Secret Sauce - The Restaurant Marketing Podcast

It's a management truism that gets measured gets managed, that goes for Restaurant Marketing as well.

Last podcast covered the trends and the megatrend for indie restaurants. We look at the trends for restaurants we see in 2018. 5. Experience Design – VR experience at Restaurant Lume, Saved by the Max in Chicago and now LA. These are examples of restaurants that are doing a great job with designeing an experience. Where there is experience, there is margin! 6. Zero waste – decrease food costs and environmentally responsible. Consumers are looking for more opportunities to dine at eco friendly restaurants. 7. Meal labelling – In an effort to improve health, consumers are a lot more interested in the ingredients that are in the meals that they are eating and the carbs and fats in the meals, allowing them to make better choices. 8. Health – Flexitarianism and a growing trend towards people's changing tastes as they look for a more healthy diet. People will still want to have a great experience, but decouple it from being a 'naughty treat'. How can you improve the healthy benefits of your food. Sub niching towards meals like ketogenic meals. 9. Hyperlocal – building an ecosystem around the local area. Food precincts, partner with other restaurants and other businesses to leverage different strengths. 10. Fine casual – providing elements of fine dining with a casual dining type experience. Bring those elements into a medium price point. Expensive cutlery in a hamburger joint with table service enabling them to increase the price point that is sustainable. 11. Cuisine – More non traditional cuisines like Israeli, Filippino and Eastern European cuisine based restaurants. These restaurants traditionally target their expat market, but the focus will be on building that cuisines brand and building a strong repeat customer base out of locals who have never experienced that culture. 12. Menu experimentation – more weird things are going to appear, like chicken donuts. 13. Story telling – What is your authentic, passionate story? How does it relate to your customers and how are you going to tell that story? 14. Marketing – Restaurants will be forced to start taking their marketing a lot more seriously. Running Facebook ads will become increasingly popular. We see only 5% of indie restaurants running Facebook ads and that will increase dramatically next year. Facebook videos – this is really the hottest marketing tool available to restaurants today. More restaurants will look at those restaurants killing it on FB videos and think "why not me?" and after those first couple of awkward videos, you will see a big improvement in return. (Have a look at some of our first videos – they were awful!)

The changes we are seeing are: Changing / Evolving consumer tastes - looking for new experiences. Workforce management - the skills shortage is will drive significant change as restaurants look to manage their teams better in the face of declining numbers of people choosing hospitality careers. Profitability will be the mega trend for the next 5 years. More restaurants are saying that it has never been harder to run a profitable restaurant. Profitability is becoming increasingly important with increasing costs in a lot of areas and some tech companies becoming increasingly aggressive in the fees that they are charging. Culture driven dining will become increasingly important with Restaurants looking for better ways to hire and retain the best staff in order to create the experiences for consumers that they need to create in order to be competitive. More technology in Restaurants, especially as there is more tech available that is no cost or low cost that can make a big difference for a small business. Ordering Commoditisation – Menulog, Just Eat, Delivery Hero, Deliveroo and UrbanEats are changing take out and delivery fundamentally and it is creating massive cost pressures for Restaurants. This will see more restaurants leaving the platforms as well as a consumer backlash as they see decreasing quality from financially struggling restaurants. Lease Innovation – Restaurants will look for different solutions to the traditional lease. Looking at different spaces and an increasing in the 'shipping container' kitchen that Deliveroo has pioneered, but with the Restaurants in control of the process.

6 - Marketing is all about discounting. A lot of Restaurants already discount, especially if you are doing lunch or breakfast meals. We look at dynamic yield pricing for Restaurants. 7 - We are killing it on Instagram, (or Twitter or Snapchat) - we don't need any other marketing. Marketing must, Must, MUST be tied to revenue and too many people think that having 100,000 people following them on Instagram, but you can't meet payroll with Instagram followers or likes. 8 - Our third party provider does all of our marketing. Restaurants using people like Menulog, Dimmi, OpenTable, Just Eat, GrubHub, think that they are doing marketing on their behalf. The 3rd parrty providers do marketing on their own behalf, not yours, especially, 9- We can't afford a $1,000 a month marketing budget. We have restaurants doing 1,000 seats a month. With Dimmi that is $1,000 a month! We recommend spending $3 - $10 a day on Facebook marketing. We are also looking at a results driven marketing campaign as well. Too many people are spending $3,000 a month with companies that aren't focused on revenue. 10 - We need to do brand marketing. You should always be looking at your sales funnel and drive people into the funnel. Great social media driving customers to websites that tell an engaging story and convert with great photos and menus and customer experiences. 11 - I am too old to do the marketing for my Restaurant. This is a poor excuse. If it is your restaurant, it is your story that your customers want to hear and Restaurant Marketing isn't Rocket Science. Anyone can learn the basics of the tools that work really well to help you tell your Restaurant's story. 12 - I already have a website. Restaurant owners don't want a Restaurant Website, they want a Restaurant eCommerce machine that generates revenue. Don't let your main sales person in your team (your restaurant's website) do nothing - it should be working really hard. Make sure you know the metrics, make sure it is fast, make sure it is optimized for mobile, make sure it tells your story. If you need help with your Restaurant website, have a look at our Restaurant specific way of helping you to tell your Restaurant's story.

Wouldn't you be sad if your Restaurant was missing out on $100,000 a year in revenue because you believed a couple of these myths. We discuss what we hear from Restaurants vs what we actually seeing as working for Restaurants around the world. We look at Restaurant Dark Kitchens and how they are starting to change the way that food is delivered to Restaurants. 1. SEO is a monthly ongoing cost - what is this all about? Restaurant Keyword Optimisation - can be a can of worms and often it comes down to a monthly report only a lot of the time. Some restaurants are paying thousands of dollars every month for no real services. 2. If your Restaurants name comes up number 1 when someone searches for it, you have great SEO. There are 2 types of people out there and you are only reaching 1 group (the much smaller group) if you are only getting traffic when people type in your Restaurants name. We discuss the secret of SEO and how you can use that secret to dramatically grow the number of people going to your restaurant. If someone doesn't know about your Restaurant, how many will find your Restaurant in Google - the answer should be lots! 3. Great restaurants don't need marketing. Too many times great restaurants with great food are outdone by crappy restaurants with great marketing. You don't want to be the best restaurant that no one has ever heard of. 4. Restaurant Email Marketing doesn't work. Email marketing is great because it goes to people who know your Restaurant and it is very cheap to run and they are a great part of the yield utilisation process. The hard part is building your marketing database. 5. Facebook no longer works. Ongoing changes to the Facebook platform have meant that some restaurants don't think Facebook works any more. Listen to last week's episode about Mama's BBQ Chicken and Salad Bar and how they got 1,000,000 views on Facebook. For everyone who can't dance like Wally, :), it has become pay to play, but the budgets are often just $3 per day. We talk about our new Marketing University course on running your first Facebook Marketing ad campaign.

