STORYTIME (1) - Playing Defense at the Door

Speaker A: I don't think it's my job to tell you or anyone else what to do. I think it is my job to share stories about what other people have done. So over the next 20 episodes of Restaurant Strategy, I want to share with you 20 stories. The 20 stories that I share more than any other. They're stories from clients of mine, P3 members from other restaurants I've been to, experiences I've had firsthand. They are stories about how restaurants are leveling up, increasing revenue, increasing retention, growing profitability. And it's not, uh, me telling you what to do. It's me sharing stories so that they can inspire you, spark creativity, so that you can level up your restaurant and eventually provide the kind of stability that is required for a successful, profitable restaurant. All of that today and on the next 20 episodes of Restaurant Strategy. There's an old saying that goes something like this. You'll only find three kinds of people in the world. Those who see, those who will never see, and those who can see when shown. People. This is Restaurant Strategy, a podcast with answers for anyone who's looking. Hey, everyone, thanks for tuning in. My name is Chip Close. I am m your host here of the Restaurant Strategy podcast. You know, I give talks, I've written books, I host a coaching program. It's called the P3 mastermind. But I also run one big live event every year. It's the Restaurant Profitability Summit. It happens every October. Tickets are on sale now. The Restaurant Profitability Summit happens October 18th to the 20th in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We change cities every single time. I will be on stage with my other P3 coaches, Chris Hughes, Sal Rotolo, Rev Ciancio. We will be joined by other P3 members on stage. We've got a lineup of killer sponsors all all there to talk to you about what is working now when it comes to cost management, revenue growth, AI, everything. We also have a headliner. For the first time ever, we're going to be joined on stage by Gavin Case. And he is Mr. Minneapolis. Got a whole bunch of restaurants in Minneapolis. Two James Beard awards. He is there to talk not just about himself and his trajectory, but specifically how you grow a restaurant group, how you grow a profitable restaurant group. You can get your tickets now. There are only 200 spots in the room. As of the date of recording this, there are 86 tickets already committed. So we're almost halfway full. When they're gone, they're gone. 200 seats to the Restaurant Profitability Summit. About half of them are gone. You're going to find the link in the show notes. Go. Click check it out. Two different levels of tickets. We have general admission and vip. Both of them get you into two days of education. Both of them get you into the party on Monday night. Food, open bar. It is a great event. And then if you do the VIP package, you also get a welcome dinner with me and my team on Sunday night. It's a proper dinner, not, not some like crap. It's uh, a sit down, seated, proper dinner. You also get catered lunch both Monday and Tuesday. So you get extra time to hang around with me and my team. You also don't have to, you know, run across the city of Minneapolis to find food. We provide it there for you. Two different levels. To join us, you're going to find the link in the show notes. Okay. One of the tools that we recommend more than anything else is Marquee. I recommend Marquee for listings management. That has to do with SEO and also reputation. With Marquee, you get to manage and respond to all of your reviews to Google, Yelp, OpenTable, TripAdvisor, Facebook, Grubhub, Uber Eats, EasyCater. You know how many places you get reviews? You get to get them all in one central place. They also improve your star ratings with consistent review responses. And guess what? The system will also respond for you if you don't have time. Marquee makes sure that all your hours, menu and other online information is accurate across the entire Internet. Which places you higher in near me searches, which ultimately helps you get more buts and seats. Did you know 72% of users who click who uh, run a near ah me search will go to one of those restaurants, one of those businesses within the next 60 minutes. You need to be top of the table when it comes to near me searches. Marquis helps you do that. If you're curious to learn more, visit marquee.com that's M M A R Q I I dot com. As always, you're going to find the link in the show notes. Pop Menu has reimagined the restaurant. They're breaking the mold of the menu. Taking the kitchen doors off the hinges, serving up their most comprehensive technology solution yet. It's called Pop Menu Max. It comes with all the previous ingredients that we've mentioned here on the podcast. Right? So you get a website designed with SEO in mind, marketing tools to keep you top of mind with your guests, and of course, the patented interactive menu technology. But this new recipe brings automated phone answering to the table, third party online ordering, aggregation, wait listing, and more. Pop Menu's phone answering technology has got your ringing phones covered with AI the simple questions that used to keep