Happy New Year from Restaurant Revolution

The first couple months of every new year have a certain “air” about them… almost like another chapter has begun, and the excitement of new opportunities create a buzz in the heart.

At this time of year, I always take a moment to be thankful and consider what I can do with the next 12 months in business and life. There are so many possibilities!

Restaurant Revolution has plans that you would not believe, and I cannot wait to introduce them to you.
I’ve already mentioned our video series on Internet Marketing for Restaurant Owners — I hope you’ll take the time to view each chapter and consider how it will help your business.

Beyond the video series and blog are additional reports and events that you’ll definitely want to be involved in — and don’t hesitate to tell your friends, the more the merrier. Overall, I want to encourage you in the growth and success of everything you do in 2008. I sincerely wish you the best.

And for those who decide to join CouponCuisine, the restaurant coupon marketing system, we are most thankful. We look forward to providing you remarkable service.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year from Restaurant Revolution

We wish you a blessed and Merry Christmas… and a spectacular beginning to 2008!

The Restaurant Revolution team is taking a two-week break from production; look for our new video series and exclusive articles in January. Thanks for reading!

Restaurant Team Charter - Getting Buy In to Get Results

How do you look at the team concept in your restaurant? Is it a conscious thought process or something that you expect to just happen? How do you go about communicating your expectations with the staff and do they clearly know what is expected of them?

Just as there is incredible power in a strong team, there is a disaster waiting to happen in a weak team environment. A strong team over achieves and accomplishes results that they could never reach working independently. Unfortunately, a strong team does not happen by accident. It takes management awareness, focus and effort.

What Does a Strong Restaurant Team Look Like?

There are several readily identifiable characteristics of strong teams.

• Team has clear goals and sense of restaurant’s vision/direction
• Clear understanding of individual roles and responsibilitie
• Agreed upon procedures (for dealing with things like conflict and decision making)
• Complementary skills that create a well rounded set of team skills and experience
• Constructive relationships with a sense of trust and respect
• Team members are committed to the team and hold each other mutually accountable for successes and failures
• Reinforcement of team behaviors (including recognition, appreciation, and being held accountable)

How Do We Get There?

It is critical, of course, to first have the right team members to begin with. That all happens as a result of your recruiting, interviewing, hiring and training process. So, assuming you’ve done the right things here, how do you ensure maximum results from your squad? There are two great tools for this purpose, a team mission statement and a team charter.

Restaurant Team Mission Statement

This is different from the corporate mission statement for your restaurant. This is an outline of what the team sees as its goals and mission. For example, the team may choose as its mission statement something like “serving our customers deliciously prepared food in a beautiful atmosphere with warm and friendly service while having fun and learning and growing our skills.”

Restaurant Team Charter

This is like the U.S. Constitution and should be written up with various articles defining and describing the behaviors expected of all team members. Possible items to be addressed in the charter include timeliness, preparation/training, respect, confrontation and conflict, team support, commitments to team, decision-making process, how to reassess team performance as well as how to have fun.

Getting Buy In Gets Results

The most important part of creating these two documents is that the team creates them jointly. It does not work for management to write up a team mission statement and charter and to deliver a lecture about both to the group. It takes time, but can be well worth it, to have your restaurant team meet as a group, brainstorm their thoughts and draft both a mission and charter all on their own. Management will be pleasantly surprised at what the team creates on its own accord. They will set higher expectations of themselves then you ever imagined.

Most importantly, there will be complete buy-in to the mission and the charter because the team wrote it up together. As a final step, have all members of the team sign the mission statement and team charter. This commits each individual to fulfilling their promises to the team. Another key benefit here is that should a difficulty or conflict arise, the team’s mission statement and charter can be brought out and referenced. “Didn’t we all agree as a team in article III that we would behave in this manner because we felt it was important to accomplish our objectives?” It is very difficult for a counter argument to follow this process and this can go a long way to fostering team harmony and unity.

So, if you are serious about developing a strong sense of teamwork in your restaurant, have your team write-up a team mission statement and team charter and then watch as they self-police themselves to stronger performance results.