We talk to Wally from Mama's BBQ Chicken and Salad Bar and the process he has used with Facebook Live videos to turn around his business. The Chicken Shop wasn't doing too well, some weeks needing to put money in to keep it running. This is a problem that far too many Restaurant owners are all too familiar with. To try and turn things around, Wally started doing some Facebook Live videos. More people started watching and he started dancing on the videos. Over time his followers built up and he now has over 2,000,000 views for his videos. He has been on TV multiple times and dramatically turned around the his business. He has grabbed the slogan 'Flavour, flavour, flavour', after mentioning it in one of his videos and seeing the reaction that people have had with it. No script - just Wally's passion for his food, his business and his customers. This and Wally's epic dancing skills :) have created content that has gone viral with very little marketing spend. Very few of the videos are boosted, which is a testament to his passion and how he has tapped into what people want to see. His videos have even been made into a rap song by one of his fans! The effect on the business has been massive. He has turned a business around that was late on making payments to tripling revenue and being a lot more successful. This is a powerful story about how your Passion can really be the big difference in your Restaurant when you match it up with technology like Facebook Live.

Processes - How do your team know what it is that they are meant to be doing and how do you ensure consistency across visits for customers. Work out where the problems are and create a system around that procedure. This is a part of winning back more of your time. There will be less questions for you and less time fixing up mistakes. Restaurant Business Plan - Lets review the Business Plan that you had before you opened and update it with the reality that is your restaurant. Look at the numbers and start to think about how you are going to make them work. Once you identify your current numbers and what you need, that will start to create some of the action steps that you need to take. KPIs - what are the numbers that are important for your Restaurants? Customer numbers, average check size, food costs, delivery vs pick up orders. These come out of your Business Plan and help everyone on the team understand how they are tracking. Finances - you need to understand the finances because if you don't you are never really going to have control over your restaurant, you'll never be able to manage it. What are the levers that you can pull to increase profitability. Understanding the finances can help you with things like negotiating the lease. Menu - Your menu is an important sales tool for your Restaurant. How hard is your menu working? Have you ever costed the menu? Too many restaurants don't cost the menu and go out of business as a consequence. COST THE MENU! Do it today. How many items are on the menu? How long do they take to prepare? How much of the throughput of the kitchen do some items take up? Marketable, costed items that can be prepared quickly are critical to the restaurant. Marketing - last but least, marketing. You need to fix the other issues before you look at the marketing. If the food is not great, you don't want more people coming in. You want your product and experience to be great before you start marketing. What is the USP, what is your story and how are you telling it? Have a listen to the low cost and no cost ideas to help you build the restaurant that you always wanted.

This is a self first aid program for Restaurant Owners to help you build the restaurant that you always wanted and that you can be proud of. We are focusing on small iterative steps that are low or no cost for Restaurants How do you know if you need to do a Restaurant Rescue? Are you happy coming to work each day? Are you proud of the restaurant? Are you spending enough time with your family? Are you taking holidays? Are you making enough money for the hours you work? Is this the Restaurant that you thought you would run when you started the Restaurant? If are working 60 -70 hours a week and not loving every minute of it, then you need to think about Restaurant Rescue. Once you've made that decision, you need to write down the kind of Restaurant you want to run. How many hours do you want to work? How much money do you want to make? What kind of reputation do you want to have? This is your Restaurant Gap Analysis. What is happening now and what do you want it to be. This is the first step to start on your Restaurant Rescue. Start writing down all of the problems that you have. Food, money, front of house, stock control, customer service, cash flow, customer numbers, repeat customers. Talk to your customers and your staff and get some honest criticism and feedback. The next thing to do is to look at the appearance of your Restaurant. Are you attracting walk - ins. Honestly, how does the Restaurant look? What is the interior like? Start to look at the Culture of the Restaurant. What is the vision of the restaurant, what are the values and how does your team know what those values are? How do you turn around the culture of your team? Look at the team. How do you hiring and firing processes work? How does someone know if they have had a good day or not in your Restaurant?

We look at how Restaurant Innovation can help you build a more profitable Restaurant business. What is the link between Innovation and Creativity. We look at the Triad Technique, Inputs and Creativity and how that feeds into creating an innovative menu, an innovative restaurant and an innovative business. We look at the approach to the ingredients that Shaun uses with sourcing ingredients. How does the selection of ingredients interact with the menu and the guests? We walk through the process of how Shaun creates one of his amazing dishes, the Sea Corn Taco. What is the problem that he is trying to solve with it? What techniques did he use and how did it evolve to being the item that can open the Menu? How can technology change the dining experience? What is Lume doing with Virtual Reality? We talk about the work of Charles Spence. We look at failure in the Restaurant. So many people shy away from failure on the menu and in the Restaurant, but it is a critical part of the Innovation process. We talk about how you innovative when you've got a menu that works. If you aren't innovating, then you are probably dying.

The team at Marketing4Restaurants.com have been busy creating our first courses for Restaurant owners. We are about to open the Marketing4Restaurants University. We are creating a series of online courses to take you by the hand and skill up you and your team on how to run your own Restaurant marketing campaigns. This is a really exciting development. We cover what is the story for your Restaurant, what it impacts and why you need one and how to create one. We go through so examples of Restaurants with great stories. Is the story for your Restaurant tie in with your Restaurant Business plan? We look at Paymasters whose story is about great food. The same with Aangan in Melbourne. These are Restaurants based on great food. Too many Restaurants have a story based on great food, when in reality the food isn't that great. Not having great food isn't a big killer, unless that is what your story is. Jestine's Kitchen has an amazing example of the kind of story that can work really well. It has a great reputation and that story really closes the deal when you think about a place to try some real Southern food. (I loved the Oyster Podboy! and Grits!) :) We talk about the story of Fergburger and who a story can really help your great food get noticed and to really take your business to the next level. This is the best burger I've eaten anywhere and it has become synonymous with with Queenstown. Stratosfare also in Queenstown. They have good food, but the thing that makes them a must do destination is the view from the Restaurant. It is absolutely amazing. Another great story is Cinnanmon Snail. An amazing business with ridiculously good food. Adam is a Vegan and he wants to introduce meat eaters to Vegan food by cooking the tastiest Vegan food ever. Check out his videos, the food is really amazing. We talk about how to come up with a story for the local Thai, Chinese or Indian restaurant and how you can bundle that into a story that will help you to attract customer. We talk about integrating sub stories into your story, so that you can attract more targeted markets in your local area. Finally we look at Mama's BBQ Chicken and Salad bar and Waleed Khawli. Waleed runs a local Chicken and Chips shop. Check out his video that has been seen by 882,642 people. I think the music is a big part of the virality of this as well as his great dancing skills.

We talk to Restaurant Sales expert Robbie Doyle from Buy Grow Sell. We look at the tactics that you can use and how you can best plan for the restaurant sale so that you can get the best sale price for your Restaurant. We discuss: When should you start to think about selling your Restaurant? How to prepare to sell your Restaurant? How do you work out the sale price of the Restaurant? What kind of buyers are out there? Which one is the best one to attract? How can you maximise the price that you get? How to select a broker? What are the risks in selling a Restaurant? There are lots of tips on how to maximise the sale price for your Restaurant in this podcast. If you have any questions, reach out to Robbie and he will give you some great advice to help you understand the process.

