3 Things You Must Do To Grow Profits NOW

Hey, welcome to the Restaurant Coach podcast. It is the cure for the common restaurant. I am joined back in the studio today with my partners in restaurants, Simplified, Darren Mansari and Pamela Lee. Welcome back to part two of our little series on how to grow your profits in the next 30 days.

Thanks, Donald.

Thanks for having me. Yeah.

And thanks, everyone for tuning in.

Yeah. So, yeah, on the. On the first part of the series, we kind of gave an overview of what you need to do to really kind of grow your profits. And today, what we want to do is we want to kind of narrow this down a little bit. We want to go a little bit deeper down the rabbit hole, as they say. And we're going to talk about three of the main things that everyone must do, not should do, must do if you really want to grow your profits in 30 days. And the first thing I'm going to talk about, I'm going to lead this thing off and I'm going to talk mindset, but specifically mindset. We talked a little bit about mindset yesterday. I really want to talk about habits and also having a really solid plan. And we've shown some people some of the stuff. Yesterday. We talked about a little bit about our mastermind group and things like that. What I really want to talk about is there's, like, a path, I would say, to restaurant success. And most restaurants start at the bottom of this kind of valley of mediocrity. And if you looked at any market right now, if I looked out in any market, doesn't matter where I go in the world, 60% of all restaurants kind of fall in this average or kind of bad category. And actually, I would. I could even probably expand it up to like 60, 70, 80% of all restaurants in any market are average or bad restaurants. Okay. Now, when you're in that bad category, you know, I hate to say it's, you know, things suck, okay? But then as you move up, you move up towards that. I call it the summit of outstanding. You move up to that good category, and good is good, and I hate to say, as good as kind of, you know, it's all right. Things aren't great, but they're not. They're not like, you're not living down in the valley of mediocrity any longer. And when you get to that level of being outstanding where you really stand out in front of the market, you really don't have competition anymore. And our goal is always in any of our coaching programs, especially with our mastermind group, is we want to take you from where you are now to where you want to be in our kind. Of course that we're going to get you on is we're going to get you out of this valley of mediocrity. We're going to get you up to base camp. Okay. Then we're going to get you. We're going to get you under the good path. And this, you know, you can see as we get higher up the kind of elevation as far as the standards that we expect, you can see, the journey gets a little more challenging, as they say, because if it was easy, everyone could do it. And I'm a big believer. I say that restaurant success, not rocket science. If you understand the people and you work on those things, it's get people to the top where they need to be. In fact, we kind of have, like, different programs. We have, like, an integrated coaching suite that we teach. So, like, you know, at the bad category, you know, most restaurants don't even. They might call us, they might not. Most restaurants that give to base camp, they know that there's a better way. When you get to base camp here, you kind of realize, and you can easily join the Restaurant Coach Nation. It's a free Facebook group. And then from there, people can go to the good area. We have a couple different programs there. We have the Restaurant Coach University. Then if you really want to get to the great area, there's two different paths you can take. Either go to Restaurant Owner Academy, which is my kind of my private coaching, or we have our Restaurant Simplified Mastermind group, which is probably the program most people should really, really look at today, especially with the way Covid is and with the way kind of finances are and your economy and your, you know, what you have to spend. It's a great way to get started. And we've got what. How many people we got now in our Mastermind group? Like 60 people total?

Yeah, no more than anybody. We're just about at 20 people in a current one. We're doing now, like the Q and A call we did today. We had a lot of people on the Q and A call.

That was true. That's true.

Yeah. So it's. It's really growing quick. And I just want to just pause and comment. You know, I love hearing you talk, Donald, and sometimes I want to just jump in and comment on something. Sure. But then I'll let you go. So then I got to think back what you said. But for the people on the podcast and you're not watching this, Donald has a picture of, like, a mountain in Front of you, right? And it shows this line from base camp or from the Valley of Mediocrity, you know, up through base camp, and then good culture and then great culture, and you're going towards the top. And if you're what we called Valley of Mediocrity, and we call that like a bad or toxic culture, just by the fact that you're on this call and just by the fact that you're listening to this podcast, you're already taking steps towards that climb. Because to be on this podcast, you're probably realizing that there's a problem. You're realizing that it can be better. So I just want to say, you know, if you're in that spot, don't get upset about it. Don't worry about it, because you don't have to stay there. You don't have to live in that valley forever. And it sounds like you're already searching in that right direction. You're already looking in the right direction. So we'll be able to help you with that. Don't. Don't worry about that at all.

Pam, you want to add to that?

Well, I want you to bring this up again. When we talk a little bit, we're going to actually talk a little bit about statistics. Very little. I don't want to scare anybody, but scares me. Well, let's just. I mean, the very basic thing most people have learned about what a standard deviation is, what average is. So if you look at that Valley of Mediocrity, and Donald, you said that something like somewhere between 60 and 80% of restaurants live there. So statistically speaking, 66% of anything lives in the average range. And then you've got some below. And then you've got some above the ones that are below that average. When we're talking about restaurants close their doors, and then the ones that are above that average are the ones that are climbing up the mountain. And we're going to talk a little bit later about how to stay up that mountain, but we'll get there in a minute.

Right? Yeah.

One of the things I always kind of like, I say look at the bell curve. If you look at the bell curve, that's out there, you know, and this goes back to school. Right in the middle is like your C students. And unfortunately, that's where most restaurants are. Most restaurants are average. Most restaurants are that C level. They're not, you know, and if you look to this, like this little kind of bell curve we have here on the screen, right in the middle, of course, where the biggest Hump is of the bell curve. That's, that's the means. That's the, that's kind of the average. That's where 60% most the market is. Now if you, if I look to the left of this bell curve, there's a, you know, slope at the very beginning, that's that 20% that are bad. And if I look to the right, if I go slightly to the right, that's the ones that are good, that's about 15%. And to the far, far right, the ones that are very, very on the far right, those would be like your A students. That's what I call outstanding. And that's only like 5% of restaurants are outstanding. And the biggest thing I'm going to say is going to get you from here to there is changing your habits. And what do I mean by changing your habits? We all have, I hate to say that your restaurant and I would say, hashtag, write this shit down. Your restaurant is a reflection of your habits, plain and simple. And here's, here's a simple way to look at it. If your restaurant is running really great, you're having high profits, your team seems to be on, on top of everything, the systems are working and it just seems like your restaurant pretty much runs itself without you having to kind of like be micromanaging everything and controlling everything. Then you have more good habits than bad habits. Now if your restaurant's not running very well, not running very efficiency, seems like you got a lot of turnover, your profits are really low. It seems like every day is a struggle. Every day it seems like you're like jumping into a, into a high volume river and you're fighting the current every day just to stay above, you know, keep your head above water. Then you have more bad habits than good habits. Yes, yes. Now here's where the tricky part comes in. Awareness precedes choice and choice precedes change. That's why getting a coach or getting involved in a mastermind group is so valuable in a sense that it gives you self awareness. You don't know what you don't know. And I always ask people this question. Do you have a blind spot?

