Grow Your Profits 15 Percent in 90 Days

Foreign. Hey, good morning. Good morning, Restaurant Coach Nation. I hope everyone's having a fantastic day. Welcome to the party. As they say. This is our normal Friday get together. Talk about some tools, techniques, some ideas, some ways that you can break free from your restaurant running you. So a lot of people have asked me, hey, Restaurant Coach Nation, how did this all come about? Well, it started years ago when I was interviewed by Forbes magazine. One of the reporters wanted to ask me some questions about restaurants. And I happened to say, you know what he asked? And the question was, he asked me was, do you think there's too many restaurants? And I said, sadly, you know, I don't think there's too many restaurants. I think there's too many average restaurants. I think we've become a society that's been addicted to mediocrity. So that's why I started the Restaurant Codes Nation. It's a free Facebook group where we get together and we learn about ways to break free from our restaurants running us, break free from mediocrity. Because we have the motto around here that mediocrity sucks. And my, my kind of mission has always been to help you build your brand, strengthen your team and increase your profits. Also, you might not know this, but we got some really cool things going on in the Restaurant Coach Nation. I also have. Don't know if you know this, but we have a mentor program available too. The mentor program is a great way to, to reach out and find someone. I don't know if you know the story, but when I opened my first restaurant, I knew a lot about running a restaurant. I did not know anything about building a business. I was very fortunate that a local businessman decided to be my mentor and he actually taught me a lot of stuff I teach today. Even the stuff I coach to my high level private coaching members. A lot of the stuff I teach them was the stuff I learned back in the 90s because these are solid business principles that will help you grow your brand. So inside the TRC Nation, we do have a mentor program available. There should be a tab when you go into the members area or when you go to the Facebook page, you can see a thing says mentorship and you can actually reach out and find a mentor. All the mentors in the Restaurant Coach Nation are handpicked by me. I make sure that they are people that I think are going to give good value. And the mentor program is only, I think it's only eight weeks, the mentor program. But you know what? It's a lot better than being stuck where you are. And you'd be really, you'd be shocked how much you can accomplish in eight weeks if you really sit down and dedicate some time to making it happen. So check out the mentorship program inside the TRC Nation. It's a free program again. And then every Friday, as we are right now, we are here inside the TRC Nation for a little bit of live training. I love to do these trainings. I think they're a great way to give you some new tools, some new ideas, and that's what it's all about. Training is, is really about just kind of getting you out of your comfort zone and looking at things in a different way. And today's training is definitely, definitely going to do that. And I got a big promise on here. It's kind of a big sales pitch. Grow your profits. 15 in 90 days. How to stop. How to stop surviving and start thriving. Thriving. I know it's a big, big. A big. A big wish. A big promise. I'm going to show you how to make this happen because I do it all the time with restaurants. So let's start off with a quote, one of my favorite ones. Restaurant success isn't rocket science. It's people science. When you understand the people, science is what really drives the. Drives the ship. You have a totally different restaurant. And if we've never met before, I am Donald Burns. I am the restaurant coach. I am a former, I guess I call it a recovering restaurant owner. I've been a consultant. I've been an executive chef for Wolfgang Puck. I also have three books out. Your Restaurant Sucks, your Restaurant still sucks. And my newest book just came out, your Restaurant Culture sucks. It's the Suck series. It's. I call it the Restaurant your Restaurant Sucks trilogy. It is available on Amazon in paperback, Kindle, and hardcover. And for those of you who prefer to absorb your knowledge through audio, the books are also available on Audible. The third book, your Restaurant Culture Sucks, will be out probably end of the month on Audible. And I'm also a former US Air Force Pararescueman. I was very, very fortunate at a young age to join a elite team in the United States Air Force called Pararescue. We started with quite a few guys. I think 80 something, 86 people tried out for the team. And a year and a half later, there was 11 of us on stage that got the coveted maroon beret. And it is a brotherhood that I am very, very proud to be a part of. Also coming up soon this month, I have my annual and this is my kind of my Mastermind Group annual conference. We have here in Scottsdale, Arizona the Restaurant Success summit. It's three days, eight speakers, 18 workshops. It is just three days of immersive training and it is a great, great time if you've never been. It is October 24th, 25th, 26th here in Scottsdale, Arizona. I do have a few seats left. You can go to restaurantsuccessunit.com to grab a seat if you want to join us. Now, it's not just a three day conference. It also includes a 90 day mastermind program with it. So you actually become part of my elite group coaching program called Restaurant Masterminds. You get a 90 day