The Restaurant industry is often a very tough Today we interview Chef Shaun Quade from Restaurant Lume, and how his journey with mental illness has interacted with his journey to opening Australia's most creative Restaurant. This is an important subject for anyone who is travelling with mental illness issues (which is a lot of us), and also really important for anyone working with or employing people with mental health issues. The outcomes of mental health can be incredibly tragic, so this is a very important topic to talk about. The impact on mental health is exacerbated in the Restaurant industry because of a lot of the factors particular to hospitality, the high paced work environment, the incredibly high standards that restaurants strive to attain and maintain. For owners, these pressures are multiplied by the pressures of running a business, payroll, finance issues and managing people. We talk about the impact that reviews platforms have in some of the issues that are created by some of the reviews that are written about Restaurants. Chef Quade has worked at a number of highly successful restaurants in the country and has used his work in the kitchen as a kind of therapy that has helped him. He has also accepted that his mind works differently to other peoples and we discuss how this accentuates his creative talent. Everyone has a different road to travel and Chef Quade's is jut one, but I think that there is something for everyone to help them get a better understanding of what it can be like living with mental illness as well as for those in a team environment. Please listen to this podcast and have a think about how we can all work together to destigmatise mental illness and help out our mates who are struggling with mental illness. A massive thank you to Chef Quade for sharing his story. It is a difficult topic to talk about particularly if it is your story and Chef Quade has shared fearlessly his story as a part of an effort to help others out. Thank you!

We look at the role that wine plays in a restaurant as a part of the experience that you are creating for your customers. What is the process that you should use in building a wine list and how does that reflect on the customers that you are looking to attract to your restaurant and what the menu is like. How can you use dynamic content on the wine list to increase the number of times that a customer will return to your restaurant. The linkage between wineries and restaurants are increasing to get closer as wineries look for wide distribution channels and restaurants look for ways that they can create new experiences for their customers. Partnering with a local winery can give you access to the wine makers and enable you to create bespoke dinner events like paired degustation menus, which are perfect for the quieter nights of the week to drive higher revenue. Should you be dealing with a wine rep or direct from the winery? What are the benefits of dealing with a wine rep? How can a wine distributor. As a chef who doesn't know a lot about wine, how can you take your first steps in creating your own wine list? There are a lot of resources available to help you skill up yourself and your team around your wines? What are the important things to train your FOH team up on when dealing with customers about wine? How do you price your bottles of wine? This is a big question that a lot of restaurants struggle with. We look at some of the factors that you need to think about when coming up with the price you should charge for your wine. How often should you turn over your wine inventory? Some wine programs have significant investments, so getting the wine mix right and being able to turn it over quickly is key to running a successful wine program. Lastly we look at some of the mistakes that people make when putting a wine program together. Have a look at Chris' book, This is not a Wine Guide.

We look at Just Eats latest profit results. Orders growth is slowing and they are relying more for Revenue growth on top placement, which is where Restaurants pay for higher results in the Just Eat listings. In Australia, Menulog has struggled with the entry of UberEats and Deliveroo and our Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering system. In this podcast we look at how you can build a community in your Restaurant. Looking at a place like Nick's Pizza and Pub, you can see the way that Facebook represents the integrated, community focused marketing plan that Nick Sarillo has at Nick's. Marketing with suppliers. Telling the story of your suppliers can really help you to tell your story better. Your suppliers are often struggling to get traction with their customers, so if you are marketing heir great produce, you may be able to access marketing funds or resources like a wine maker from your local winery to help run a wine tasting. You can even run joint marketed events, engaging with not only your email marketing list, but possibly your suppliers. Marketing to journalists. There are a lot less journalists now, which means that journalists are very time poor. This means that you can start telling a story about your Restaurant that is newsworthy. (Hint: The best place to interact with Journalists is on Twitter.) In dealing with bloggers and journos, have a think about the way that Danny Meyer in Setting the Table. Every restaurant should have a PR plan and Facebook can be a great way of driving your PR plan. We like to use email marketing with Facebook. You can upload your email list into Facebook (if you are happy to) to increase the conversion rate of campaigns by running an ad to people who have already received an email. The 9th way of our 8 ways to use Facebook to grow your restaurant is to use Facebook for market research. This means that you can have better dishes on the menu and you are creating connections and relationships with people as they help you to create the dishes that they want. These customers will be more likely to come into your Restaurant to try that meal when they see that meal advertised.

To many people think that Facebook is just selling stuff, but there is a lot more that you can do with it. In Restaurant Autopsy, we talk about a Restaurant that looks like it is entering the Groupon Death Spiral :(. There are a lot of things that you can do that are free or don't take a lot of time, or are free and don't take a lot of time, and yet they still don't get done and this is how Restaurants end up using Groupon out of desperation to try and keep the doors open. We look at the Lobster Cave's Groupon strategy. They are one of the few Restaurants that have a decent discounting strategy. We look at how to run very cheap and cost effective Facebook campaigns and often the budget is just $3 per day. 1. Sell stuff. Have a think about what it is that you are selling and how you are reaching out to customers and prospects. You can drive people to make an order and/or booking. You can then make your marketing accountable. Our FROLO and FORBS system will tell you where your bookings come from and this can make a big difference in understanding how effective your marketing is. You don't need a discount, it may just remind people about your great food. Don't forget to drive people to call for take out or book, or even as a walk in. 2. Targeting. We show you how targeting can dramatically increase the response rate from your campaigns. There is a huge range of options in the Facebook demographics section of the ad setup. This creates a simple way to run a birthday campaign. If yu don't have a database, you can use Facebook's database with targeting. 3. Retargeting. This is how to target people who have been on your website, you can even target based on individual pages that they have visited. 4. Recruiting. We use Facebook to recruit staff. We have found it to work so much better than using Job Boards. On Facebook, it is a lot easier for prospective employees to see what kind of Restaurant you run and you are more likely to attract the right kind of people. You can target people in the job role that you want. It often works out a lot cheaper to advertise on Facebook than on a Job Board and best of all, the talent pool is so much better. Stay tuned for the next Episode with the other 4 ways that we work to build Restaurant businesses!

Kyle Welter works at Tock, an ethical online booking and restaurant management software company. We look at how Google Adwords works for Restaurants. Not many Restaurants use Google Adwords, but companies like OpenTable and Dimmi use it very aggressively to come between their 'Restaurant partners' and the restaurant customers. We look at Arbitrage. This is the process where you buy something in one market and sell it in another market at a higher price. Companies like Dimmi and OpenTable use Adwords Arbitrage to steal your customers contact details (and sometimes they don't share them with you!) and as well as creating the impression that it is their marketing that is bringing customers to you, when in fact it is often your existing, regular customers that OpenTable is charging you a higher price to take that booking. The email address is the easiest way to communicate with your customers and Adwords Arbitrage allows Dimmi and OpenTable to get between your customers Online Ordering has very similar practices. Restaurants are paying 13% commission and not getting the customers email address, so they can't remarket to the customer, they have to rely on JustEat, Menulog or GrubHub to provide them their next customer. This is how Online Ordering aggregators build dependence on their platforms and extract such high fees for doing it. The impact for Restaurants can be crippling. We see Restaurants paying over $1,000 a month in commissions, and some high traffic restaurants can be a lot higher, which for some restaurants can be the difference from staying in business and bankruptcy, or being not profitable and profitable, so the choice of booking or ordering partner is a crucial part of your marketing plan and even your business plan. We talk about dynamic pricing. This as an area that Tock specialises in. Charge more for your peak times, and drive demand out into the shoulder times. Airlines drive yield utilisation with dynamic pricing and popular restaurants should be looking at charging different prices for different tables, different days and different hours to dine in their restaurant. Dynamic pricing with pre paid bookings significantly decreases no shows as well. We also talk about the Google knowledge panel and how restaurants can better manage it. The best advice is to open a chrome browser in incognito mode and search for your Restaurant. Look at who is running ads and look at the information in the Google Search Panel. You may want to try different times of the day. This will give you a really good idea of what your customers are seeing when they Google for your Restaurant. If you need access to free tools to help your grow your email database without paying commissions and without sharing your customers contact details, check out: The Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering system. The Free Online Restaurant Booking system.