Do I have a blind spot? I wish I had a blind spot.

We have lots of blind spots.

We have a lot of blind spots.

That's why they're called blind spots. People don't know what their blind spots are. They're blind spots.

And if you're listening to this call, you don't think you have any blind spots.

That's your first one that's your first blind spot.

But just ask some of the people you work with. They'll be very happy to tell you what some of those blind spots are.

Exactly. You know, and that's why having, like, good business partners or having mentors or having, you know, coaches or being in a mastermind group is so valuable. I mean, even myself, I have some blind spots, you know, And I know a lot of people say, oh, Donald, you don't have blind spots. Yes, I have blind spots because I'm a human being and I have blind spots like everyone else. Darren, being a great partner in our company is very happy and actually very good at pointing out my blind spots without insulting me, which that's another good thing too. It's like, you know, you want someone who tells you about your blind spots but does not beat you up about it, you know, because he know and I know every time Darren says something to me, he wants me to become a better. He wants me to be better because I know when I become better, I'm better for our clients. I'm better. I'm a better coach, I'm a better person. And so, you know, and I'm just gonna be honest with you. Sometimes when people come to you and address their blind spots with you, you might not be very receptive to it. But if you just pause and process and understand it's for your growth, you say, you know what? He's right. You know, I need to really take a look at that. I need to look, I need to take some action and I need to implement what they say so you can grow and everyone can grow. Everyone can improve better. One of the things we really believe in in our mastermind group is a concept called kaizen. It's a Japanese term. Constant never ending improvement. We talk about it all the time. Kaizen is how we basically we live our lives as mastermind coaches. And our whole goal is to just constantly, in never ending, get better a little bit each day. That's all we want to do.

You know, if you're listening to this call and you could adopt Kaizen into every area of your life.

Change.

Yeah. We'll just say, thanks so much for tuning in. Your life's about to get better from this point forward. Everyone.

That's a mic drop moment right there.

It is.

If you adapt, Kaizen. Mic drop. Mic drop right there.

That's it. Our job is done.

Exactly. But, you know, most people, they don't think about that stuff. So changing your habits is not easy, but it's required because doing the Same thing over and over again and expecting different results is what they call insanity. And sadly, that's how 80% of restaurants operate. They keep doing the same thing over and over again and they hope something changes. Well, hope's not a strategy.

I'm going to share a personal philosophy with everybody. I don't believe in a New Year's resolution.

I know.

If you have to make a New Year's resolution, then you need to examine what have you been doing the entire private prior year that made it so that you need one. Why have you not been just working towards that goal for the entire prior year?

Exactly. I love it when people say, you know, I'm going to start on Monday.

What's so great about Monday?

I know, then what happens is like, you know, Monday happens and it comes around and they don't do anything and they're like, oh, shit, I gotta start on Tuesday. Well, why don't you start? You know, why can't you just start now? Oh, no, no, I can't. I gotta wait till next Monday. People just, people give excuses. Every time I hear someone say to me, I'm gonna start next week, I know they're not gonna do anything.

Who is that best selling author who had that quote, when would now be a good time? Who has that? Donald.

I know the guy probably got all over his walls. I know he's got a mug back there on the shelf that says, when would now be a good time?

Correct. The first time. If you're on this podcast. I met Donald when we were opening our restaurant and I sought out a consultant and I said, who's the best that could come help me? And Donald came out to help us at our restaurant. That's a whole story in itself. But one of the first things I noticed was he had like either pens or hats, but he had these logos around that said, when would now be a good time? And I was like, we need to adopt that right now in this restaurant. Everybody needs to adopt that. I never want to hear, I'll do it next week. I'll do it. No, we'll do it now. Let's just start right now.

When would not be a good time.

Yeah.

So as you can see on our kind of our, you know, to our summit of outstanding, we have different checkpoints. Checkpoint one is, you have to make a commitment that. Listen, you know what, I'm not going to, I'm not going to settle for average. I'm not going to have things the way they were. I make a commitment to start doing things different and then checkpoint two is, we're gonna have to adopt and change your mindset. Checkpoint three is after I got my mind right, I gotta start having that influence because that's what leadership's about really, is having influence. I gotta have influence on my team. After that we gotta really dial in your operations, make sure my operations are great. And then the final thing again is leadership. And if you really look at this thing, it actually is like a, it's like a circle and it keeps, it kind of feeds itself. So as you go through this kind of, this kind of checklist to checkpoints to the top, then it starts over again. It's never ending. It's not like you reach the top and then you're done. It's always like, I'm going back through. And basically I go through it one time as 1.0. Now I go through it again, it's 2.0. Now I go through it again, it's 3.0. And every time it's an upgrade. Every time it's an upgrade. So you can actually. This is a self perpetuating kind of wheel of awesomeness. I kind of kind of describe it is you can actually take this and you can keep, you can keep taking your restaurant to the next level and then when you get to that level, take it to the next level. There's never ever really a final destination if you don't want it ever to be.

No, it could always, it could always be better, right?

Yeah.

So when we talk about this stuff and we're talking about in the calls today, we're going to give you again the first, I'm going to give you the first kind of couple sets number. You know, 1 and 2 is kind of like my big thing. You got to make a commitment and you got to change your mindset. Then from there, you know, the team is another kind of complex stuff. But the one thing I want to kind of dive into next is I really want to talk about KPIs because when I talk about changing habits, one of the habits that we really implement with our restaurant simplified Mastermind group is we have this really cool thing called a KPI dashboard. And if you're on the call yesterday, you saw a little bit of dashboard. It's really, really cool. Basically you can dial in and you put in a couple numbers every day and it basically gives you this really, really cool dashboard. I'll show a picture of it a little bit. But what I want you to understand is that one of our things we want to do is when we Talk about creating habits. We want you to get in the habit of looking at your numbers every single day. Darien gave me a really great challenge, or he actually gave me a great analogy. And I tried it this morning.

Did you?

