Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] You know, we're in the hospitality industry, but I don't think we're nearly as hospitable as we think we are. And I don't think we're nearly as hospitable as we can be. What happens when you go on a great interview? You've got a great conversation. What do you do? You go home and you send a follow up. What do you do when you have a great date? You send a follow up. What do you do in all these instances of your life when it's important to maintain a relationship? You send a follow up. So why are we so bad at it in our industry? I'm going to share with you a couple of instances in particular where you can inject a well timed, well placed, well written follow up into your business that will make a profound difference in the profitability of your business. You want to learn how? Don't go anywhere.
[00:00:46] 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.
[00:01:16] Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in. My name is Chip Close and this is Restaurant Strategy, a podcast dedicated to helping you build a more profitable business. A business that will provide stability and security for you and your families for generations to come. A profitable business is a sustainable business that will allow you to feed more people, employ more people, provide for the people that matter most in your life. There's nothing wrong with making money in this podcast. It's all about how to make you more money. Restaurant Strategy Podcast is six years old now. In addition to this podcast, I've got a YouTube channel. We put out content on Instagram, on TikTok, on Facebook, and I run a coaching program. It's called the P3 mastermind. It's a group coaching program. We've grown it from one all the way up to four. Four unique groups. Four groups. Almost 150 people currently enrolled in the program. The bottom line is the program works if you've got a restaurant but you struggle with profitability, meaning you're not making as much from your business as you think you should be. You're not alone and you're not crazy. You should be taken care of. If you want to start a conversation, just set up a call. Free call, absolutely free, 30 minutes with me or someone from my team. You do that by visiting restaurantstrategypodcast.com.com schedule you get to Ask us a lot of questions, we get to ask you a lot of questions and let's see if we're a good fit. RestaurantStrategyPodcast.com Schedule Sign up for a call to learn more about the P3 mastermind. As always, that link is in the show notes.
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[00:04:08] Okay, so we're talking about how we have better follow ups, how we inject better follow ups into our business. Bottom line is there are some key areas of our business that we don't follow up and it's unconscionable. Here's what I mean. There are three areas in particular where I think we can inject a better follow up into that will make us a better, more profitable, more beloved restaurant. The first one, the very first one is after somebody's first visit, right? I want to get right to it. The first visit, the first time somebody walks into your restaurant, right? And they come in and they try you for the first time and they have a meal and then they leave.
[00:04:47] You know, there's an Opportunity. There's a way that you can send them a follow up. Now, I had the, the owners of Noco, right? So Noco's restaurant in East Nashville. And they said they challenged themselves for the entire year that they were in business to call the entire nightly reservation book the day after. So every Tuesday they would call all of the Monday reservations. Every Thursday they'd call all of the Wednesday reservations. And what happens? There are three owners, they divvied it all up and they all called a portion of the list. And basically they called up, they say, hey, I'm one of the owners of Noco. I want to thank you personally for coming out and supporting our small business. I want to know what you thought of the experience. And also I wanted to see if there's anything we could have done better. What they did, I'm sure, is they blew people away for the entire first year they were in business. What they did is they tried to scale the thing that was on the surface unscalable. They sent a follow up. Now, before you sit back and say, well, that's crazy, I can't do that. We've got 200 seats in our restaurant. We'll do 400 covers on a Saturday, let me just say you absolutely could if you thought it would make a difference. And I'm here to tell you it absolutely will make a difference. Now should you call every single reservation the day after? I don't know. It would take a lot of effort. I think you could, and I think there'd be a huge benefit. But you could also automate this in a couple of really easy ways. There are ways that you can automate so that 24 hours after somebody's reservation they could get an email that thanks you. Right. So there's a program called 7Rooms. 7Rooms is a table management platform. It's really a CRM platform that ties together your table management software and your POS software. So you get all of the information in one hub and you use it to make better decisions and use it to maintain better relationships with your people. 7Rooms has always maintained that as a really key feature. But you could put something together using mailchimp or whatever your CRM platform is. Bottom line is there's a will, there's a way, and I think there's a benefit to saying, sending a message, even just three sentences and hey, I just wanted to reach out. Thank you for, for joining us last night. I'd love to hear any feedback and including criticism. There's something you think we could have done Better when you do that. And this is how you do a better touch point there when you do it, ask a question. Not a yes or no question, but ask a question, an opinion question that would, that would get someone to hit reply and send you a message back. What happens when you do that? You start engaging with people, right? On social media we talk a lot about engagement. Engagement just means to get someone to raise their hand, to get someone to respond, respond, to get someone to share their feelings. This is something we couldn't do 30, 40, 50 years ago. We couldn't ask somebody their opinion and actually respond in real time for relatively free. Basically free, right? We don't have to stamp, we don't have to, we don't need an envelope, we just hit send. So easy to do. First place that I think we can do a better follow up is right then and there when we identify the first time diners and send them a follow up after their first visit. To go one further, why not send a follow up to every diner every time they join you?
[00:07:56] It's actually pretty easy. Again, this is what the guys at Noco are doing so well. They're calling every single person because wouldn't there be a benefit of calling somebody after their second visit, third visit, fifth visit, eighth visit? And we have all that data housed within the reservation software. You can tell how often they came, how many times they've been there, where they've sat, who's been their waiter. And if you got a sophisticated program like seven rooms, you can see what they ordered, how much they spent, you can see the value of that given guest.