We discuss some of the retargetting methods for Google Analytics and Facebook Pixels. One of the Restaurants featured in the Cheap Eats guide 2017 for Melbourne only had a Menulog website. It had Google Analytics tag manager and the Facebook Pixel on the website they provided to the restaurant. Menulog makes a lot of money out of these marketing techniques. They aren't too hard to set up and every restaurant should have it set up for them. Chef Shaun Quade's night on Masterchef required a lot of preparation. We built a website for Restaurant Lume that had the pixel installed, had Google Analytics installed. It was designed to scale, with a lot of visitors at once and it was designed to show the Restaurant of in the best way. Chef Quade has some amazing photos of the food and we needed to display them in the best possible way. The first mistake people make is not having a website. The Website had 10 people on the website at once before the show. The traffic jumped to 50, then to 300 in the space of minutes. That is 300 people at one time! It then climbed to 450, 700 and topped out at 1,148 people at once. The website was serving 25 pages per second. 90% of that traffic was from mobile phones. This was because people were sitting down watching Masterchef and had their phones with them. We used an Amazon AWS server to be able to scale so that everyone hitting the server at once would be able to see the website. Chef Quade had 4 friends appear on Masterchef and all 4 had their websites crash. It doesn't need to be like that. Check out the Show Notes to see the video of the traffic that they generated on the night. Make sure that you have Facebook pixel installed. Make sure you take bookings online. Restaurant Lume uses Tock and was able to take $15,000 of bookings in the first 30 minutes of being on Masterchef. If their website was down, many of those customers would not have come back and so those bookings would have been lost. The last mistake is using the wrong booking or ordering system. If you are using Menulog, Just Eat, Delivery Hero, OpenTable, Dimmi or Quandoo, you are sharing or losing your customer contact details AND you are being charged per seat or per order. This places you at a massive disadvantage compared to those using different systems, like the Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering System or the Free Online Restaurant Booking System. Hopefully you've got some ideas about how to generate your own Masterchef effect and you will be really well prepared with an online marketing strategy for your Restaurant to make sure you capture all of the benefits that you can for your Restaurant.

We talk about the Masterchef Effect. The Masterchef Effect occurs when your Restaurant gets a huge amount of publicity. It could be from getting a great review on a popular website, winning an award, have a meal or event go viral or being featured on national TV, like Masterchef. Too many restaurants aren't prepared for the Masterchef Effect and as such they miss out on the ongoing benefits of their huge Public Relations win. In this two part podcast, we examine the preparations 20 restaurants have taken after being featured in The Age Top 20 Cheap Eats for 2017 list and what happened to Restaurant Lume when Chef Shaun Quade was featured on Masterchef. The Age has released the Melbourne's Top 20 Cheap Eats for 2017 list in Melbourne. Here are 20 restaurants that have done a great job of bringing together a team, the ingredients, the menu, the FOH experience and the marketing. (No point in having the best restaurant that no one has ever heard of!) The Cheap Eats guide has just 3 lines of text about each Restaurant, so people are looking for more information about your Restaurant to make a buying decision. Without a website, you aren't able to tell the story of your Restaurant that you have put so much work into in any way that does it justice. You goal doesn't need to be on Masterchef, but you need to have an attitude that sets you apart. Chan Hon Meng from Hong Kong Soya Sauce Chicken Rice and Noodle won a Michelin star and he said that everyone should cook like a Michelin judge is eating in their restaurant everyday. If you thought like that, how much better would you run your Restaurant? How can you capitalise on the public relations when you get the Masterchef Effect? In the Good Food Cheap Eats guide 8 / 20 restaurants did not have a website. 1 restaurant had their website taken down because of too much traffic (!) 1 only had a Menulog website (no phone number, no bookings, no emails :( 6 had Google Analytic on their website 2 had the Facebook Pixel installed (THIS IS A MASSIVE ISSUE!) 1 website was Weebly. It is cute that Weebly is still around. 1 website had Wix. Friends don't let friends use Wix. Most common was Wordpress (which is good.) Only 2 had Yoast installed. Some were using OpenTable (no email addresses) No one was using Dimmi - is Dimmi losing traction in Australia. 1 Restaurant using Menulog. No emails, just bills. 2 websites weren't mobile optimized. 8 Restaurants had not claimed their Google knowledge panel. (Your competitors could claim it and tell Google the restaurant is permanently closed) The Zomato reviews were 23% lower than Facebook reviews. Are Zomato reviews a lot less reliable than Facebook and Google Reviews? These are some of the critical things that you need to prepare for your next great Public Relations success. The next episode will cover off the technical procedures to prepare for the Restaurant Lume being featured on Masterchef, including how much traffic was served up over the length of the episode (a lot!!!)

Hooray - Episode 50. Thank you so much to everyone who has contributed to the Secret Sauce podcast since we started. We look at how a lot of Restaurants miss some fundamental marketing steps and when they get a great public relations win they aren't in a position to capitalise on that win. Too many restaurants don't have a website, they don't have the Facebook pixel installed, they which means it is a lot harder to build a strong brand and find new customers and turn them into repeat customers. We discuss what intellectual property and intangible assets. These can have an impact on the price that you pay when you buy a restaurant and definitely can impact the price of the restaurant that you sell for. Does a restaurant have an email list? How big is it and how Domain Names - These are sometimes registered by aggegators like Menulog, or they can register a similar name. Facebook Pages - who is the owner of the Facebook page, who has access to it? Do you have an unofficial Facebook Page? Is there a site that Facebook created for you? You need to claim that. Do you have an unofficial Google My Business account? You need to claim that and ensure that the information is correct. We have seen peoples business listed as Permanently Closed and they are still open. Very few customers would go to a Restaurant that Google has listed as Permanently Closed and unfortunately dodgey competitors may list your restaurant as permanently closed. Check out your restaurants google listing from an incognito mode browser so that you can see your restaurants as other people will see it. Look for fake websites. We see this all the time and there are thousands of restaurant brand jacking websites, set up by shonky online ordering companies. Brand jacking can mean that you are missing out on all of the emails of your customers. Check the details of your Google Knowledge Panel. Many restaurant aggregators can try to hijack the Google Knowledge Panel to hijack your customers. We look at restaurant adwords arbitrage and how it can be costing your Restaurant tens of thousands of dollars every year. We talk about how companies like Dimmi can attempt to hijack customers look for your restaurant and drive them to a restaurant using Dimmi. We wrote an article about what happened to Brae and how Dimmi was trying to steal their customers. Make a booking at your own restaurant with a new gmail account and see what kind of emails you receive from your booking company. We finish of with a story of how restaurant aggregators want to minimise the impact of your brand and your story. The only way that they can stand out in these online ordering platforms is with price, which decreases their ability to really create some awesome food. If you are having issues with your Google Knowledge Panel, Facebook Page, fake websites or domain name hijackers, please contact the M4R team, we deal with these issues every day and we know the best ways to help you to protect your own intellectual property.