I did try it this morning, and I didn't go too far because I'll tell you in this challenge. So Darren's like, donald, you know, you go to Orange Theory every morning. Here's what I want you to do. You go to. You go to workout, right? I go, yeah. Do you have a towel you take to the gym? I go, yeah, I have a towel. Yeah. Because when you get in your car, just throw your towel over your dashboard before you start your car up. Don't even look at anything. Just start your. Just throw the towel over your dashboard. Start your car up. So I did. And so, you know, I backed up, which I was, you know, I was okay backing up. Close the garage door. I started driving down the street, and I started freaking out because I was like, how much gas do I have? You know, I. And I knew I was getting low, too. And then I started freaking out because I was like, do I have enough gas to get there? And I had my dad. Then I. I pulled onto the highway, and in Scottsdale, they would have, like, this 101. I pulled on that 101, and traffic's moving pretty fast. And I'm driving, I'm going. And I'm like, two minutes down the highway, and I'm like, really starting to freak out because I don't. I mean, I can't see my dashboard at all now. I don't know if, you know, am I even in the right gear? Am I. You know, am I. I don't know what I'm doing. And then, like, you know, the traffic seems. Moves pretty fast. And I saw a state. I saw a state police on the side. I'm like, am I going too fast? And then finally, I just couldn't take it. I had to pull the towel off, and I had to look. And I was. And I was speeding, so I'm lucky and happy. He didn't, like, pull me over. I was like, oh, no. That would have been a bad ticket. But, you know, Darren made the analogy, is like, how did you know? Then he's like, well, how would that make you feel? I'll tell you right now. I was freaked out. But that's how most people run their restaurants.

Yes. And that's it. Like, all you were doing was driving to Orange Theory. Could you imagine your restaurant day after day after Day the business that's not only supporting you, but supporting every one of your employees and their families in return. And you're taking that all to chance if you're not looking at a dashboard, you know, so I'm glad you did that, and I'm glad you didn't get a ticket.

Yeah. I'm telling you, though, you know, at first I was like, you know, I thought it was going to be pretty easy. I could drive to Orange.

And Darren.

And Darren challenged me. You think you could drive to Orange Theory with a towel over your dad? Oh, yeah, I could do it, right? No, I couldn't do it. But then I started. I started, you know, like Darren mentioned. I was like, you know, how do. How do people run their restaurant? Not looking at their numbers every single day.

So you had to go as fast as everybody else was going, right?

Yeah.

Tell how fast you were going. So you're like, I'll just do what they're doing. That's how to work. And that's what. Restaurant owners do that a lot.

Oh, my God. All the time, right?

I'll price my burger.

What?

They price their burger?

Yeah. We ask people in our mastermind group all the time. You know, hey, where'd you get that? How'd you get the price for that? Oh, well, that's what the place down the street charges. And then we always like, well, how do you know they're making money?

Correct.

And they're like, I don't. Oh, okay, that's not good.

Now, that's a great observation, Pam, that you just made, because, you know, the whole purpose of the analogy was just to show how do you run, you know, without looking, but you're exactly right. People tend to do what other people tend to do. They tend to do what they see. You know, I hate to say we're a culture of lemmings, but we are a little bit. You know, we do it. So that was excellent.

Yeah, it was a crazy exercise. And I was going to tell you this morning, but I thought I'd share for the podcast the story because I was like, yeah, I was freaking out. I thought I had it. Okay. I was like, you know, I drive there every day, right? I know the road. I know the exit to take. I don't have to get on my GPS or nothing like that. I know the road. I know where to go. But, boy, I tell you. And the thing actually freaked me out was gas, because I know I was getting low and I had. I still had a quarter of a tank when I finally took the towel down. But I tell you, though, the panic of, like running out of gas on the highway and then having to be late for class and then being. Oh, it just like it started snowballing everything because then I know we had a mastermind call. It's like, if I'm late for class and I can't go to class, oh my God, then I gotta go get. It just started like this whole spiral of anxiety and I didn't like it, like it at all.

Absolutely.

So I wanted to have Darren come on today. And for those listening to the podcast, we'll try to describe this as much as possible. If you're watching the YouTube video, you'll have the visual representation of it. But the things we look at in our restaurants, Simplified Mastermind group is we look at, there's 12 KPIs we look at. The thing we say all the time is not all KPIs are created equal. What I want Darren to do is I want Darren to explain there's what we call linear KPIs and multiplicative KPIs. I'm going to be honest, I didn't know what the word multiplicative was until I met Darren.

That's fine. Thank you. One thing I want to do is, and I would not have done this if it wasn't for one of our mastermind calls this morning. One thing I didn't realize is Donald's been talking about the fact that we're going to talk about KPIs today. I just want to make sure everybody knows what a KPI is. This happened on the call this morning. We were talking about KPIs and one of the members said, hey, what's a KPI? They put in a chat, KPI question mark, what is that? And we made the assumption, blind spot on my part and Donald's part and Bama's part, that everybody knew what a KPI is. I don't want to make that mistake again. So just basically a KPI, it stands for key performance indicator. Okay. And what this is is it's a way to measure a specific part of your business. Right? So this could be a process within your business. It could be just a component of your business, something that's integral to profitability or performance or customer service. And it gives us a way to measure it and see how it's doing so that, you know, with the intent on improving it, that that's what KPI is. It's not the textbook definition, but it comes probably pretty close.

Yeah, we always, if you can't. It is. A KPI to us is something that you need to measure and manage to improve. That's what we look at, Right?

Yeah. So, so we relate it to the dashboard, because think of, like, your gas gauge as a KPI. It's measuring how much gas is in your car. Your speedometer is a KPI. It's measuring how fast you're going to. And now your business is going to have certain KPIs in them, one of them being, like Pram mentioned yesterday, profitability. Right. That's an actual KPI that's affected by many other KPIs, which you're going to see right here. So do you want me to jump right into this, Donald?

Yeah, sure. So we're going to do, like, a little case study. And Darren always calls this a really good case study.

Yeah. So this is a case study of your average restaurant in the United States. So the numbers that we're going to use here, this is. If you looked at all the restaurants in the United States, this probably is representative of an average restaurant. And we're going to talk about the difference between a linear KPI and a multiplicative KPI. Right. So let's. Let's look at the restaurant first. Here are the baseline numbers, because I know some of you are just listening to this on the podcast, so I'll just say everything, but basically, this restaurant does 100 guests per day. They are open five days per week, and their GCA, which stands for guest check average, is $35. This means they're going to do $3,500 a day in sales. They're going to average $70,000 a month in sales, or $840,000 a year. Right. So that's your average restaurant. Their food cost, if we say they're doing a good job and they have a 30% food cost, they're going to spend $252,000 a year in food. They're going to keep their Labor Right. At 30%. So they're going to spend another $252,000 in labor costs, and then their fixed expenses are running about 36%, or $302,400. This leaves them a 4% profit margin, or they're making their clearing, when it's all said and done, $33,600. Now, where we come up with these numbers again, this is the average restaurant and. And the average restaurant. And Donald could back this up. He's been working with restaurants not only in this country, but around the world for many Many years. But in the United States, I think we're right between 3 and 5%. Is that right, Donald?