membership in it. It's included with your Restaurant Success Summit ticket. It is the fastest way to make sure that the stuff you learn at the summit actually gets translated into actionable items that you can actually do. That being said, let's get a little bit more into our training. We also talk a lot about the 3P framework. All my coaching programs. This was actually when I talk about having that business mentor back in the 90s when I had my first restaurant. This is what he taught me. He taught me the value of understanding the 3P framework. And it is always people, product and process. And you have to have them in the right order is where so many people go wrong. They have the combination, but they have them all messed up or they have pieces of the puzzle. They don't have the whole puzzle put together. This is the exact roadmap right here that I teach all my clients. We talk about in the people part, mindset, culture, hiring, in the product part, food cost, menu, marketing and in the process part, it's system, strategy and profitability. And if you want to check out some more stuff about the 3P frame work itself, the 3P framework, go ahead and sign up for my Three Frames to Thrive series. I'm actually, it's a, I think it's almost. It's a little over three hours of free training. You can get. You go to my website, therestaurantcoach.com and grab, grab this training or you can go to threeframestothrive.com and grab the training there as well. Either way, it's free training. It will help you understand exactly why you're where you are and how to get unstuck. It is an amazing, amazing thing. So let's jump into this. How to grow your profits 15% in 90 days, I will tell you now is not as hard as you think. Is not as hard as you think. But I have to give you a fair warning too. Okay? I said it wasn't hard. It doesn't mean it will be easy. There will be some stuff required on your end, some action plans, some things that you have to be accountable for and do. So this is, it's not hard, but it's not going to be super easy too, especially if you haven't done a lot of these things I'm going to be asking you to do today. So the first thing, let's talk about the action plan for this kind of training. It's a three step action plan. If you want, if you have a piece of paper and a pen, you might want to be taking some notes. The replays are only available for members of my mastermind group, for the Restaurant Coach University and for my elite private coaching program, the accelerator program. All right, the accelerator. The restaurant accelerator action plan. Number one, you got to close the gap between theoretical and actual food cost. Number two, use menu engineering to maximize profit. And our, our action plan today is number three, drive traffic with massive marketing. Underline the word massive because I will tell you now, whatever you're marketing, it's probably not the level you should be marketing at. You're dabbling and when you dabble, you get very, very poor results. And then you just throw out that disclaimer to the world, this doesn't work, or this doesn't work. And then you're in trouble because you've already bought into a BS storyline that doesn't work. So action plan, we're going to break them down one by one. So step one, understand the theoretical versus actual gap. And I'm going to take you through a small piece of a workshop I do with my accelerator program. It's called the food cost boot camp. And the Food cost boot camp is a, actually, it's, it's a series of workshops. So it's like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 workshops. Each workshop's about an hour long. We're gonna go today, I'm gonna give you a couple pieces of this food cause boot camp because this is actually where the rubber meets the road and how we start putting some of that profit back in our, in our pocket. Right? We are going to talk today about theoretical food cost. Here's a great quote, hashtag, write this down. Experience without theory is blind, but theory without application is just effing around. Remember that Experience without theory is blind, but theory without actually applying it, you're just, you're just jerking around. You're not really doing anything, anything different. Another Thing you have to remember, and especially goes about numbers. What gets measured, gets managed. What get managed can be improved. I am shocked. I am totally shocked. Every time I go to a conference, every time I speak on stage, I will ask the audience this question. And it doesn't matter if there is a hundred people in a room, 700 people, like when I go to Spain, there's a thousand people in the room. I'll ask everyone the same question. It doesn't matter where I am in the world either. How many people in the audience know the cost of everything on their menu down to the penny? I will only get 1 to 2% will raise their hand. It doesn't matter how big the audience is. I was shocked. Last year I spoke at the Nightclub and Bar Expo, I think I call it a restaurant and bar expo now. And I asked. The room was packed. There had to be over 700 people in the room and only five people raised their hand. And that's, that's sad. That's sad that people don't measure their numbers, don't know their numbers. And I have another saying I use a lot. If you don't know your numbers, you don't know your business. In fact, you don't even really have a business. What you have is a hobby, Very, very expensive hobby. And your spouse is probably very, very upset that you keep doing this hobby and not making a lot of money at it. So let's fix some of that because here's