We talk to Robbie Doyle from Buy Grow Sell about the pitfalls and opportunities in negotiating a Restaurant property lease. This is particularly topical in Australia, with Sumo Salad putting two leasing companies into Administration because of the difficulties that they have had in negotiating the leases with Westfield. Westfield, like a lot of shopping centre owners have tried to respond to decreasing retail trade by increasing the experiential opportunities for customers, and this has seen an increase in the number of restaurants in shopping centres with no increase in customers, in fact some shopping centres are seeing decreasing foot traffic. Where can restaurant owners find properties that have affordable rents? We discuss some of traps that can be included in a lease offer. We look at how many restaurant owners buy their property versus leasing. Buying gives you a friendly landlord, but it is expensive and if the restaurant goes badly, you have a struggling lease and a struggling tenant to deal with at the same time. What are the different types of lease that are available and how can you structure that with your exit plan, especially when you factor in the fitout costs that will be sunk into the property. If you've got questions on Restaurant Leases, Robbie has very generously offered to help you out, so contact him at www.buygrowsell.com.au Should you get a lawyer to review your Restaurant Lease? Robbie discusses some of the caveats that can be put onto a lease, and how they can affect your over the time of the lease. What are the parts of the lease that are negotiable and how can you get the best terms for your Restaurant? Robbie provides some great insights into what Landlords can be thinking and the factors that drive the way that they negotiate. Robbie shares a lot of great insights into the Restaurant Leasing process that can make the process a lot less painful for you the next time that you need to negotiate a lease. We finish off with the great story of Robbie's first Restaurant. A talented chef, he was undercapitalised, but with a little out of the box thinking, he was able to get his first start in a Restaurant. His story has some great ideas in it for those struggle to get the money together to begin their own Restaurant story.

We talk about Kalimera Souvlaki Art, which was recently written up in the New York Times by Sam Sifton. How does a Souvlaki Restaurant in Melbourne Australia get written up in the New York Times? We talk to Veronica Fil, the Business Manager at Restaurant Lume. Lume was voted the Gault and Millau Restaurant of the Year in 2016. Lume works very hard to create unique experiences for diners. They use actors, script writers and use psychological tests to work and are pushing the boundaries in the way that food is experienced in their restaurant. The are attracting a significantly younger audience market than a traditional fine dining venue. Understanding their customers is a critical part of the Lume experience. With a high percentage of customers from China, they learned that many were not drinking wine, so they created a tailored mocktail drink pairing with their meal. Lume has adopted Virtual Reality to push the boundary on the way that their guests experience their food. They have created VR experiences that significantly pushes the limits of multi sensory dining. By combining the story of the ingredients, the preparation and the restaurant into a Virtual Reality experience with scents, auditory cues and tactile sensations. Restaurant Lume has reduced No Shows to zero in their restaurant. This is a phenomenal result because No Shows in fine dining are especially expensive in fine dining. They adopted Tock as a booking engine that takes pre bookings. They were losing up to $3,000 a week to zero. This is the difference between Lume surviving through to the point where they are very popular and having run out of cash and going out of business. Lume has a reputation of providing some of the best Corporate Event experiences in the country. Large corporate customers looking for something to WOW their customers with and provide their customers with a unique experience have becoming For one event they created a perfume for the event, a bespoke menu based on local ingredients of the customer, they had a photographer at the event and used those photographs to create a cook book of the recipes from the event with photos of the participants in it. The diners get a memento of the event, a cook book that features photos of themselves delivered to them weeks after the event, reminding them of it. The customer gets branding that will stay with the customers. Lume is continuing to create cutting edge multisensory dining experiences, starting to work with augmented reality. All of the experiences have the foundation of Chef Quade and the team creating amazing food. We will talk to Chef Quade in a future podcast about his journey and his approach to restaurant creativity and innovation.

We look at Domino's Pizza. They are a great example of a successful online ordering businesses. The complete directly against Menulog / Just Eat / Delivery Hero and Grubhub. They put a lot of work into their online ordering solution, because they need to differentiate themselves from other online ordering solutions. We look at the prices between 2 orders, one for take out and one for delivery. Domino's have no minimum order value. We look at Domino's delivery fees and analyse the delivery fee. They have marked up their food by 48% for the convenience of having it delivered. This is a massive charge and something that a lot of people don't really want to deliver the pizza. They are driving people to pick up the pizza. Why is this? Domino's is set up for high volume pizza creation. The bottleneck is now the synchronisation of pizza cooking with delivery, which is expensive, so they drive people to pick up. The Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering system now feeds into our Free Restaurant CRM system. We talk about the importance of using your email database to turn new customers into repeat customers. This is the simplest way to increase repeat customer orders. We look at how the numbers stack up to increase your revenue by $144,000 a year with a simple monthly program shaping customers to buy from you at least monthly. Many customers with online ordering will spend $5,00 or $10,000 with their favourite restaurant, but most restaurants aren't able to identify who their regular customers are. We talk about the kind of offerings and emails that you can send to drive demand and we also look yield utilisation. How can you move demand from Saturday through to Wednesday when the kitchen is quieter. We also talk about some of the Facebook campaigns that you can run. We have some customers who are running very effective Facebook campaigns to drive online order revenue. Even better, those using FROLO can directly see the number of orders that have come in from a Facebook campaign, which means that you can scale your marketing because you know that it is working. We look at the number of customers who still like to make a call to place their order. Restaurant aggregators like grubhub and Just Eat don't publish phone numbers because they don't get to charge commission for orders placed over the phone. We are still seeing a lot of orders being done over the phone, so including the phone number can make a big difference in the success of the campaign. We look at the increase in orders that you can see by offering your own loyalty campaign for online orders. This is a highly effective way of increasing your customers orders. Some of your take out customers could be worth more than $4,000 a year, so it is really important that you work as hard as possible to not only find those new customers, but to turn them into repeat customers. If you are looking for ways to increase order frequency and value, take payments online and get paid in 3 days and to build your email database, not someone else's, check out the Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering system.