Yep. Exactly. 5% is the national average, actually, in the restaurant in the United States especially.

Okay, good. So our numbers are not often. They're not far off. Okay, good. So now this owner, he's like, he's sick of living in the valley of mediocrity.

Ballet mediocrity.

He's gonna climb Mount Everest. So what do you do? You call a Sherpa. Right? And a Sherpa is like a consultant that gets you up Mount Everest. Well, this is. This restaurant guy's gonna call his Sherpa, and he's gonna call a consultant and say, hey, how do we improve our restaurant? What should we do here? So consultant A is pretty good. He's got a good reputation in our industry, and he's known to get results. And he says here, consultant A suggests we should create an advertising campaign, and that'll increase the effectiveness of our image. We'll up our image. Our goal will be increasing our guest count by 20%. So we're going to get 20% more customers, increase our guest count. And if we do this and this all works, these are the projected results.

In which there are a lot of consultants out there today. And we see these ads all the time. Darren and I and Pam, we see these ads all over Facebook, all over Instagram. We will drive more people to your restaurant.

Correct.

More guests.

And so these results are actually assuming that they were successful in that. That they actually do get 20% more people in the door.

Yes, correct. We're making an assumption that they're going to succeed 100% on their protections. So thank you for that. That's very important. Okay, so what we're going to do is we're going to put this plan together and we're going to up our guest count from 100, from 100 guests per day to now 120 guests per day. We're still going to remain open five days a week. We're still going to have a $35 guest check average. Now our sales, though, are going to jump to $4,200 a day in sales. Okay, so that's really good.

That's exciting.

We're now going to make $84,000 a month.

Oh, my God. That's even more exciting.

That's right. And our annual income, we broke that ceiling of that million dollar ceiling, and we are now doing a million dollars and 8,000. So 1 million, $8,000 in sales. Right. There's What Donald calls your vanity metric. Hey, I did a million dollars in sales last year, right?

Tell all my friends at the country club.

We're still going to maintain our 30% food cost. So we. So we now are $302,400 in food costs. Our labor costs, we're going to hold right at 30%. So that's another 302,000. And our fixed expenses didn't change. So our fixed expenses are still $302,400, but now they only represent 30% of the total. So we actually did better. We had to put some money into advertising. So we have a $6,000 billboard, right? So that's $500 a month. That's the average price of a billboard. We have one for our restaurant. That's what we pay. And we're going to put an advertising campaign together, spend another $500 a month in advertising. So that's another $6,000. When we add all that up, we're going to increase our profit. This consultant actually doubled our profit, okay? So we went from a 4% profit. We're now at an 8.8% profit. So our profit jumped from 33,000 to now $88,800. Now, one thing I. Not bad at all. Now one thing I did forget to put in this slide when I put this together was the cost of the consultant. Maybe the consultant came in for a day and came up with this whole idea. So let's, you know, pretend there's a $2,000 fee in there somewhere, but you're still at about an 8% profit. You know, you'd be at 86,000 from 33,000. I would say he did his job. He did a good job.

He doubled. He doubled your profits.

Yeah. So. So there's nothing wrong. Consultant A is good. Okay? Now, one thing I want to talk to you about is guests per day is what we call a linear KPI. And what that means is if we were able to graph the amount of effectiveness of this program, this would be a straight line, okay? It would be a linear line. And basically what we're saying is more people equal more money. Okay? If we're making a dollar profit per person, 100 people, $100 profit. 120 people, $120 profit. So it's just a linear KPI. Okay? So we could go with that plan, or we could suggest. Let's get a second opinion, right? There's like kind of, you know, when you go to a doctor and he tells you something and second opinion. So we're going to get a second opinion. We're going to call consultant B. So that'll be consultant Burns. Right. We'll make B for Burns and. And consultant B. So Donald says, no, that's a good idea. Well, Consultant A said is good, but instead I think we should do some internal training with the staff. Okay. And what we'll do is we'll get them better educated on the menu. We'll teach them how to upsell sides better, upsell desserts better. We'll educate them on the wine pairing. And our goal will be to increase the guest check average by 20%. So we'll leave the guest count alone. But let's go for guest check average and see if we could just be better at selling what we already have here in the restaurant. Okay, Sounds like it sounds like a plan. What do you project for this, Donald? And he says, well, if we do that, we're not going to increase our guest count. So we're still only at 100 guests per day. Okay. We're still going to be open five days a week. But now our guest check average is going to jump from $35 a guest to $42 a guest. So even though we're only dealing with 100 people, they're spending just a little bit more money on average. Okay. For sales, that's going to give us $4,200 a day in sales. It's going to give us $84,000 a month in sales. And just like Consultant A, we broke the million dollar ceiling. Okay. So we're making $1,008,000 a year in sales. Okay, let's look at our expenses. Our food cost stays at 30%. So we have our $302,400 in food costs. But now our labor costs drop because we really. We're not servicing any more customers. So we really don't need any more labor involved in this. So our labor cost stays the same at 252,000 or drops to 25%. So that's a big advantage over consultant A. Our fixed expenses stay fixed at 302,000, representing now 30% of the total. This time we did put a trainer fee in there for $2,000 for Donald to come in for a day and do all this training with the staff. How do we do for profit in the end? Wow. When we add these numbers up, our profit is now $149,000. 149,200. Or now we are at a 14.8% profit. Okay. So consultant A doubled our profits from 4 to 8%. Consultant B more than tripled. Almost quadrupled our profits. Pretty close to quadrupling them. Same plan almost. You know, just a little different way to look at it. But this is the difference between a linear KPI and a multiplicative KPI. Guest check average is a multiplicative KPI, because what it does is it's multiplying the cost or the effectiveness on every single ticket that comes in. So the effectiveness is much greater. And which one would you go with? Pam, what do you think? What should we go with in a restaurant here?

I mean, this is pretty obvious. Consultant B gave you the better, the better deal here. And also, I think it's worth pointing out, too, that with consultant A, you brought in 20 more guests per day, which means that's 20 more people per day or 100 more people per week that you had to serve, that you had to get the meal right for, that you had to staff your restaurant for. So that was more work to get 120 guests per day and less increase in your profits.

Exactly. If you look at it, you know, what Pam is saying is the increased guest count strains the entire operation because it's 20 more people that have to be seated by the host. It's 20 more people that have to be served by servers. It's 20 more meals that have to be cooked in the kitchen. So the whole restaurant feels the increased stress of the. Of that increased guest count. So you're absolutely right with that.

