmers markets, right? Don't just get nearsighted. Like, I bought a stall and I'm trying to make money. That's nearsighted. Play the long game. The long game is figuring out how to collect information and drive people down to your restaurant. Because the street fair doesn't scale. You do a couple of them a year, but your restaurant scales. Your restaurant's open 360 days a year. You do that. That's how you crush at this game. And that's it, guys. That's what I want to talk to you about. I wanted to give you a really easy game plan for how to crush these street fairs. So that's the playbook again. If you have a busy restaurant, but you're not making what you think you should make out of the restaurant, you're not alone. There's a whole lot of people that I work with that I continue to work with in my P3 mastermind. It's a group coaching program. We meet for two hours every single week, and we are laser focused, targeted on profitability. If you want to start that conversation is just see if you're a good fit. It starts with a free call. 30 minutes, absolutely free. You grab time on the calendar by visiting restaurantstrategypodcast.com Schedule again. We'll get to ask you a bunch of questions about your restaurant. You'll get to ask us a bunch of questions about the program we run. It's an incredible community, and if you think you belong, I'm going to tell you, you're probably right. Grab time on the calendar. Look forward to chatting with you. Thank you very much for making time for this show, for making this part of your weekly routine. Appreciate you guys very much. I will see you next time.
