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Secret Sauce - The Restaurant Marketing Podcast

We discover the ingredients of your Restaurant's secret sauce. SEO, Facebook, Twitter, emails, coupons, yield utilization, USPs, Menu engineering, direct mail, partnerships - there are many ingredients for creating your Secret Sauce and with the right Secret Sauce you can find more customers and turn them into repeat customers. We deconstruct the recipes, so you can increase increase turnover, increase profit and maybe decrease the amount of time you spend working in your Restaurant.
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Secret Sauce - The Restaurant Marketing Podcast
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Now displaying: March, 2017
Mar 25, 2017

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."  

Nick’s Pizza & Pub Values

  • We treat everyone with dignity and respect.
  • We are dedicated to the learning, teaching, and ongoing development of each other.
  • We have fun while we work!
  • We provide a clean and safe environment for our guests and team members.
  • We honor individual passions, and creativity at work and at home.
  • We communicate openly, clearly and honestly.
  • We honor the relationships that connect our team, our guests and community.
  • We take pride in our commitment to provide quality service and a quality product.
  • We celebrate and reward accomplishments and “A+” players.
  • We support balance between home and work.
  • Health: We are a profitable and fiscally responsible company. We support the physical and emotional well-being of our guests and team members.
  • Our team works through support and cooperation.

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.

  • Have a personal plan
  • Be passionate
  • Define your values
  • Hire for values and train for skills
  • Procedures
  • Delegate
  • Communicate, Communicate and Communicate
  • Find a mentor.

The journey of leadership is never ending, but remember - The better you get, the better you get.  

Mar 7, 2017

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?

  1.  People fall in love with their food and their restaurant without understanding the profit and loss, or even having a plan of how to be profitable.
  2. Not understanding key fixed costs.  11.6% of net costs are rent.
  3. Venues are often too big.  Large venues have 60% of revenue in 2 days of the week.

 

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.

Mar 7, 2017

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?

  1.  People fall in love with their food and their restaurant without understanding the profit and loss, or even having a plan of how to be profitable.
  2. Not understanding key fixed costs.  11.6% of net costs are rent.
  3. Venues are often too big.  Large venues have 60% of revenue in 2 days of the week.

 

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.

Mar 1, 2017

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?

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