Yeah. And we're also giving that owner a lot of credit to say you can do an extra 20 guests per day with no decrease in your guest check average. That's assuming that you haven't. Your service hasn't suffered at all. So people are still getting the same experience, and the servers are able to get the same guest check average. And I know, we were just talking about this recently, if you want to elaborate on. On the likelihood of that happening. Darren.

Absolutely. He knows what Pam is talking about. And this just happened literally like a week ago, or, you know, just a little over a week ago. We were. We were in a restaurant. And, you know, to an owner, when I say we were in our restaurant, they're like, well, of course you're in our restaurant. You own the restaurant. But one thing you need to realize is we run our business like a business, not like a restaurant. So I'm not here all the time. As a matter of fact, I'm here a very limited amount of time. We spend maybe a week to two weeks a month at most, in our restaurant. Other Than that we're traveling. We're, you know, either in Florida or somewhere in the country traveling. We're not tied to our restaurant. When I'm here, I'm not working in my restaurant. I'm just observing the restaurant. Even if one of the staff members comes up to me and says, you know, how do I do this? How do I do that? What do I tell them?

I don't work here. What are you asking me for? I don't work here.

I tell them. I say, look, I'm just a hangaround. Don't pay attention to me. I'm just here. That's it. Because we run our business like we run a restaurant, like a business. But one thing I noticed was I didn't see pre busing taking place fast enough. I didn't feel our guests were getting what we call the Nona's experience. The name of my restaurant is called Nona's kitchen. And they weren't getting that full experience that I look for or that we look for. So I said to the manager who runs the restaurant for us when we're not here, I said to her, I said, brooke, let's put some extra staff on. As a matter of fact, double the staff. She. And she looked at me like I was crazy. She goes, what? Double the staff? I said, yeah, I'll take the hit on payroll. I said, I just want to see what happens. I want to see the effectiveness on. If I gave them half the tables to service, if we could do a better job, and then we could always ramp it back up again. But I need to know, number one, that my guests are getting the experience we want. So she was like, okay, I'll do it. So the following weekend, we doubled the staff. So now everyone went from, let's say, just using round numbers. Instead of doing eight tables, they had four tables. Okay? Our guest check average increased from an average of, like, $28 to an average of $34 or $35. Almost $6 a table or $6 a guest. Guest check average. Because now they were. They had so much time on their hands. They were selling the wine better. They were pairing it better with the meals. They had more time to spend at the table. They were more attentive. They were better at upselling desserts. They were better at, you know, adding meatballs to the pannella vodka or something like that. The guest check average went through the roof, so outweighed the additional payroll. And not only that, improved our experience to the customer tenfold. It was. It was so much better. So much better.

You know, you've actually experienced that where you've did like record number nights. And I remember you had a front of house manager Sam, right?

Yes.

Tell us kind of that experience you had.

Yeah, well, Sam, he was great. Sam worked with us from when his kitchen was just an idea. And he stayed with us right up until he went away to college to nursing school and just couldn't juggle the two anymore. Had to focus all his efforts on school. So we love Sam and he's great. And what happened one night though is we average about 180 to 185 people a night. Let's say 175, 185. And that's kind of our sweet spot when we do that. The fulfillment times are right, the guest check averages are right. Everything's right, Right, Right. Well, one night it was just really busy. It was a busy summer night. And he came to me all excited. We had done 225 people. And he goes, look at this. We broke 200 is the highest record we've ever had. We broke 200 a couple times, but 225, we never served that many people before. And he was so happy and he was so excited until I showed him the numbers. And what I showed him was that by doing 225 people, our fulfillment times increased, our discounts and comps increased because there were some people that were unhappy because time was a little higher. The guest check average dropped because instead of spending the time to really be with the customers at the table, now we're kind of just rushing to get food out. Just get the food out, get the table burned. And I said to him, I go, congratulations, we did another 40 extra people today. We strained our business, we strained our kitchen, and we actually made less profit than had we done 185 people. So please, let's not ever do this again. 175 to 185 is our sweet spot. More people do not equal more money. Right. And this is another KPI, right? So if we're talking about KPIs, there's a KPI called capacity, right? What is your capacity? But what is your ideal capacity? Is that something you've looked at in a restaurant? Do you equate being busier with making more money? Or have you really taken the time to say, how much profit do I get when I do 150 customers versus 200 customers versus 250 customers? Right. What is that place where I'm. I'm optimizing My profitability for my restaurant.

That's a huge question that people don't ask. And, you know, and you're smart enough, Darren, where you actually start asking that question. And now you have the formula, and now you guys know.

Yes, absolutely. So we want to cap it at a certain point. We don't want more customers. We love all our customers. We love all our guests. But thanks for thinking of us. Maybe make a reservation for Wednesday night when we're not so busy. There you go.

I wanted to bring up this slide because when we talk about KPIs and talk about ease, and one of the things that I was really big on is when I first started talking to Darren about this KPI dashboard and this KPI software that he uses, I was like, you know, this. This is great. But the thing I know about working with restaurants for over 40 years is that if it's not simple, they won't use it.

No, it won't.

All right. And then Darren gave me, like, a kind of a background. He goes, and here's the story he kind of told me. He's like, you know, you see your car dashboard like this, right? And I said, yeah. He said, do you know it really looks like this? I'm like, what?

It's really the truth. You know, if you're just listening to this on the podcast, Donald was showing a car dashboard, and now he's showing, really, the computer language called ASC2 or ASC.

I could not read that to save my life. I don't know what. What's the. I don't know what the temperature, what in that code right there. I would. I would be totally lost. I would not know what my speed is, what my tire pressure is. I wouldn't know anything.

You just have digital data being sent to your dashboard, and your dashboard's taking it all apart, and. And it's reading all this. All this data that's coming in and saying, oh, this is the speedometer, and he's going 60 miles an hour. Oh, and this is the fuel gauge. And he's going, you know, this is how much gas he has in the car. But if we looked at it the other way, it wouldn't make any sense to us, right? And this is what. You know, a lot of times people open a restaurant, and one of the first things we choose, one of the first tools we choose is our POS system, right? And we say to the, oh, can I get reports out of my positive. Well, of course you can. You know, we. We give you all that information that's what the POS salesman will say to you. Oh, yeah, it's all in there.

And it is. But it is all over the place in there.

Yes. They're not lying to you. They're right. So you could spend all your time, you know, printing out these dashboards like this, or printing out these reports, and you could look for the data, you can mine for the data, but you're not going to find it very easily. Right. Or we could take all that data and we could just put it on a nice beautiful dashboard for you that you could just. You could look down at that dashboard and drive your restaurant right to Orange Theory without any problem. Without any problems at all.