your phone line tied up will now be able to be handled without pulling a staff member from your in person hospitality. So no more missed reservations, no more asking for hours, no more missed revenue. And that's just the beginning. See, you got a passion for food. Pop menu's got a passion for technology. Together, that's a recipe for restaurant success. And now even more digital ingredients are in their technology pantry. Trust me, if you're a restaurant owner, you gotta check out Pop Menu. It will take your business to the next level. For a limited time only, you get a hundred bucks off your first month. Plus you get to lock in one unchanging flat monthly rate. Go to popmenu.com restaurantstrategy to claim the offer. Again, that's a hundred bucks off your first month. Go to p o p m e n u.com restaurantstrategy and yep, you're gonna find that link in the show notes. So we are beginning a journey. For the next 20 episodes. I'm gonna share the 20 stories that I share more than anything else. Stories from clients, p members, things we've done, uh, initiatives, campaigns we've put into place, um, ideas, platings, uh, you know, presentations, all of that. And then I'm also going to share stories from experiences that I've had. All of it. Not to tell you, hey, do this, but to say, hey, this is something that someone is doing and look at the impact of what they're doing. I want to start with the story that I tell probably more than any other story. It was from the first time that, uh, I took my family to Italy. We were on the Amalfi coast. We're in Sorrento. We took a boat ride the entire day. At the end of the day, I asked the captain, I say, hey, after spending a day on the water, we'd really like a good seafood meal. Where should we go? And he said, oh, right where I drop you off. It's a restaurant called Porto Marina. And I was like, isn't that where we met you? Right, Puerto Marina? And he said, yeah, yeah, it's right there. I said, but that place looks like a dump. And he sort of like, got a weird look on his face. He said, well, you asked me for the best seafood in Sorrento. That's it, Porto Marina. And I was like, okay. So the boat captain drops us off, we get off the boat, we get to the port, and if you've been to a European City, you know, there in the harbor, there's like, six, seven, eight restaurants right along the harbor. And sure enough, they were like, like seven restaurants there. And it was half full, half full, line out the door. Half full, half full, half full. Obviously, the one with the line out the door was this place, Porta Marina. And it wasn't just because my captain was telling people to go. It was very obviously in demand. It was where you go. So we were like, okay, let's go up. We go and put our names on the list because there's obviously people waiting. Said, oh, how long for a table for three? And she said, oh, I got two, I got two. I got three. Three. I view three, and then I'll do you four and you four. Okay, fine, great. So she said, you know, sit, relax. Make yourself comfortable. But there was, like, I don't know, 20, 25 people waiting. It wasn't very comfortable. And there was nowhere really to sit because the restaurant is just sort of like, out on the street. And we're like, okay. So we found a little bench. My wife sat down with my son, and we're sitting there, and not 90 seconds later, this woman comes over with hands filled with white wine glasses, and she goes, here, here, here, here, here. And she just starts giving out white wine to everyone. And in that moment, I realized a couple of important things. Actually, over the next 10 minutes, let's say immediately she was so, uh, we talk about old World charm, we talk about old World hospitality. It was free. She was just giving it away. Forget the fact of the cost. The cost was probably pennies to them because it wasn't very high quality wine. But she was starting the hospitality. She was doing what we do whenever we have guests over. Come in, come in. Give me your coat. Sit down, relax. What can I get you to drink? Immediately she walked up and just said, here, relax. Make yourself comfortable. And we did. We all took a glass of white wine, except for my son, because he was only seven at the time. We sat there and we start sipping the white wine. And I realized she started the hospitality. No questions asked, whatever. She was just making us, uh, feel at home and comfortable, number one. Number two, she was calming us down, because guess what? Wine calms people down. Whatever anxiety or impatience you might have had, it's all just flying out the window because you're just sipping wine on some coastal Italian city. It was, like, relaxing and lovely. The sun is setting. It was magical. The third turn, though, was amazing. As I was looking down at the other restaurants there, other restaurants, all had tables available at any point, we could have gotten up and gone over to the other tables and said, hey, can you seat a table for three? And they would have said, sure, sit down. And I bet you the food would have been good, but it wouldn't have been great. Everybody had told us. The captain was just the first, uh, person to tell us, uh, because everyone else told us, no, no, no, you gotta go