[00:08:26] Why not reach out to everybody? I think this is one area, right? At the very least all of your first timers. But I think extrapolate it out. You should be reaching out the day after every single person dines with you. That's the first one, the second one, the second, the better touch point. We can and should do the follow up, right? That's what we're talking about. How to do better follow ups is right after somebody's first trail. I think it would be great. Number one, I've gone on the record of saying this. I think it's really helpful if you sit down, if a manager sits down with a new training hourly employee at the end of every single training shift, you'll be able to take the temperature of the water, see if this person is going to make it or not. See if you can read body language if they're not really into it. Better to know that after the second training shift than after the eighth training shift. But why not call them the first day? Right? So if the chef, the owner, the gm. Right. So maybe it's a line cook. So the chef de cuisine is taking care of the training of this person. But what happens when the GM calls and says, hey, I saw that you started training last night. I know you're in good hands with our chef de cuisine, but I just wanted to reach out and introduce myself and tell me, what did you think of it last night? I think there's value for the front of the house manager to know what's going on in the back of the house or vice versa. Right? Why can't a chef de cuisine or an executive chef reach out and say, hey, I understand you just started training last night as a server in our restaurant. I just want to see if there were any questions for me. What did you think of our restaurant? I think it would blow people away and we're so focused on finding people, getting people, retaining people.
[00:09:54] Isn't this a crucial way to do that? First, better follow up is after they dine with us. The second better follow up. A big ball I think we drop is with new hires and I'm going to share the third one, my favorite one after a word from some more of our sponsors.
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[00:12:08] Okay, so today we're talking about how to make our businesses more hospitable. Specifically, I'm talking about the follow up, right? You go on a date, you send a follow up. You have an interview, you send a follow up. So why don't we follow up in the moments that matter most, Specifically when people actually come dine with us. Specifically when people come and train with us and we're trying to find those people and keep those people. Those are key areas I'm going to share with you the third one. The third is perhaps the most impactful. This has everything to do with catering and private dining. And basically it's straight sales. So it's the same thing. Every time you do a catering gig, every time you get a catering job, you've got to call them the day after and you talk to the host. Every time you do a private dining event, right, Somebody rents out your private dining room for eight people, for 28 people, for 108 people, you call them the day after. I can't tell you how crucial this is and how easy it is to overlook. Right? This I learned from some of the best private dining managers I ever saw. People who were the most successful, made the most money at doing it, and had a full book of business every single year. You call your clients the day after, 24 hours after. And this is how we do it. This is how we do it really well. It starts as a customer service call and turns to a sales call. So you call and say, hi, you know, hey, I just wanted to, you know, reach back out. This is Chip calling from Restaurant xyz. We catered for you yesterday and I just wanted to see how everything was. And you ask questions and hopefully they are gushing to you, right? Oh, did you, you know, what did people love? What disappeared quickly? Awesome. Amazing. Did you hear, have any feedback for us? What were people saying? Great. Hopefully it's, oh, my God, everybody loved it. They rave, blah, blah, blah. And then you're going to ask, you know, I just got to ask this. Was there anything you felt like people didn't like? Was there anything you felt like wasn't a big hit or something? We sort of screwed up or maybe could have done better. They will give you honest feedback and who cares? If they say, no, no, everything was great, then fine. You got them to tell you, no, no, everything was perfect. It starts as a customer service call, and then at that point in the conversation, a minute, two minutes in, it shifts to a sales call, you're basically going to say, great. Listen, I'm so glad everyone enjoyed it. It was a pleasure taking care of you. Tell me, what else do you have coming up? We'd love to take care of you again and continue building this relationship. What do you got coming up? Right? That's what you do now. You don't say, now here's the danger. You say, oh, this is so great. It was our pleasure to take care of you. Well, listen, let me know if you have anything else coming up. Click. They're never going to call you. You actually have to ask for the sale. This was so great. It was our pleasure taking care of you. What else do you have coming up? It's so huge. And then when you ask that, you stop talking. You just let them say, oh, well, you know what? We have this other thing, right, perfect. Tell me about that event, right? And then you start going into more information, right? You ask more questions. If they say, oh, well, you know, we don't really do this very often. I'm not sure when we have something coming up, you say, great, no problem. If it's okay with you, I'd love to keep in contact with you. Is it okay if I call you every couple of months just to check in and see if you do have something coming up? Basically, you're either asking for the sale or asking for their permission to follow back up, to call back and sell and try to sell yourself again, right? So you're either asking for the sale or asking for the opportunity for their permission to call back. And I promise you, when you call them the day after an event, a private dining event or catering event, it will be received warmly. It's a customer service call. And when you turn it into a sales call, basically saying, it was our pleasure, we love taking care of you. Can we do this again? Right. It's basically when you go on a great date and you say, I had a great time. Can I call you sometime? Can I call you again? Do you want to go out again? That's all we're asking. We're asking for a second date. When you do that consistently, religiously, over and over, you will get more business, you will drive more revenue, you will be more profitable for the hospitality industry. We are remarkably inhospitable and I think we can do this follow up Touch point so much better. Those are the three areas that I want you to focus on. Even if you just pick one, pick one of them and put it into play, you will be better. And if you do all three, I promise you will have a much better restaurant. That's it. The better follow up. The better follow up will lead to more sales and will make you more beloved to your people. Will make you a better restaurant. That's it. You guys. Appreciate you sitting here and joining me every single week. Again, if you've got a busy restaurant but not a profitable one, meaning you're not making what you should be making out of this, then I want you to reach out and get in touch. You set up a call with us totally free by visiting restaurantstrategypodcast.com schedule as always, that link is in the show Notes. I look forward to chatting with a bunch of you. I do these calls each and every week. My team loves fielding these calls. It's the best part of what we do, getting to connect with listeners out there. Listen. Appreciate you guys again. Restaurant strategy podcast.com schedule look forward to connecting with you guys.
