Chef Ana Ros along with here husband owns Hisa Franko, a fine dining Restaurant in Slovenia.
Ana's story is truly inspiring, she never received a a classical training, but has developed her own style and techniques and her determination has seen her been recognised amongst the World's best Chefs.
Not originally planning a career as a Chef, she meet her husband whose parents owned Hisa Franko. He was a trained Sommelier and when his parents handed the reins of the Restaurant to him, Ana stepped into the kitchen.
Her determination to succeed saw her learn the techniques of a chef, learn how to manage a team and how to run the Restaurant. We talk about the earlier years and how she was able to build her repertoire of techniques in the kitchen, the process she went through build her skills.
We also look at the process she takes to create a new dish, and the way that she is not only integrating local produce into the menu, but working to build the supply chain to enable local commerce and to showcase the amazing ingredients that she is able to source from around Hisa Franko.
This year she was Voted the World's Best Female Chef.
We met our friends from the Dimmi and discussed some of the issues with the aggregator model as opposed to those who want to tell the story of their own Restaurant.
Many Restaurants are taking control of their marketing and their story and using the Free Online Restaurant Booking System and the Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering system.
We talk about our plans to help a Restaurant that is kicking in $10,000 a month to keep their Restaurant going and how we are going to help them.
Congratulations to 11 Madison Park, the World's Best Restaurant for 2017.
We discuss why you may not want to be in the World's 50 Best, but you may want to be the best parent to your kids, and how your Restaurant needs to support that.
Have a listen to Chef's Table on Netflix, a great series telling amazing stories of these amazing Chefs.
Super excited that we are going to the 2017 NRA Show in Chicago. It is one of the best educational opportunities for Restaurant owners and chefs to learn and get inspiration on how to better run their restaurant and/or kitchen.
In this Secret Sauce we talk about attracting tourist customers. A lot of towns get a lot of tourists, but they tend to go to a very small number of Restaurants. Are you getting your fair share of the Tourists in your area? If not, we will discuss lots of ideas to help you find more tourist customer and turn them into repeat customers.
Websites are even more important in Tourist areas. Make sure that it is:
If you need help with your Restaurant Website, talk to the M4R team, we have packages starting from $995 to help you start getting more customers.
Facebook ads can run very differently in tourist towns, making it a lot easier to use Facebook, make sure you listen to our Facebook ads in tourist towns run down.
Have you worked with the local Concierges, Hotels, Tour Operators, and airport tourism guides?
We have a discussion about the issues with Tripadvisor and Yelp and some of your options for dealing with them. Do you actively manage them, ignore them, build your own channel for customers?
We talk about Trip Guides and some ideas about how to be listed in those Top 10 things to do in YOUR TOWN.
We look at Lonely Planet and the effect that it had for Ferg Burger.
What is your signature dish, does it fit in with your tourist message and how are you marketing it?
Skyline Restaurant
What can you sell? T-Shirts, sauces? Part of something to take home for the tourists?
Seasonality is always an issue, so we talk about building a database and focusing on locals for the quiet times. You will have your regulars, even if it is only every two years.
Leave a review, hit us up on Facebook, and Linkedin.
Let us know if you are going to the NRA show!!
Many of the problems in Restaurants that we see come down to issues with Leadership. Restaurant Leadership is something that isn't taught, most people pick it up on the job, so we will go through some tools to help with your Restaurant Leadership.
What is the definition of Leadership and in particular Restaurant Leadership.
Restaurant Autoposy. One of the Restaurants using our Free Online Restaurant Booking System has closed. We go through the issues that they had. The biggest issue was that even though they weren't busy and wanted to be better, and it was quiet on Saturday nights, they did no marketing. Even worse, the website was very poor, no great photos, no SEO (getting found in Google). There web traffic dropped from 750 a month down to 600 over the last 18 months. These is less than half of what their competitors were getting. It probably equated to $10,000 a month in revenue that they were missing out on. I wonder what was going on in the minds of the people in the team there, doing nothing to find more customers. The only marketing they did was Groupon at the end.
We talk about what Leadership is and look at Dwight D Eisenhower's definition of Leadership, which is "Getting people to do what you want them to do, because they want to do it"
How does Restaurant Leadership work in a Restaurant? There is the typical angry chef, but I think it is a lot more common to have no Leadership in the Restaurant.
We look at the mindset that people need to be able to be an effective Leader in your Restaurant.
