Secret Sauce - The Restaurant Marketing Podcast

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

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

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

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

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 Restau

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

  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 fo

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 gett

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 t

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

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 ba

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 in

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 - thi

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

  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 sea

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 C

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 v

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 gre

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 y