Jaime Oikle is the Owner of Restaurant Report, LLC, which runs a web site and e-newsletter for owners, chefs, managers and staff of the restaurant community. You can visit the site at RunningRestaurants.com.

BBQ Restaurant Gives Out Free Samples, Success!

Many restaurants have hang-ups about giving away free food, and reasonably so, but one turned the idea into a “marketing concept” that has set him apart from local competitors. In fact, when I heard about this, I mentioned to the restauranteur that his was the first business of that particular cuisine that I’ve personally known of to do this.

Consider the ice cream shop.

When you go out to get ice cream, it’s common to try at least one flavor before purchasing an entire cup. Why not take the same idea, mold it to our own businesses… and advertise that we’re doing it? That’s what the Doctor of BBQ did:

Ok so I went thru a slow period in September and most of my Friends in the restaurant business all said they were feeling the annual back to school pinch as well. But I’m the new guy in town and felt I needed to grow more not go through a slow time. So I gave it a lot of thought, and worry, looked at electronic signs ($5000.00) and I will have one by mid summer, I think they are great, but still felt there had to be another way to attract more customers, without spending 5 K.

Finally a week ago I was at Sam’s Club an getting more and more frustrated with the holiday crowds sucking down free samples, and blocking the isles. I need to buzz into Sam’s and pick up what ever I need and get back to work. So I struggle with the crowds, slow checkers, and in general I hate going to that place.

After that visit I drove away thinking oh well after Christmas the crowds will vanish and it’ll be so much better. Then I flashed back to my biggest Pet Peeve and that is people of all ages that will literally run over other customers just to get a bite of whatever free samples being given away.

So I thought why not join them. I went to Kinko’s ($26.00) and had a sign made that reads as follows:
Free Samples Today.

Boom instant increase of cars in the drive up lane. So far 99% taste my food and buy lunch or something to take home for their family. I mean an instant increase in business.

And I keep hearing the same thing over and over again it varies on how it’s said but it amounts to the following: I heard you had really good food and I drive by here every day and kept thinking well I’ll stop tomorrow and then I saw your sign for free samples so here I am.

Now I kill them with free samples, I give them a four-ounce cup with a little pulled pork
(maybe a half ounce) and some sauce in it, but before they finish that I’m already handing them the same size cup with my beef in it. And by the time they get started with the beef, I hand them another cup with some of the flap meat I trim off of the back of my ribs. If they were smart they could have a free lunch. LMAO but again 9 out of 10 say heh I’ll have a …..and order something. Now I tell my employees to load them up don’t worry about what we are giving away go crazy giving them the freebies. Still were not giving away much but the return is incredible. There are a couple of things that I think are important if you chose to copy what I’m doing.

1st many people don’t feel comfortable asking for a freebie, if they really have to ask. I spent an hour watching at my local Sam’s Club and many customers would swoop in and pick up a cup but fairly quickly move away from the server as if they were embarrassed.

So we don’t force our customers to ask we insist that they take a sample. And another and another, and if we can get them to taste everything we serve we do it. It becomes fun for them and for us. After they taste they usually buy something and the few that don’t say that’s great I’ll be back, then take a menu with them and now after a week we are seeing those people come in or call in an order.

I promise it’s paying off big time. Best thing I’ve done promotionally since I opened the door. If you come to Springfield Illinois come by and have a free sample.

It keeps cars in front of the window and the other people driving by don’t know if that driver is getting free samples or ordering 3 slabs of ribs. The drivers going by are thinking gee that place is always busy.

PS Now after two weeks I never took the sign down. My location is a triangle so I just move it from corner to corner. And it still seems to be working. Now that said I bet I could take it down and people would still come in having remembered it being there. I’m not sure what to do now leave it up or take it down, for awhile to see if it would make a greater impact when put back up.If I take it down and business slows down I’d be pissed at myself for taking it down and losing money.If I took it down and we had 3 or 4 days of nice weather which we are supposed to have this week I’m not sure if I could decide if it made a difference. If I leave it up for very long people may not notice it being gone? There are so many variables what with the winter weather, lots of snow and ice right now. And (and this is a big and) there is no sense of urgency if it’s up all the time

But that said I’ve also thought about changing my big sign to read:

“Doctor of BBQ
Free Samples Everyday”

So what do you think I should do?