Make sure that your Personal Plan aligns with your Business Plan which aligns with your Marketing Plan. Too many people forget why they opened their Restaurant and they lose their passion for their Restaurant. It is so much harder to motivate people if you aren't motivated and passionate about what you are doing.
We look at BHAGs (big Hairy Audacious Goals), and we talk about Missions, Values and Goals and how these are tools to help you be a better leader, but also the big component of the business that you are responsible.
We talk about Adam Sobel's Vision from Cinnamon Snail and Nick Sarillo's Nick's Pizza and Pub. Check out Nick's book, "A Slice of the Pie."
We look at the E-Myth and how it can help you delegate.
How can you be a better communicator in your business.
We also look at Danny Meyers "Setting the Table" as well, another great book on the topic of leadership.
The journey of leadership is never ending, but remember - The better you get, the better you get.
The talk to Ivan Brewer from Restaurantology.
We talk about a Restaurant using a Qandoo website and the issues that poor SEO and not having a marketing strategy is really hurting 1 Restaurant and Sydney and another that is taking over $100,000 a year in online orders and how they are saving $13,000 a year by not paying commission on their online orders. We talk about how much you should be paying for online Facebook campaign budgets for your Restaurant.
It is a sad fact that 50% of restaurants fail within 4 years and only make 2% in profit.
The biggest Restaurant profitability mistakes that people make when running a restaurant?
High Rent as a % of revenue may not correlate to high foot traffic. If it was high, there should be more sales.
How does Labour costs relate to rent and cost of goods sold. How many staff do I really need?
We discuss restaurant productivity and ways to increase it.
Discretionary effort. The more we engage our staff the higher the productivity of the staff. Listen to your staff and their ideas.
Creating a vision and a story that your team can sell, eg
The KPIs for a restaurant business viability test - % fixed costs / % variable costs.
Fixed costs like - Accounting, Rent, Variable can be things like linen and gas.
COGS should be pretty consistent with a weekly stocktake and weekly P+L.
What is the labour %?
Understand the key distribution of costs and be able to adjust in real time. How can you influence the time spent in the kitchen with pricing. How do you avoid bottlenecks in the kitchen during peak hours.
You should have a costed roster. The dollar spend on a daily basis.
How can the distribution of the restaurant across the week. Should we discount in the quiet times or charge a premium for the busy times.
How does the pricing of the bar work and what opportunities are there to increase revenue and profit from bar revenue. Why should you discount on the bar, rather than in the kitchen?
What is restaurant sales velocity and how do you influence it?
Try rostering by 15 minute increments.
We discuss a lot of advanced way to think about the profit and loss and how you can influence how much of the revenue flows to the bottom line.
If you haven't signed up yet, check out the 5 Minute a day Restaurant Marketing MBA. It's totally free.
The talk to Ivan Brewer from Restaurantology.
We talk about a Restaurant using a Qandoo website and the issues that poor SEO and not having a marketing strategy is really hurting 1 Restaurant and Sydney and another that is taking over $100,000 a year in online orders and how they are saving $13,000 a year by not paying commission on their online orders. We talk about how much you should be paying for online Facebook campaign budgets for your Restaurant.
It is a sad fact that 50% of restaurants fail within 4 years and only make 2% in profit.
The biggest Restaurant profitability mistakes that people make when running a restaurant?
High Rent as a % of revenue may not correlate to high foot traffic. If it was high, there should be more sales.
How does Labour costs relate to rent and cost of goods sold. How many staff do I really need?
We discuss restaurant productivity and ways to increase it.
Discretionary effort. The more we engage our staff the higher the productivity of the staff. Listen to your staff and their ideas.
Creating a vision and a story that your team can sell, eg
The KPIs for a restaurant business viability test - % fixed costs / % variable costs.
Fixed costs like - Accounting, Rent, Variable can be things like linen and gas.
COGS should be pretty consistent with a weekly stocktake and weekly P+L.
What is the labour %?
Understand the key distribution of costs and be able to adjust in real time. How can you influence the time spent in the kitchen with pricing. How do you avoid bottlenecks in the kitchen during peak hours.
You should have a costed roster. The dollar spend on a daily basis.
How can the distribution of the restaurant across the week. Should we discount in the quiet times or charge a premium for the busy times.
How does the pricing of the bar work and what opportunities are there to increase revenue and profit from bar revenue. Why should you discount on the bar, rather than in the kitchen?
