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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: June, 2018
Jun 22, 2018

We look at what we learnt from Dinner by Heston.

Firstly, have a think about the photos that you've got.  I will put some images up in the show notes to give you an idea about the kind of photos that you can take with an entry level camera or a decent mobile phone.

Dinner by Heston has a unifying story throughout the menu - cooking food for centuries ago and reinterpreting them in a way that is interesting and compelling for customers.

Every dish had a story and they tell the story really well.  There was Savoury Porridge.  This was green and gives everyone something to talk about.  Green Porridge.  For Dinner.  Savoury Porridge.  Lots of interesting components to the dish to get people talking about the Restaurant.

I was lucky enough that my wife had booked the Chef's table for us.  A great high value experience that gives you a close up view of the workings of the kitchen. 

Our tea came with an hour glass to tell us when the tea was properly steeped.  A small thing that signals the value of the experience that you are having. 

As a part of the Chef's Table, we were able to see the quality assurance commitment that the team have.  It shows.  The steak that we had was probably the best I have ever had.  

Mentoring in the Restaurant - does your head chef do this?  Helping out all of the team to be their best in the team.  I think mentoring is a big thing, it makes the team better and good mentoring usually means that your team members will stay with you longer because you are investing in their career.

We look at the sourcing work that the sommelier.  An eclectic range of drinks that were immaculately paired with the degustation menu.

Do you have an incremental revenue opportunity from Birthday cakes?

Have a think about creating unique and epic desserts.

How can you create something, a physical link with the experience that you have created?

Are you using OpenTable?  Are you getting the email addresses of your customers booking through OpenTable?  Do you want to be giving them access to your booking list to another company?  We talk about IP leakage and what it can cost you.

For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.

If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes.  It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.

For Free Tools  to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page.  We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools.  Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.

Jun 15, 2018

What if you ran your Restaurant like Princess Cruises?

I spoke to a Restaurant owner and he said why think about cruises?  

We look at operational efficiencies and how looking outside the Restaurant industry can give you ideas about innovation for your Restaurant.  We discuss Southwest Airlines and how they redefined industry best practice in turning around the aircraft.  It is a great story about culture and innovation that you can use in your Restaurant.

We look at our time from on the Sapphire Princess.  We look at the food with Princess Cruises.  It is amazing the quality of the food that is produced out of a floating kitchen.

We talk about what it is that your customers buy from you.  Often it is not the food, sometimes it is, but there are other products that customers are looking at.

The chefs did a great job in the descriptions of the food.  There were theme nights.  These are things that can drive more customers on quiet nights.  What if you swapped chefs with another chef to create unique events?

We talk about the experiences created by the pool, watching the TV.  We discuss beatboxing squirrels.  

Princess Cruises aim for a family demographic and do a lot of work around creating experiences for the entire family.

How do they upsell with their alcohol?  For a family, what is your mocktail play for the children?  Wine tasting seminars, cocktail making seminars.  All of these are experiential events that add to the value of the cruise and are centered around food.

The chef ran a cooking demonstration, followed by a behind the scenes of the kitchen.

2670 guests and a crew of 1100.  3 square meals a day.  The costings and planning are done very well, because when they can't run done the road to the local market.

The cruise industry understands revenue per available bed.  They aim to fill every room that they can.

Princess Cruises really understand the power of social.  The staff were always very keen to take a photo of the passengers with their own camera, knowing that the photos would be shared on social media.

How do they create great experiences around the food?  

For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.

If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes.  It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.

For Free Tools  to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page.  We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools.  Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.

Jun 1, 2018

We discuss products and services.  What is it that you do?  Many restaurants that we speak to who have been running restaurants for 10 years still do not know what it is that they do and what it is that their customers buy from them.

For the numbers for your Restaurant, make sure you have pessimistic numbers in there.  Too much optimism in your P+L spreadsheet makes it very hard to be long term viable.

What is your pricing strategy?

How do you put a restaurant under management?

Innovation - what is your approach to Research and Development.  R + D can be a clear differentiator for your restaurant.  Restaurants are designed for innovation, but too many don't innovate.

Insurance, the costs and what is covered?

Are you designing your customer for high throughput?  Is your kitchen limiting the number of customers that you can manage?

What is your strategy around supplier choice - this can make a big difference for your story, your margin, and your success.

Fit out costs for your Restaurant.  How can you get a cheap fitout for your restaurant?

How much inventory do you need and how will you fund it.

We look at the Restaurant Marking plan and some of the big mistakes that people make when it comes to the restaurant opening.

Trading hours.  This is a small question but has some huge implications for your Restaurant.  This is not an easy question to answer without a fair amount of thinking and planning.

For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.

If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes.  It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.

For Free Tools  to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page.  We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools.  Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.

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