And what we're looking at right now is we're looking at a picture of the KPI, the KPI Mastery Dashboard, which is, I mean, I'm telling you from a restaurant standpoint, being a restaurant owner and operator in myself in the past, if I had this back when I had my restaurants, I could have probably made so much more money. And I made pretty good money. But I'm telling you, this would have made my life so easy. And again, what we try to do is we try to create new habits. So the habit we teach in our mastermind group is this, that you have someone on your team, not necessarily you, someone on your team enters the data every night and it's like what, eight key numbers have to put in every night?

Yeah, it's just quick. You know, we were on a call once, we were on a mastermind call, and Brooke was on. And Brooke, like I said, she runs our restaurant, right? She runs the restaurant for us. And Donald was talking about KPIs and someone said, you know, well, how hard is it? How much time do I have to spend? And Brooke, you know, just said, well, I just do it over a cup of coffee. It takes me about like three or four minutes and it's no big deal. I make my coffee, I open up the laptop and I just entering the numbers and literally I couldn't have asked for a better testimony than that. And that was not prearranged. That was just telling the truth. And that's all it does take. It takes three or four minutes. You enter in the information and then you can see exactly, exactly how your restaurant is performing. You know, if you want to relate it to the car again, how much gas, car, how fast am I going, what's the temperature? Same thing here. Like, in a second, you can see exactly the performance of your restaurant and, and know what do I need to do to fix this. Right?

And once you have this, too. We just heard this from, from someone the other day on one of our calls. It's like Donald tried to drive without his dashboard the other day and he ripped the towel off like, no, I need to know. I need my dashboard. That's what it's there for. When a restaurant owner gets used to having this, then they can't imagine not having it. They can't imagine what they did before it. Pretty amazing tool.

Yeah. And remember when you change habits, change your restaurant.

Exactly. You know, you know, let me just work off what Pam just said for a second, okay? You don't know how good it could be. Okay? So if, if you're, you know, my age, let's say, or if you're even 40 and above, let's say there was a time when you learned how to drive. There were no backup cameras, right? What did you do? You put it in reverse and you looked in the mirror, right? Or you turned your head around and you back your car up. Now you get in a car, you put in reverse, you have this big giant screen that projects your car behind you and it has lines and it says if you turn your wheel this way, you're gonna hit the telephone pole. If you hit. You know, it guides you so perfectly. Nowadays, people who are used to those backup cameras, if it stops working, if it malfunct, they don't even know how to look in their mirror that they think they can't even back their car up anymore because they've grown accustomed to it. But back then, they didn't know how good it could be. Right? Well, that's how this is. If you're running your restaurant without looking at KPIs, you think that's the norm for you, right? And you're like, well, I'm running my restaurant. It's okay. You don't realize how good it could be, Right. It's kind of like the slide two slides ago where we showed you were making $33,000 a year in profit, not realizing you could have been making $150,000 a year in profit, right? And all it took was a one day visit from a consultant for two grand. And you spent 2,000 and now you made what, 120 extra? I'll take that deal all day. I'll give Donald 2000, he gives me back 120,000. All day.

Yeah. I spent 90 minutes with one of our Mastermind members. We went over, now this is a little more advanced stuff. We went over some deep menu engineering But I showed him, just by doing some simple changes on his menu and some simple menu engineering in a 90 minute call, increased his profit 7%, which was $150,000 in his pocket for 90 minutes of work.

Exactly. If I want to get in shape, should I just go buy a set of weights or should I go to a gym and have someone instruct me on what exercises I should do?

Right.

I'm a pilot. Should I have gone to flight school and learned how to fly or should I just jump in a plane and I'll figure it out in the air?

And actually, I want to elaborate on the reverse camera analogy because I just had to drive a vehicle with no reverse camera the other day. I had to back it out of my garage. And I grew up with no reverse camera. I'm old enough to have done that. And I know how to use my mirrors. But there's a blind spot right behind the car that no mirror can show you. And I've got three kids and guaranteed I'm going to run over a bike or a scooter or something if I can't see that blind spot. And so I had to get the car out of gear, get out of my vehicle and go back and look at it, make sure that there's nothing behind me. And then I got back in and then I felt comfortable backing up. You're not even aware sometimes of the blind spots until you get used to uncovering them, being able to see it. And it's the same thing with having a dashboard like this. You can run your restaurant, but it'll be inefficient unless you're, you know, you know exactly what direction you need to go and which KPI you need to focus on and how.

Exactly.

Absolutely. Thank you.

And so, and then the third thing you must do to grow your profits is you must be consistent because everything tends, in the universe tends to go to entropy, everything tends to disorder. And Pamela is going to elaborate a little bit that she has this great kind of this psychological term she likes that she tells our mastermind group. So, Pam, I want you to take it over from here.

Yeah. So I have a statistics background that also kind of comes from psychology, but there's something called regression to the mean when you talk about statistics. So let me explain this for a couple minutes here. So if I were to take, let's say I had 100 people and I told them to flip a coin 100 times and most people are going to get 50, 50 heads and tails are close to it, but there's going to be a few people that get like 90 times out of the hundred, they're going to get heads or tails. One of the two. They're outliers, right? They're not the norm. They're not average.

If I.

But so I could say those people are outside of average. They're either really good or really bad if I have heads are good, for example. But if I were to repeat that, those outliers are going to be closer to the mean the next time around. It's just because the first time it was entirely due to chance that they were outliers. And restaurants, we've already talked about the fact that the majority of them have something around 3 to 5% profits. That's average. So there's a reason it's like every restaurant is kind of being pulled to that average. It's because the majority of people that you hire are going to have some bad habits. The majority of, you know, food gets put out unless there's really, really clear systems in place. Sometimes mistakes are going to happen. And there's just things that happen that restaurants will go to that average unless there's a leader who's consistently pushing them to be an outlier and consistently making it so that the restaurant's performance is not due to chance. Because if it's left to chance, it's going to go to the. It's going to regress to the mean. It's going to become an average restaurant. And so your challenge as a restaurant owner is to make sure that nothing's left to chance in terms of, you know, your, your, your restaurant being great. So there's a few things that we can talk about, and I want Donald and Darren to weigh in on that. But things like, is your food good? How do you make sure that that's not left to chance? How do you put the systems and the standards in place so that there's consistency in every single meal that goes out is a great meal. And it's not just, oh, we had a good cook on that, or he did a good job that time, but sometimes. So let's talk about some more examples like that.