What is restaurant sales velocity and how do you influence it?
Try rostering by 15 minute increments.
We discuss a lot of advanced way to think about the profit and loss and how you can influence how much of the revenue flows to the bottom line.
If you haven't signed up yet, check out the 5 Minute a day Restaurant Marketing MBA. It's totally free.
Make sure you check out the Restaurant Innovation podcast. This is our most popular podcast this so far this year and it goes into the processes that can help you be more productive in your Restaurant.
In this podcast, we talk to Robbie Doyle from Buy Grow Sell a Business.
Robbie has been a chef for 25 years and a Real Estate agent specialising in hospitality for 10 years.
He tells some sad stories of Restaurant purchases gone bad and people who have lost their homes in when their Restaurant business has gone broke.
What are the right and wrong motivations for buying a restaurant?
What are the big 5 mistakes that people make when buying a Restaurant?
Where are the best buying opportunities to buy a Restaurant?
What discuss Robbie's thoughts on fitout costs?
What role do systems play in Restaurant success? Should you buy a systematised restaurant or not?
How do the successful people flip Restaurants? What is the process they go through?
What are the general rules of thumb for metrics on sale price?
What bargains are out there and should you be looking for the bargain, or are the bargains bargains for good reason?
We now have customers in Singapore and the Czech Republic! Hooray.
The times, they are a changing. Customers are changing, tastes are changing, dining experiences are changing, competition is changing and the players in the industry are changing.
I was surprised to see the number of people who are still advertising in the Yellow Pages. The budgets that people are spending is amazing, when you think of the returns that you would get if you were spending that money online. We discuss the 7 best uses for the Yellow Pages in 2017.
The online startup space has innovation built in, but the imperative to innovative is a lot more insidious. The lack of pressure to innovate means that Restaurants often slowly decline in their Restaurant as customers needs change.
The rise of Delivery services, pre prepared food, Booking aggregators are all changing the restaurant business.
What kind of person is better at innovation and how can you use that to help your team innovate.
What kind of activities can help you with innovation. How can you change your habits and routines to increase your opportunities to innovate.
We look at how different actions, people and activities. I've started playing the drums and going to art galleries to change the way I think and the ideas that I am having. Without that external stimulas, it is very difficult for your to come up with different ideas.
How did Massimo Bottera develop the ability to fuse art and his culinary techniques to create the dishes that lead to Osteria Francescana.
We discuss business model innovation and menu innovation.
The Business Model.
We discuss how taking ideas from different industries can make a big difference in your industry. Plus or minus 10% everyone else in your industry is doing the same as you. In other industries, there may be much better results.
The Business Model Canvas covers:
Menu Innovation
You take take existing products and techniques and fuse them together or your can take an object or concept and recreate it in food. We look at the Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit.
We look at the work of Grant Achatz and his Apple Taffy and how it brings back childhood memories which are a fundamental part of the attraction of the menu item.
How can you recreate a menu with different items, maybe cheaper items.
We discuss failure and why it is important to embrace failure as a part of the innovation process.
Wolfgang Puck has said that he has opened a lot of successful Restaurants, but he has learnt the most about the restaurants that failed.
Facebook Marketing - We look at the Facebook Marketing Report Card for Australia, and very few Restaurants are doing any Facebook marketing. This is a huge opportunity for most restaurants.
Annual event marketing - We discuss a Restaurant that made a Meat Pie Burger for Australia Day. Sounds pretty ordinary, but it is an Aussie thing. A great idea that got them mentioned in news.com.au.
We look at how you to run a Facebook Live Video for your Restaurant.
Check out the Facebook Live Map, to get some ideas of the kind of streaming that people are doing.
Equipment -
Here are the makers of the phone holder that I use - Arkon.
Bright lights - we bought some cheapies of eBay.
Your phone - Android or iPhone. It doesn't really matter, both do an excellent job.
A couple of tips - Rehearse, plan, and start with something exciting because the video will appear silent. People need to engage with the video to be able to hear the video.
Pick somewhere quiet, make sure you have a good phone signal.
Be authentic - this is a great way to build your personal brand.
Types of content you can use in your Facebook Live Videos:
Aangan at Footscray prepare their own spices, that is a perfect type of video for Facebook Live.
We then discuss some ideas on how to best run an ad to your Facebook Live Video.
Tag us in on your Facebook Live videos.