another sad statistic. The average restaurant in the United States makes 5% profit. We're going to use this on our workshop today. I'm going to use this kind of as our starting point. So imagine you have the average restaurant and you're making 5% no matter where you are. Use that as your basis. And as we add on profitability points on these other different phases, see what the potential could be for your restaurant, which could be very, very exciting. But we're going to start today at a base point and I'm going to say we're going to start at 5%. So what exactly is theoretical food cost? Theoretical food cost is what your restaurant cost should be for a given period of time according to current cost of all ingredients, right? So basically, when you do a costing program and you cost out everything on your menu down to the penny, and then you put those things together in like plate recipes, usually you first you do an inventory costing, and then you do bulk recipes, like all the stuff you make in bulk, and then you put together what we call plate recipes or Menu recipes. When you cost out your menu down to the penny, that is called theoretical food cost. Or some people call it perfect world food cost, because it's perfect. It assumes that you don't make mistakes, you don't drop anything on the floor, you don't have any waste, you don't burn anything, which we know doesn't happen. Theoretical to me, and this is the key word, theoretical food cost is potential. This is where your food cost could be. Now, do you ever, ever hit theoretical? It's really, really hard. The only time I've seen restaurants hit or exceed theoretical is during like busy sales periods, like maybe during Christmas and you're doing a lot of holiday parties that use, you know, spin offs off your menu, you might be able to hit theoretical or, and if you do a lot of catering, you might even be able to beat theoretical. But most of the time, just hashtag, write this down. Most of the time your goal is to get within 2% of your theoretical food cost. That's important to know, right? 2% within your theoretical food cost. So now what is actual food cost? Actual food cost, this is how most people think they're doing. Great. Actual food cost is, is basically you take account for all the stuff like, and the easiest way to do it is take all your invoices, you total them up, you divide them by your sales, and that's what we call this actual food cost. I will get someone every week that will call me and say, hey Donald, my food cost is 30. Is that good? And I'll say, I don't know. They go, what do you mean you don't know? Aren't you the restaurant coach? Yes, I am the restaurant coach, but I have to ask you a question. And they'll say, what? I'll say, what's your theoretical food cost? And they'll say, I don't know. And I say, that's the problem. If you had a 30 food cost and you were running a 28, you know, theoretical, that's a pretty good food cost. Then you're 2%. But you know, above theoretical, that's a pretty good food cost. Now if your theoretical is 20%, that's where we got some problems. And that's why using standardized, you know, numbers that you read on the Internet is never a good idea. Because your theoretical for your restaurant is going to be different than other restaurants. You cannot understand how much potential you have until you understand what your theoretical food cost is. Because that leads us to this thing. You want to understand what the variance is. There is always A gap depends on where you, you know, what part of the country you're from and who you're talking to. As far as consultants, they'll say variance, I'll say gap. It's basically, it's the difference between your theoretical and actual food cost. And here's a sad statistic. The average restaurant has a gap or difference between theoretical and actual food cost of 9%. Oh, my God, that's so much money on the table. Now, if you can't match theoretical, that's still 7% of profit. You could be adding to the bottom line just by understanding what your theoretical is and understanding how to work the gap down. So how do we manage that gap? There's a couple different ways. Okay, the main way, I manage the gap. So anyone who has a high food cost problem, especially after we figure out theoretical, and we figure out, okay, our gap between theoretical and actual is 10 points. 10%, that's a lot of money on the table. So how do we manage the gap? This is the tool I use right here. It is called the 40 Thieves of Food cost. It is guaranteed. If you have a food cost problem, I will tell you right now, it is in this list. And I pull this list out just like this, and we go through it like a checklist. Almost like, all right, are we purchasing too much? Do we have a process in place of getting bids on our pricing for stuff? Purchasing too high? Do we have a budget, a purchasing budget? Are we auditing our invoices and payments? How many vendors do we have? I go through this thing. I, item by item, I ask the hard questions, and then we get answers. And then if we don't have a process in place, that goes on the action plan. So, like, if we don't have a. A system for credits on under receiving. All right, that goes in our action plan is that we need to create a system for credits. Hey, we don't have a real. We don't really have a process to measure excessive trim on vegetables and meats. Well, we need. Then that goes on the action plan. We're going to create a process to make sure we have this happening. There's no check on raw yields. All right? We need to put it into our checklist that the chef or the kitchen