here. So, okay, what happens is that they were playing defense. So they started the hospitality. They calmed us down, gave us a little bit more patience than we might have otherwise had, and then they were playing defense, because, again, instead of us getting up and, you know, I, uh, don't know, uh, 15, 20, 25 minutes, maybe the kids getting a little bit irritable. Maybe grandma's getting a little irritable. Anybody can get up and walk over to another restaurant. But the fact that wine was given to you for free, you then had this, right, the law of reciprocity, as they call it, right? And this idea that I'm not gonna go anywhere because they've already given me something. So it kept us anchored there for 25 minutes, almost until our table was ready. And then she came over, brought us over to the table, and she sat us down. The fourth turn actually happened. So again, if you're keeping track, first turn was she started the hospitality, no questions asked. We're just here to take care of you. Number two, she put us at ease, gave us a little bit more patience, because wine calms everybody down. Number three, she was playing defense. So we never felt, uh, you know, never felt the. The pull up and go to another restaurant because we would have felt guilty about taking free wine and then going somewhere else. And the fourth part, she comes over, she's like, sid, is this table good? We're like, yeah. She's like, great. Do you like the white wine? Do you want to do a carafe? We said, sure. Boom. She slams down a carafe of the same white wine on the table. So now wine service was done, which there was one woman handling all of the guests, all of the servers, taking all the orders and getting people seated. She didn't have the time to also do wine service. So, boom. Uh, the carafe of white wine goes right on the table. Four turns from one simple move. So we talk a lot about, right? Some people are playing checkers, while others are playing chess. This restaurant, been there for a million years, is playing chess. My whole point to this story is we can challenge ourselves to do things differently than every other place. How do you answer the phone differently. How do you greet people and make them feel immediately welcome besides a smile and a hi, how's everyone doing? Do you have a reservation tonight? Right. So, hi, how can I help you? How do you go above and beyond? How do you extend the hospitality? How. How do you begin the experience before the true, quote, unquote, experience really begins? This place figured out, and I bet you they've been doing this for a decade or more, and I bet you they're going to keep doing this forever and ever and ever. In fact, I sent two different friends of mine. Uh, they were going to be in the. In Italy. They were going to be on the Amalfi coast. This past year, not three weeks ago, both of them sent me pictures and of them in line waiting for their table and the woman passing out white wine. They are still doing it. And I bet you they're doing it for a very, very, very long time. The interesting thing here is that none of the other restaurants in the block were doing it. The other interesting thing is as many times as I've traveled, and I travel a lot, I've never seen anyone else do it as much as I've been out in the United States. I've never seen anyone do it. Now, do you have to do this? No, you don't. But why not do some sort of generosity like this to accomplish all of those things, to begin the hospitality, to get a little bit to play defense? I think there are ways to do it. I think. I think if you wanted to, you could do it. And I think if there's any takeaway from this story is that I think we have to be willing now, in the year 2026 and beyond, we have to be willing to think outside the box. I challenge you, by way of this story, to think outside the box. In fact, that's the point of so many of these stories, is to get you to see people doing things differently. Getting to see people playing checkers, uh, playing chess instead of just checkers. If you can do that, you will have a restaurant that survives. Don't just do the same thing. Don't just serve the same thing. Go above and beyond. So this place, Porto Marina, was serving the same, you know, mussels and fish and calamari and all the same stuff that everyone else was, but it was somehow presented differently because of the way that it was presented. Cool. Makes sense. Listen, one final reminder. The Restaurant Profitability Summit happens once a year. It's our biggest event of the year. This will be our biggest event ever Last year we had about 150 people. We capped it at 140. We oversold the thing to get 150 people in the room. This year we've got a bigger venue. We are opening up to 200 people, but roughly about half of those seats are already gone. General admission tickets available. VIP tickets available. I promise. This is the tactical right? It's a series of tactical playbooks. You're gonna learn, paint by number, how to actually run a more profitable restaurant. I am interested in you making more money. Come join me in Minneapolis, October 18th, 19th and 20th. The link is in the show notes for you to go grab tickets. Thank you very much. I'll see you on the next one. Mhm.