I could give you an example from last night, Pam, of exactly what you're talking about. So I had some friends come down. They're from Washington, Washington state. And they stayed with us for about four days. It was him, his wife and two of their three children. And they spent the day. They went down to Mount Rushmore, you know, visited some of the sites down in that area in Custer area. And now they Came to the restaurant at night for dinner, and beautiful. So we're going to sit down, have dinner together. So I don't eat dinner in my restaurant a whole lot, you know, not as a customer. You know, yes, I eat here, but I don't get the full experience. So now that I'm with them, though, I want the full experience. So we have this server, and she's a very good server, okay? And in my restaurant, we are definitely not the average restaurant, okay? I push for training. I push for very high standards. I push for very high profitability in our restaurant, and we achieve all these goals, okay? Now, we change our menu quarterly, right? So every season, seasonally, we change it. So it's April 6th or 7th today. I don't know what the date is here, but we just changed the menu a week ago. So my server comes over to the table, and I love her.

She.

She's a great, great server. And said. She said, what are you having? And I said, well, tell Chris, you know, it's me. And Chris will make me something, you know, different. And whatever he recommends, I'll have. And she said, would you like super salad or an appetizer? And I said, yeah, you know, I said, what's the soup of the day? And she kind of looked at me for a second, and she goes, well, she goes, the tomato bisque is on the menu. Now, I didn't show her the menu, but, no, the tomato bisque isn't on the menu. We took the men. We took the tomato bisque off the menu just a week ago, right? So I said, do me a favor. Go ask Chris if we have the tomato bisque, and then ask him what the soup of the day is. So sure enough, she realized that she had made a mistake. And there was, like, probably three mistakes that I picked up being a customer my own restaurant. So naturally. Brooke, could you come here for a second? I said, did you train all the servers on the new menu? She said, yes, you have some more training to do. I said, they clearly didn't absorb it. Maybe you really didn't train them on the menu. Maybe you kind of mentioned the new menu to them. Right? We need to start giving them pop quizzes every day. So is this a really big deal? No, it's not. It's not a big deal at all. But it's exactly what Pam was saying is that I would never tolerate a server that doesn't know the menu. But because, like, a week went by and nobody confirmed the testing regression to the mean, all of a sudden, she doesn't know what's on the menu. All of a sudden she doesn't know we took tomato biscuit off the menu. And if I didn't pick that up and say something, guess what? There's probably three more things that she doesn't know about the menu that I didn't even realize right now. So it was a perfect example of what you were saying. Just happens to be last night.

Yeah, that is a perfect example. So in an average restaurant, there's going to be servers that don't know the menu very well. In an average restaurant there might be. And we've talked about how lights could be too dim or not dim enough, depending on the time of day. They don't get changed, the music might be too loud. It's not creating the right atmosphere. If your atmosphere in your restaurant is due to chance, like who happens to be working that day and whether or not they create the atmosphere, then you're going to regress to the mean.

Yeah, I can give you an example. Like, so a lot of times I'll go out, Mastermind clients will have me come out and do like a site visit with their restaurants. So last week I was out at a Mastermind members restaurant. And they have quite a few restaurants. And the thing was, at the one restaurant which was their, you know, their prime location, their kind of home base, they were, they were very specific about the brand, especially about the music. It was, you know, it's a kind of a Hispanic kind of theme restaurant. They had a lot of country western music. You know, it was really. I really felt like the vibe was there. But then when I went to other locations, the music was really, really radically different. One place had like some 90s rock. One place had like some 80s stuff like Pat Benatar, which. I like Pat Benatar, but you could. It was totally disconnected with the brand.

Yeah.

Which, you know, and it really kind of. And I said that, I said to the owner, I said, you know, this. It really gives me mixed signals when I come out here and I see this. And then another thing was, you know, they had a new location to open up and the menu. The general manager out there decided he wanted to do a different menu. So he actually broke free and just like did this like really cheap, cheesy looking printed menu off the computer. It did not look like the brand at all. It was, I mean, horrible. I mean, totally horrible.

Often is left to chance with restaurants. And that's marketing. There's a lot of times when restaurant owners or managers, whoever's in Charge of the marketing, don't exactly know what to do and they're not tracking things to see what's being successful. So a lot of times a restaurant's marketing strategy is not much different than throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, then throwing different spaghetti at the wall the next week, not paying attention to what stuck last week. So it really is left to chance the marketing strategy. Unless you have some consistency and you're tracking what's working for your restaurant, the.

More you leave to chance, the more you open yourself up for issues.

Absolutely.

Definitely. Definitely. Well, she got Pam.

Well, well, I mean, this is Donald, this is your stuff. But menu design is another one. If you are not. If you don't have a strategy behind menu design and you use that same strategy with each time that you redesign your menu, that's another one.

I could talk for days about menu design and I say it every time I go to a restaurant. Most restaurants have, they're totally missing the point on their menus. Their menus are totally, totally designed. Wrong.

One thing I could say is if you're on this call and you're a restaurant owner, if you ever get the chance to go have a meal with Donald, it's experience. He is critiquing everything. Yeah, menu was a big thing.

So when I first went to meet with Tara, Darren took me around to all the restaurants in his market. Right. So we want, you know, and I always said, let's go to those restaurants, your market, so I can understand what your competition is. And I'm number one. I was like, after eating at four of them, I was like, you guys are gonna do so great because the bar is so low in your market. It's like, this is like, it's like low hanging fruit. But we went to one restaurant in particular that was pretty well known and the first thing they did, they sat us down, they handed the menu and there's a huge Sharpie cross out across the menu. I was like, oh my God, that's like menu Design. No, no, 101. Don't Sharpie out your menu. You know, I mean, just come on, man, just print new menus. I mean, it's like number one thing, number two is don't print off cheesy looking menus off your computer when you have a, like that client in, in, in the Mastermind group that I went to, they have a beautifully designed menu, very brand driven, very, very beautiful, beautiful fonts, beautiful papers, beautiful layout and everything. But this guy just thought it would be better if you print off Something off his computer in the office. And I was like, you gotta be kidding me.

Yeah, you don't want to do that.

No, don't do that. Please don't do that.

No.

But, and I can tell you also, just because of the way our brains work, if you're able to pretty consistently create a really good experience at your restaurant, if that's the customer's first experience, that's the one that they're going to hold on to. So the more you can be consistent with that, then they're going to be forgiving. When they come back the next time and something's not quite right, they'll go, oh, you guys do a great job. It's totally fine this time. But if you, if they have a bad experience when they come to your restaurant for the first time, that's what they're going to be expecting from that point on. So again, the more consistent you can be and leave less to chance, the more likely you're going to be able to handle those things that when they don't go well.

Exactly.

Not lose your customer base.

