Best Practices Usually Arent
By definition, best practices are what the crowd does well. They represent the aggregate experience of many operators across many contexts, distilled into recommendations that tend to work to varying degrees in most situations. Which means they are designed to...
Its Not About Teamwork
Teamwork has become a marketing term or art. It sells books, training programs, workshops, and consulting engagements. It appears in company values statements and pre-shift speeches. It is invoked whenever a leader wants to inspire collective effort without doing the...
Is Restaurant Marketing Broken?
A colleague asked this question in a forum years ago. The answer has not changed. Yes. Restaurant marketing is broken. Not because the tools do not work. Because the thinking behind how most operators use them is wrong at the...
Inside The Box Thinking
For years I heard gurus tell operators to think outside the box. I resisted it. Not because outside the box thinking is wrong. Because I kept looking at the businesses around me and seeing that nobody had exhausted their inside...
Strategy Tactics
Most operators, consultants, and industry associations use the words interchangeably. They are not interchangeable. Confusing them is one of the most expensive mistakes in the business. Two questions. Only two. And they have to be answered in order. What kind...
How To Create Loyal Guests For The Restaurant Across The Street
Most operators who lose Guests do not lose them dramatically. There is no scene. No complaint. No scathing review. The Guest simply stops coming back — and the operator never finds out why because the Guest never told them. Here...
The Killer Interview Question
Most interview questions reveal what a candidate wants you to know. One question reveals what they would rather you did not. Tell me about the worst mistake you ever made — and what it cost your employer. That is it....
Restaurant Marketing What Does An Empty Chair Really Cost
The costliest item in most restaurant operations does not appear on the P&L. It is not food waste, not labor variance, not rent. It is the empty chair. Not the chair that was empty because the restaurant was not full....
The Insanity of Losses
Someone told an operator I was working with that 75% of food and beverage businesses lose money or break even indefinitely — and that F&B is a loss leader by nature. I nearly lost my mind. This is not a...
The Parrot Conundrum
There is a service recovery script making the rounds in hospitality training circles that sounds like empathy and produces the opposite of it. “I can see how angry this makes you.” When was the last time you were genuinely upset...