Online ordering is a really important part of the revenue mix for some restaurants. This is the first part of a 2 part podcast on the economics of online ordering and how small restaurants are dramatically increasing profitability with a few simple tweaks. Menulog, Just Eat, Grub Hub and Delivery Hero are charging 13% commission and not giving the restaurants the email addresses, so it is very difficult to build a sustainable take out business with those platforms. We look at why restaurants do take out. Often the bottle neck for a restaurant is the number of tables in a restaurant and the number of times you turn those tables. Take out moves spare capacity in your kitchen past the bottleneck of the tables that you have, allowing for significantly higher revenue if you have a big mismatch between kitchen capability and in house consumption. We discuss the profitability of take out orders. There is very little front of house costs associated and Restaurants used to offer a 10% discount for take out orders to reflect the decreased costs associated with take out, but increased commissions from Online Ordering companies have seen these offers all but disappear. (They are starting to come back as restaurants move to commission free platforms.) What problem do you solve with in your restaurant? Take out offers convenience, the ability to have a few drinks without worrying about an Uber home. For us, take out allows us to Netflix and Chill, rather than the issues associated with going out. It offers flexibility and convenience, and it dramatically opens up your target market when you offer take out. One of the big things that Uber has done is that they have increased the calibre of restaurants that are now offering take out, with customers now increasing the amount of take out that they are eating, which goes hand in hand with the increasing number of customers who are time poor. What are the problems with Take Out? For delivery, the synchronisation of getting meals out of the kitchen becomes a lot more complicated because rather than relying on front of house to get the meal to the table, now a delivery driver needs to be organised and synchronised with the food coming out of the kitchen to get it to the customer in a reasonable time. Using UberEATS removes some of the logistics issues, but it also means that you are losing 35% of revenue as well as not getting the customers email address. We look at some of the statistics around Online Orders. We discuss the average order value and anecdotally, Thai has a lower average order value than Indian. The spread of the number of orders that a restaurant takes is incredible. Some restaurants take 1 order a week. Some are doing $2,000 - $3,000 a week! This means that some restaurants have an extra $150,000 a year in revenue. If they are using a delivery service that charges, they may be paying $20,000 a year in commission and NOT getting any of their customers email addresses. We have some restaurants saving over $1,000 a month in commissions using the Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering system. What is the product that you offer through take out? Often the menu is exactly the same as the dine-in menu without any thought to the issues with delivery. How is it packaged? What can you do to make a better experience for your customers when they unpack their food. What branding do you do for your restaurant? Do you have online ordering online specials? We look at how Qantas uses online only specials to drive passengers to pre-order their meals. It makes it easier for them to cater for everyone. They offer online only special meals, which are using pretty epic - this drives people to pre order, meaning they have a much better idea of the number of meals that they will need for each flight. Remember, they can't just go out to the supermarket and pick up a couple of extra steaks when they are at 30,000 feet. How are you driving phone orders? Companies like Menulog, Just Eat and Delivery Hero will not publish your phone number because they don't want any phone orders because they don't make any commission on it, but there are still a lot of people who want to order over the phone. Are you running "Order direct from the Restaurant and save!" campaigns. These can be very effective for local restaurants. We discuss Giodana's Pizza and their Deep Dish Pie and how it is almost the perfect product for Restaurant delivery. We talk about Sam Panopoulos and the international storm he created by throwing some pineapple on a pizza. In the next episode we will look at Domino's Pizza and the economics underlying the way they cost their menu. If you are looking to increase your online orders, if you want an email database of your customers who order from you, try using the Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering system. It's free, supports printing dockets, feeds into our Free Restaurant CRM system and processes payments in just 3 days. This is one of our most popular products with restaurants saving thous

This special podcast covers the first two days from the National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago. The show is absolutely massive and after 2 days we have only down 2/3s of the show. There are show many people to talk to, some many ideas to explore and some much food to sample :). We've gone looking for the best ideas to improve profitability in your restaurant, so we are looking at the people, the places, the processes, the product and the produce that is at the show. People: Their are coaches, some who have some great systems to help Restaurants and Bars to run a lot more efficiently, we talk to the guys from Grub Hub and Products: We look at some massive copper beer mugs from Barbarian brands. Produce: There are some great new products at the show. Aerated kombucha tea, and we look at the difference between Chilean Sea Bass and Patagonian Tooth fish. A lot of the produce has a really interesting story behind it and when distributors are trying to sell it to you, they tell that story, but too often that story gets forgotten in what you tell your customers about the produce. How can you better tell the stories of the items on your menu, or should you get produce with better stories? There is plenty more that we talk about and we will be sharing more of the things we've learned in future episodes. We end with a great experiential dining concept, the Saved by the Max popup Restaurant, based on the 80's show, Saved by the bell.

This special podcast covers the first two days from the National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago. The show is absolutely massive and after 2 days we have only down 2/3s of the show. There are show many people to talk to, some many ideas to explore and some much food to sample :). We've gone looking for the best ideas to improve profitability in your restaurant, so we are looking at the people, the places, the processes, the product and the produce that is at the show. People: Their are coaches, some who have some great systems to help Restaurants and Bars to run a lot more efficiently, we talk to the guys from Grub Hub and Products: We look at some massive copper beer mugs from Barbarian brands. Produce: There are some great new products at the show. Aerated kombucha tea, and we look at the difference between Chilean Sea Bass and Patagonian Tooth fish. A lot of the produce has a really interesting story behind it and when distributors are trying to sell it to you, they tell that story, but too often that story gets forgotten in what you tell your customers about the produce. How can you better tell the stories of the items on your menu, or should you get produce with better stories? There is plenty more that we talk about and we will be sharing more of the things we've learned in future episodes. We end with a great experiential dining concept, the Saved by the Max popup Restaurant, based on the 80's show, Saved by the bell.

Described as the Iron Lady of Hong Kong Private Dining, we talk to Grace Choy. We talk about the our Comparison Research between Dimmi, Quandoo, OpenTable, Tock, Obee and the Free Online Restaurant Booking System. We think that email sharing Grace is very humble, but her passion for cooking shows through in the videos that she produces and that has enabled to build up the largest Facebook following of any Chinese Restaurant on Facebook. Grace has an amazing social media following: She has 41,871 followers on Linkedin and 431,703 followers on Facebook. The important lessons from Grace are: 1. The power of Facebook Videos; and 2. The power of using Facebook Video to show your passion. Grace is very passionate about her cooking and that shows through in the way that she comes across on the videos. It is so important to be yourself and do things that you are passionate about, and Grace does that very well. Grace manages her own Facebook, and responds to everyone on the Facebook page. Her 20 seat Restaurant is booked out 2 weeks in advance. She focueses on fresh food and treating people as family. She also has pre bookings to cut down on no shows. Grace was the first Twitter Verified Chef's in Greater China, even though she has only tweeted 68 times! and now has 21,500 followers on Twitter. Her Facebook following has been the basis for a large amount of free PR that Grace has received, including a short Youtube Video that tells her story.

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. Hard work - it is important to be doing the right work. Too many people work too hard at the wrong type of work. Team work - building a great team and getting them working to help you is really important. Purpose - your purpose, that is what gives you passion, you need to maintain your passion for a long time, that purpose does it. Leadership - Getting the team to work towards your purpose. Technical excellence - FOH, BOH - you need to be working towards excellence in all of the parts of your Restaurant. Always learning - Ana Ros is self taught. She didn't plan to be a chef and has taught herself the skills to be the best Female chef. That is an amazing story and should be inspiring to all restaurant owners. Persistence - Massimo Bottura's Osteria Francescana took a long time before it became popular. You need to persist, knowing that you are on the right path. Innovation - We look at the role of innovation and the importance of failing and the easiest way that you can experiment with innovation and creativity. 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: Optimised for Google Search; Optimised for mobile (most of your customers will be on mobiles); Links with Google Maps - your Google My Business account, (think about how people can get to your Restaurant); and Have a signature dish on the front page. 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." 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.