Yeah. And for anyone listening on the call today or watching on the YouTube channel, if you want to, you know, if you want to jump in, if you're ready to jump in and you want to start improving your restaurant right away. And again, not waiting till, you know, I'm gonna start next week, don't wait, jump in. We have a free 30 day trial of our mastermind group. All you gotta do is just go and sign up for it. It's at www.restaurantsssimplified.com. get started. We have a foundations program. We'll teach you all the basics. I'll take you through step by step, give you the foundational core that you need, and then from there you basically graduate into our advanced mastermind program. So that's where the real fun happens, right?

Absolutely. And it's, it's, you know, you have nothing to lose by trying. Right. 30 days, no charge. Right. Take the information for 30 days if you want.

And we actually, yeah, we actually have a live workshop coming up at the end of April, April 25, 26, in Scottsdale that we're doing this, this time in Scottsdale in June. We might be doing it somewhere else. We're deciding where we want to go for June, where we want, what part of the country we want to be in for weather. But we have one seat left. It's a free workshop. Basically all you have to do is just. You have to email me. Donaldrestaurantcoach.com. i'll send you an application. We'll review your application if you qualify. The seats yours. I got one seat left. It's a very small called restaurant owner boot camp. I'm going to take you through the eight driving force of restaurant success. And the team's going to be there, Darren's going to be there, Pamela's going to be there. You get to see and actually, you'll get to meet some of the actual members of our mastermind group because a lot of them are coming to it also. Yes. Yeah.

There's one big advantage to being part. Well, there's a lot of big advantages to being part of a group like that. But having accountability to a group of people, not just coaches or consultants, but the people in the group with you, that really, really helps people, that accountability factor and being able to say, here's what I've been doing, here's if it works, and I'm going to keep doing that and make sure people are checking in with me, that helps that regression to the mean a lot. So all these people are pushing to be an outlier, pushing to be one of those great restaurants and they can help each other.

Yeah. And one of the things too is you might have the plan or you might see the path, but you might be working on the wrong things in the wrong order. Like, we had some people on our mastermind call today, like asking about, you know, special event and catering menus, like, all right, well, have you priced out, cost out your regular menu yet? No, not yet. Well, let's do that first before we get into some other stuff, you know.

Yeah. And you don't realize that every KPI is having an effect in another area of your business.

That's true.

We have one restaurant that we work with that wanted to get more production out of. It's a pizza place wants to get more production out. So someone said you need to put in an oven that would cook more pizza quicker. Right. You get more production on the pizza. So he puts in the oven only to find out that the person making the dough can't keep up with the output of the oven now. So now he has to put on another person, two people to supply the oven because the oven puts out so much pizza.

Yep.

Well, now it turns out that the freezer isn't big enough to store the dough, to make the dough to supply. So the new oven now cost him a new employee. Now he needs a new freezer. And now he's working on the supply of the dough to the freezer. Not Realizing all this was going to take place, he's like, I just wanted an oven that would put out more. Now I'm remodeling my whole kitchen. Like, I didn't know about all this. Right. So you don't realize. And that's how KPIs are. Right. You look at one realizing it's being affected either positively or adversely by other KPIs.

Exactly. Exactly. Well, you know what I want to say thanks for joining us today on this one. We got one more part of this series, this three part series and we're going to, we're going to hit that tomorrow. Should we tease out what we're going to do tomorrow or are we going to hold it as a secret?

No, you can tease it out.

Tease it out tomorrow.

Yeah. Because I'm not even sure what it is. So you're teasing it to me.

Well, tomorrow we're gonna actually, we're gonna pull it all together and we're gonna give you, you know, today we told you so. Yesterday we talked about mindset. We kind of gave you a high arcing view of what a mastermind group is, the benefits of joining a mastermind group. Today we gave you three exact steps you need to take. Tomorrow we're actually going to give you, we're going to actually walk you through the roadmap that we use with our mastermind group. And we're going to use the analogy of kind of like building a house. And we're going to show you exactly why you got to have things in certain orders. If you don't have things in certain orders, it's like if you're building a house and then, you know, Darren's in charge of, you know, the foundation, I'm in charge of the framework, and Pamela in charge of furnishing. Pamela starts bringing sofas and chairs to the, to the empty lot and starts laying them out on the ground. I'm like, pam, what are you doing? Well, I got all the furnishing. I want you. I want to start getting the room arranged. We don't even have. There's no concrete yet, Pam. There's not even any walls or windows yet, Pam.

Well, you know, all that furniture's in.

The way, you know, and now all the furniture's in the way. But, you know, unfortunately, that's how a lot of restaurants get run. They start doing the things they want to do instead of the things they have to do. Yes. And so tomorrow we're going to actually give you the step by step. Today we talked about the three big things which is, you know, mindset, understanding what KPIs make a real impact and also having accountability and understanding what regression to the mean is. Tomorrow we are going to tell, we're going to show you how to build your restaurant just like a house. That's what we're going to share with you tomorrow. And I'm going to, we're going to show you exactly every step you need to take, what order you need to take. And if you do it, and I'm just telling you right now, whether you work with us or not, if you take what we teach you tomorrow and just start doing it, you will have a lot better restaurant by the time you're done.

Absolutely.

That's what we want to talk about. That's what we're talking about tomorrow, the house. Pam's already shopping on Wayfair for furniture already.

You guys need to hurry up. I'm ready to furnish this place.

She's ready. I'm ready. I already got the walls painted. I already got everything like Darren's, like, you know, I haven't decided I even leveled the ground yet to pour concrete.

No. And you know me, my background, I want that, all that in place and on paper before we start anything.

It's got to be down on paper, Pam.

No couches yet.

And, and also too, and tomorrow when I use the house analogy, I'm gonna, we're gonna take you through kind of step by step how Darren set up Nona's kitchen from the beginning to where he just celebrated his one year anniversary. And the man is spending most of his time at his second home down in Florida with his grandkids and with his adult children doing what he wants to do. He's not chained to his restaurant, but he's still enjoying high profits. He still has a valuable restaurant. It's still a passion project of his wife. But they still are enjoying their life. And we're going to show you exactly because Darren did a lot of the things that we're going to talk about in the house. He did those things step by step before he even met me. And that's one of the things that impressed me is that he had a lot of that foundational stuff already down. He had the concrete laid and leveled before he talked to me. Yes. Which made my job easier to help him build up on top of it. So we're hit all that tomorrow. So tune in for our next episode and we're going to give you the step by step how your restaurant is like building a house.

I look forward to it. Thanks so much, Donald, for having us today.

Yeah, thanks, Donald.

Yeah. And if you're tuning in, thank you so much for listening. We appreciate it. Thanks for listening to the Restaurant Coach Podcast with Donald Burns. Tune in next time as we serve.

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