Connect with us on Linkedin to keep up to date with the latest Restaurant Marketing ideas.
In this episode we discuss our Restaurant Facebook Marketing Report. Less than 1% of Restaurants that we surveyed ran ads in the time. A shocking statistic when you think that it is one of the easiest ways to increase revenue for your Restaurant!
We know that Restaurants aren't super interested in Facebook marketing. The previous advanced Facebook marketing episodes haven't been downloaded as much as some of the others (Reasons Restaurants Fail was downloaded a lot more - maybe something to that :( ) But it is really important if you want to be successful to understand Facebook. Even if you don't do it, your competitors will be and you need to know what is possible.
This episodes looks at using your email database to create a customer audience in Facebook to target your Restaurant customers.
We also look at budgetting. How much should you spend per day on a Facebook campaign. We look at the cost per 1000 impressions and also the cost per link click or engagement and give you some rough guidelines.
We also go into what the cost of your campaign tells you about your audience reaction.
If you want more information on Facebook marketing - check out the legends at Perpetual Traffic. Keith, Molly and Ralph delve deep, really deep into Facebook marketing. This isn't for the faint hearted, but it is a great podcast if you want to crush Facebook marketing for your Restaurant.
We talk about Delivery Hero exiting Australia, and look at the implications for Restaurants who are doing
We talked about the amazing technical expertise and innovation at Lume Restaurant. Rated by Gault and Millau as the number 1 Restaurant in Australia, and amazing experience with some great technology, including the Tock booking system which has allowed them to cut no shows to virtually zero.
This episode covers process for creating an annual marketing plan.
1. Review you monthly, weekly, daily and hourly revenue. What are the quiet times and when are the busy times. This helps you understand what work needs to be done to increase the profitability over the year.
2. What holidays are there in your country?
3. We go over the List of International Observances. Got a quite period with no public holidays? Look at this list and there are bound be to a few days around them that you can run a campaign around. We look at some of the days that you can run marketing campaigns around.
4. Look at your seasonal menu that you want to run.
5. Start looking at partnerships that you can run to avoid the troughs in revenue.
6. Look at targeting customers for each hour that your Restaurant is open. Look at variable pricing throughout the day and week to maximise yield.
Have a think about how you are growing your email marketing database and the events that you can use to market to that list.
We look at how your planning can help with your goal setting.
Technology and competition is dramatically changing the way that Restaurants operate. We look at how these 2 mega trends are creating the 7 big trends for 2017 for Restaurant owners and chefs.
We have identified 7 major trends that will change the Restaurant industry in 2017.
1. Restaurant Home Delivery - there has been consolidation with the online ordering companies like Just Eat and Delivery Hero, and new entrants like UrberEats providing delivery for Restaurants who would have never thought of doing delivery 12 months ago. On top of this - we have Drones and Self Driving Cars - this technology is going to provide a lot of opportunities for Restaurant Owners.
2. Marketing - It is becoming really hard now to not have a strong marketing strategy for your Restaurant, along with great execution. You don't want to have the best restaurant that no one has ever heard of - because it is increasingly likely that you will go out of business if you do.
3. Bigger Data for Small Restaurants - using Facebook and Comparative Analytics are a powerful way to use big data for small Restaurants.
4. Automation - the rise of the Restaurant Robots. Rising wages and increasing costs are meaning that more Restaurant owners will turn to automation to cut costs.
5. Consolidation - For a small restaurant, going to 1 Restaurant to 2 is the hardest move, but it starts you on the path to get those economies of scale.
6. Specialization - It is becoming increasingly difficult to run a generic cuisine based restaurant. Many Indian or Chinese restaurants are struggling unless they are starting to specialize and give customers a reason to be loyal to them. We look at some of the areas that Restaurants are going to be moving into.
7. Divergence - Restaurants that have their strategy in the middle of the profit mix will struggle - they will either be pushed to build a Restaurant built around low price, or specializing to create value in niches. Being a good restaurant with nothing specific will force you to start competing on price and that will make it harder for you to retain your quality.
If you want to read about the changes, check out our in depth report on the Restaurant Trends for 2017.
For your Restaurant to prosper in 2017, you need to be educated. Check out our best Restaurant podcasts of 2016. There are 19 must listen to podcasts from the thought leaders of the Restaurant Industry.
Look at the free tools to market your Restaurant and start to differentiate your Restaurant from your competitors.