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? 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. Not understanding key fixed costs. 11.6% of net costs are rent. 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.

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? 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. Not understanding key fixed costs. 11.6% of net costs are rent. 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.

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: Key Partners Key Activities Value Proposition Key Resources Cost Structure Revenue Streams Channels Customer Segments Customer Relationships 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: Food going over the pass Food prep - tell the story of how you create your dishes Sourcing the food - video from your garden, the market Use it to do market research - what items do people want to see on your menu? Go through a recipe 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.

We look at Living Social being bought by Groupon. This is a good thing because there is now 1 less daily deals company. For a lot of Restaurants, daily deals are a very dangerous process, and often a symptom We talk about an $8.38 marketing campaign that filled a cafe in Western Australia with customers buying their highest margin item. We go through the process so you can run the exact same campaign! We talk about the formula for making a Restaurant Profitable. This is a very simple formula and used in lots of different types of business, but we will go through what it looks like for your Restaurant. Leads x Conversion Rate = Customers Customers x Average number of Transaction x Average Sale Amount = Revenue. Revenue x Profit Margin = Profit We discuss all of the ways that you can effect each of these numbers. This is a great discussion about how some of our customers are making a really big difference in the profitability of their Restaurant.

We talk about using Prisma, a new and exciting app available on Android and Chrome to help you create very sharable content for solution media. Building a free CRM System What is a CRM system, what is CRM - a process for building information about your customers and leads, and your relationships with the customer The goals of your CRM system should be:. Improve marketing effectiveness - decrease the cost to acquire a customer and increase long term customer value. eg fish and chip shop. Increased personalized service or one to one service: Identify people for face to face interactions. Responsive to customer's needs: Customers' situations and needs can be understood by the firms focusing on customer needs and requirements.[ Customer segmentation: Improve customization of marketing: Multichannel integration: Integrating across multiple marketing channels. Time saving: Point and shoot marketing. Improve customer knowledge: Feedback about the food, experience and value. Your new CRM System needs to be very cost effective, very time effective and very simple to use. We look at the parts that make up a CRM system and then, how we build a free Restaurant CRM system Gather information about your customers. Purchases, bookings, , frequency, recency,birthdays, preferences Free Restaurant Online Ordering System, and the Free Online Restaurant Booking System. Big data for your Restaurant. Every Monday we benchmark every one of our customers against other Restaurants. so you know if you are doing great and you have some ideas about how to improve if not. Creating a unified view of customer information across bookings and orders. Should be electronic. Called yesterday, had to call back. She didn't ask for my name. Only 3 tables in the Restaurant. 75% is take away. Online ordering service that is charging 12%. 75% of revenue taxed at 12% and not getting If you are taking bookings or orders and not collecting emails, you are wasting a huge opportunity. Mailchimp free for 2,00 contacts . Many of our customers are using that. Facebook ads, upload mobile numbers or email addresses.

Adam Sobel is the Chef behind the amazing food and business at Cinnamon Snail. Cinnamon Snail has food trucks and restaurants in New York and New Jersey. Adam is passionate about changing the world to vegan organic and he works to do that by creating vegan organic dishes that people want to eat because they are creative, playful and great tasting. This allows him to dramatically increase his target market - but also help educate people that vegan organic food doesn't have to be boring. We talk to Adam about how he can to find his passion and how it is a central part of Cinnamon Snail today. Adam has done a great job of his menu engineering. He has created some great looking dishes that attract long lines for his food trucks. The menu is a critical part of why Adam does what he does, and it shows through in his mission and vision and the culture that he has created with the people he works with at Cinnamon Snail. Check out his website for a better idea of the great food that he is creating. Adam has a great story too about some serendipity that helped him get his first cook book published. Once again, it comes down to having great tasting food. Adam has some amazing videos for Cinnamon Snail. Check out: Vendy Awards video Vegan Food Truck in NJ

We look at the power of Big Data for Small Restaurants and some of the tools that you can use to understand how your online marketing is working in your business. As an example, we look at some data from Sensis about how many people go to their average business website. Without some big data, the information that you get about your website visits is not very useful, but with some comparative analytics and big data, you can really understand how your website is performing and more importantly, how your online marketing is contributing to your revenue and your profits. We have a quick look at generating repeat customers and word of mouth and why it can be so important for your marketing. Facebook Retargeting We look at what retargeting or remarketing is and why it is so important for you. These are really simple campaigns to run and can be the most effective campaigns that you can run. Many of the remarketing campaigns that we run for Restaurants are running at $5 per day. We talk about how to set it up on your website and the process to be able to integrate Facebook retargeting on your website. We talk about Corporate Hospitality and how remarketing can increase your Corporate customers (these ones spend the most money and often run events on Tuesday and Wednesday nights - maybe your quietest nights. We talk about Canva as well, a really powerful free tool for creating great images for your Facebook marketing campaigns.

We talk about our new Marketing Metrics dashboard, providing detailed information about customers, orders, bookings and Facebook. We look at the Facebook ad grid, with Avatars and Benefits. Who are the customers that you are looking for in your area. If you think it is people who like your cuisine in your local area, you need to be a lot more granular to create marketing campaigns that really resonate with your customers. This is breaking down your customer base into the specific niches. We talk about Duncan Robertson from Duncan's Thai Kitchen. We go into the Avatars that we created for Rooster Burgers, our test Restaurant and discuss some of the benefits that we would provide those customers. We talk about some of the ideas to come up with innovative marketing campaigns that can dramatically increase the number of customers that they bring in, along with the segmentation options that are available in Facebook. Plenty of interesting options that can really help you target new customers very effectively. We look at how to take great photos for your Restaurant, quickly and easily that will help your create killer marketing campaigns and also be great content for your website.

We look at the steps that you need to take to create a quick and dirty Facebook marketing campaign to get an injection of cash for when money is tight. First, we look at the new Loyalty discounts feature in our Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering system. We look at the first Michelin Starred street food hawker. His commitment to excellence is a really inspiring storing. Have a quick look at the video. What is the photo that you are going to use? We talk about the cheapest way to get a decent photo of the food you need for emergency Facebook marketing. What is the offer you should use and who will you targeting with it? We look at some interesting targeting options that can work well with different types of offers. How much should you spend in your Facebook Marketing campaign. What are the best times to run the ads? We also look at how to measure how well it has worked.