My own recommendation was to continue doing what’s working. Some businesses will get going with a marketing program that’s actually pulling results… and then they’ll suddenly stop it for no obvious reason, other than questioning if they should try “something else”.

When profits are affected negatively, or if the restaurant advertising doesn’t pull as well as it used to… THEN start looking at alternatives. Until that point comes, it’s always best to test along the same theme as what’s working.

Dr BBQ also wanted to point out a response by Brandon O’Dell

You’ve found out what it truly means when people say, “It takes money to make money.”

If what you are doing is working, don’t change it. I really wouldn’t start putting restrictions on it. If you are giving free samples of anything they please now, don’t start limiting it to certain things. The more rules you start putting on a promotion, the less special it is to your customers.

I think the best idea in the bunch is your idea to add “Free samples everyday” to your new electric sign. While some may think it goes overboard, I think it’s a way to capitalize on something you’ve found to work for your business. If you run into people coming in wanting to get full on free samples, you can always cut them off. It’s your restaurant and you don’t need to explain yourself to anyone who wishes to abuse the situation.

As with anything, you have to consider the cost in the pricing, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to raise the price. All those additional bodies in the door are drastically dropping the gross profit you need to collect from each of them to pay your fixed costs and expenses other than food cost. I would guess that the extra volume is much more than paying for what you are giving away without raising your prices. Save the price raising until your new marketing strategy starts getting you more customers than you can handle. Then you can raise prices to help control the flow of people into your restaurant.

As Restaurant Revolution mentioned, I think you’ve found your unique selling point. You are now selling “confidence” to your customers. By offering them samples, they KNOW before they buy that your product is good. They can be “confident” they are making a good buying decision.

Congrats!

Click here to read the entire discussion on the Foodservice Forums

Video: Restaurant Website Marketing Strategy - Tracking Traffic

We’re putting together a new series on the latest Internet technologies used to promote restaurants. Obviously, one of the key components of online advertising is having a website.

After you have a website… what next?

Many people do absolutely NOTHING with their website except hope that other people look for it. Hopefully you’re doing more than that. For example, have your web address on all business cards. Consider putting a decal with the web address in your front window or on your door. Is your restaurant website address on your menu?

Promoting your website on the Internet is also an excellent strategy to introduce yourself to new people by enticing them with photos of your restaurant and food, and a full menu listing. And there are a number of websites on the Internet that will let you have a link to your own site…

But do you KNOW how people are finding your website? Do you KNOW what websites host reviews of your restaurants? Do you KNOW what people are saying about you on the Internet?

WHY NOT?

The most basic aspect of doing anything in marketing is TRACKING. That holds true to promoting your restaurant, and restaurant’s website, on the Internet.

How do you KNOW that people are looking at your website? How do you know where they are finding links to your website? After they get to the website, are you aware of what pages they’re looking at?

To answer these questions you need additional software. Most servers come with free software options, but they can be confusing and only update every 24hrs or more. The software I recommend, and personally use with more than one website, is called Mint.

In today’s video, I provide an overview of what Mint has to offer, and why you should be Tracking Your Website Traffic.

The video is only about 8 minutes long and will give you insight on the types of information you can get from a simple application. What’s amazing is that you can actually get so much more… I just can’t show you my own installation for security purposes.

Here are other types of information that might be helpful for you and your webmaster… all of which can be found using Mint.

• Types of browsers people use for your site (Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc)
• Locations of people looking at your website
• If people are viewing the website multiple times (if they’re coming back week-after-week, for example)

If you’re a gadget freak, you can even look at your website stats on an iPhone or other mobile device.

Bottom line: tracking the traffic to your website is highly important, regardless of what program you choose to do it with. If you have questions or otherwise, don’t hesitate to comment.

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