We look at the reasons why restaurants fail. To many Restaurants close, but we aren't talking about that kind of failure. We are talking about the Restaurant owner or chef who don't have a Restaurant that is meeting the requirements of their personal plan. They are working too many hours. They aren't making enough money. They don't spend enough time with their family. They can't take time out from the Restaurant for a holiday. That isn't good enough. Running a small business is hard and stressful and running a Restaurant is one of the hardest and most stressful types of businesses. Let's look at ways that can cause failure and ways that you can avoid failure and start being successful. 1. Cashflow, leases, cashflow, understanding the P+L and the profitability hospitality metrics that you need to focus on. 2. How to be objective about your Restaurant. How can you use open and objective information about your restaurant to make it better. 3. Lack of innovation. There are so many things that can be done in the Restaurant, POS systems, marketing, ingredients, Menu. If you aren't continually innovating, you will appear dated when compared to Restaurants uses the latest techniques and technologies. 4. Fitout. What is the ROI of the fitout? 5. Poor marketing. 6. No marketing. 7. Poor Culture. Culture is a soft topic, it isn't reported in the P+L, so a lot of the time it doesn't get the attention that it deserves. It impacts you, your team and your customers. 8. Menu Engineering. We look at some great Menu Engineering ideas and how it works in a real Restaurant, like www.noisyoyster.com.au, where the menu is costed, the wait staff know wait to recommend. 9. Poor or no concept or Restaurant USP. 10. Burn out. It is a really tough game. It takes a toll. What can you do to get the spark back and the passion that will shine through in bring the customers back in?

We talk about Pokemon Go and why it is a signpost to one of the fundamental changes that is occurring for small businesses and Restaurants in particular. Some Restaurants are crushing this change and others are ignoring it at their peril. Chicken Vindaloo Dim sims. Just saying..... We look at some great tips to help you increase personal productivity and the way that you work so that you Look at the activities that you are spending time on, delegate, create procedures, hiring, multitasking the right way, automating systems, look after yourself with sleep and exercise, and last but not least - marketing :). Check out Confluence for a way to store your policies and procedures. Check out Eric Cacciatore's Restaurant Unstoppable podcast. Xero - cloud based accounting system that can cut the time you spend on accounting. Too many Restaurant owners work too many hours for too little reward - starting to work on your business is the start of making the change to the type of Hospitality business that you want to run, so you should find some ideas to be able to get that 1 hour. You will find that 1 hour on the business will return to you many hours of time saved down the track and you can use that extra time to continue to work on the business and then you are on the track to build the great profitable hospitality business. :) Have a busy day!

Profitable Hospitality is the goal of all Restaurant owners, but it can be very hard to achieve. We look at 7 areas that Restaurant, Cafe and Take Out owners can impact profitability and we look at ways that you can improve profitability in each of the areas. 1. Your business plan and the sample P+L. What are the KPIs that you need to be looking at to achieve profitability. 2. Your Marketing Plan. 3. Hiring and training. How much money are you wasting on bad hiring practices and how many great employees leave your Restaurant because it isn't a great place to work. We will cover one great tip we have used to find the great employees, which is very cheap to use! We talk about how Nick Sarillo builds a great Restaurant culture. 4. Wage costs. How do you look at your wage costs? 5. Rent. We cover an interesting way to look at your rent and 1 way that may help you save a little rent per month. 6. Managing your food and bev costs. What is the number 1 way to decrease your food costs without decreasing the quality of your food? Why not use some of the food costing tools from Sysco? 7. Menu Engineering. What is the process for Menu Engineering and how should you do that? What is the number one most profitable phrase in Restaurant Marketing and are you using it? 8. What is the 8th item of our list of the Top 7 things to do to increase your Restaurant Profitability? You'll have to listen to the podcast to find out :) We look at Big Huey's Diner, their awesome menu and some of the great things that they are doing to increase profitability in their restaurant.

We look at USPs - Unique Selling Propositions. Does your Restaurant need a Unique Selling Proposition, because not every restaurant really needs one. What should a Unique Selling Proposition do for your Restaurant? What is the process to create a Unique Selling Proposition? Qualtiy price, product We go through some sample USPs and how they work. Mentioned in this podcast: Norman Hotel - Brisbane's Worst Vegetarian Restaurant. Coravin Wine System Brooklyn Brewery Bevspot New Managing Director for Menulog - Commissions to increase? Paramount Coffee Project

The 2016 NRA Show in Chiacgo was attended by over 45,000 people. We spent 3 packed days looking for the best products, ideas and inspiration to help you grow your business. There was so much to see - but here are some of the edited highlights. We visit 2 great Chicago restaurants - Nick's Pizza and Pub and Au Cheval with Eric Cacciatore from Restaurant Unstoppable. We finally get to experience the amazing In n Out Burger - the iconic Burger business. What was the surprising thing about Bubba Gump? We discuss some of the reason YOU should go to the NRA show and how it will help you grow your business. There are a lot of suppliers who have a great story - that story can and should become part of your story. It helps create the experience and where there is experience there's margin! We discuss Kimbal Musk from The Kitchen and the way he creates a great story about his suppliers, Denny Post and the importance of a Signature meal- even if it isn't that popular, as well as a great discussion between Jon Taffer from Bar Rescue and Robert Irvine from Restaurant Impossible. Are you doing coffee in your Restaurant? Is it great coffee? What impact would making your restaurant someone's regular coffee spot make to revenue? We talked to the team from Vittoria coffee. (It was easily the best coffee at the show!) The Urban Cultivators look great and if you are creating a fresh and green brand, these are perfect for really highlighting what it is that you are doing for your customers (and how much of a difference would cheap, fresh herbs make?) Why was it we visited the Aussie Pie Kitchen in LA? We also look at Torta Bianca - a great ingredient for your cocktail list. We finish of with esoteric wine varietals and how they can help you with your wine list and profits and lastly a warning about spending the wrong way with your social media marketing. These are ujust some of the examples of what we picked up from the show. If you have an idea for a restaurant in mind, or already have a concept, there are hundreds of ideas and products there that you can find to help to tell a better story, find productivity gains or increase margin with better and more interesting menu items. I have focused too much on productivity, because I am not very good in the kitchen, but I think there was just as many interesting products for HOW you do in the kitchen as there was for WHAT you do in the kitchen. Hope to see you at #NRA 2017 and hope you have a busy night tonight!

For many Restaurants, the website is the central part We talk about how to compare the traffic for your website against other Restaurant's websites, so you know how well your online marketing is performing. Find out how to make sure that the website is optimised for mobile. How often you are updating the website? You should be able to make changes on your website yourself, so you can do it frequently without being charged by your web developer every time you make a change. A quick and easy way to grow your email marketing database and how that works with your website traffic. How integrating with Facebook can help drive traffic and customers to your website. Using www.canva.com to create great content. What can Instagram do for your website traffic? Making sure you capitalise on all of the great Public Relations mentions that you get. Have a listen to the podcast and find more ways for how to increase traffic to your Restaurant Website. For most Restaurants, your website is the hub of your online marketing and the start to building a really powerful marketing database. Some Restaurants have databases that generate hundreds of thousands of dollars every month. This can be the start of it for you! Have a listen now, because if your website is working for you, someone else's website will be working for them and they will be getter all of the traffic, all of the leads and all of the customers! **This WAS meant to go out before the NRA Show in Chicago. Oops sorry. We didn't get a chance to upload it. However, we are going to do a Show special ep covering what we saw, learnt and did along with an ep on a very exciting Restaurant visit that we did and the session with Jon Taffer and Robert Irvine from Bar Rescue and Restaurant Impossible. Stay tuned. We will get these ones out as soon as possible (I am still on the road in Taipei, looking at what tech is going to change Restaurants.) Back on deck next week.