manager has to go around and start checking on raw yields and make sure we're doing stuff that measures and manages the quantity and quality. This thing will save you. I've been doing this. I've been in the industry 42 years now. I've been restaurant coaching for 13 years, over 2400 restaurants, almost everybody has a food cost problem at first. I will tell you right now, do not think you're unusual. Do not think you know, Donald, you don't understand. Yes, I understand because I've been there myself and I also seen this thousands and thousands of times. It's easy to fix if you have a plan. And I'm going to give you my top reasons for variance. Here's the top reasons that you have a variance between your actual and theoretical food costs. Number one, you don't have an updated or accurate recipe cards. When I go do site visits with my clients, members of my accelerator, private coaching program do, every once in a while they have me come out and do what's known as a site visit where I'll spend four days with them, just observing, working with their team, giving them some one on one, you know, intensive coaching there, hands on. And the number one thing, I'll ask right away as soon as I get there. I have a list of things I asked for. When I come to your restaurant, one of the things I want to see is I want to see your recipe book. It's the first thing I ask for. You'd be shocked how many people do not have a recipe book that's updated or the recipe book is just a hodgepodge of handwritten chicken scratch that you can barely read. People have crossed out this, added this, take away this, increase the numbers. The recipes are probably nothing near what they're supposed to be. And that's number one. Number two, no plate specs or standards. You gotta have specifications. I will go back on the line when I'm doing a site visit and I'll hang out with the kitchen team and I'll see them plating stuff and I'll ask some random questions. Hey, how many ounces of fries are on that plate? I don't know. I just put a handful. All right, well, you know, George the gorilla there has a big hand. That's a lot of french fries. Where, you know, little Tammy has a little bitty hand. She's not putting that many fries on the plate. You want to have standardized plate specs. You want to say like it's 6 ounces of fries, it's 4 ounces of this, it's 2 ounces of that. I was at a place recently and this, the sauce that they do on the sides, the side of sauces, it should be like maybe a two ounce ramekin. They had a four ounce ramekin that they're doing sides of sauce with. I mean, it was. And so much stuff was going in the trash. Talk about waste. Talking about killing your food cost just by doing an easy switch by. Why do you use that ramekin? Oh, that's what we have. Okay, that's a bad excuse. Why don't we go with a better thing, like why don't we get 2 ounce ramekins and then say it's 2 ounces of sauce on the side. That fixed the problem right away. And their food cost started dropping right back down. No, inventory control is another huge thing I see. You got to have inventory control. You got to have an updated order guide. You got to use it, you got to have pars. These are common things that a lot of people think, I don't have to do that. You have to do it if you want to make a lot of money. If you want to be stuck in mediocrity and average, then don't do inventory. Don't have plate specs, don't update your recipe cards, don't. But if you want to really start moving that profit needle up higher and higher, these are the things you must do, not should do, must do. No production or prep control. This is another huge area. You gotta just. You gotta tell people how much to prep people. And don't take this the hard the wrong way. People are creatures of habit. We are. We're creatures of habit. And when you have, you know, someone who's been working for you for a few years and every Monday they come in and they make 5 gallons of salsa every Monday morning, because that's what they've been doing for the last three years. But this last weekend was super slow. And you still have 4 gallons of salsa in the cooler. Now you're sitting on nine gallons of salsa. That's a lot of freaking salsa in the cooler. You got to manage production, too. Got to manage inventory, how much you buy, and you got to manage production how much they prep, because that controls waste overproduction. And waste is something that you probably don't see as a silent killer in your food costing. Because the team's going to hide the mistakes when they're making stuff and they go back into walk in and there's mold on it or it's rotten, they're just going to throw it away and not write it on a waste sheet. Well, that goes back to bad training, too. You got to make sure there's some kind of accountability on waste and use waste logs as a training tool, not as a punishment tool. Another thing I see is no accountability on Portioning again, it goes back to that fry thing. How many ounces of fries on that plate? Now if they do know and they say, well, it's six ounces, that looks a lot more than six ounces, man. You gotta be able to hold them accountable. Give them the tools they need to like maybe use measurement stuff, have scales online, use portion cups, use portion ladles, use scoopers, dishers, whatever you need to do to keep them accountable on portioning and pro and portioning to the right amount according to the plate specs. And then number six and we talked about this a little bit already. No record of waste. Remember, the waste sheets are not a punishment. They are a training tool. And you want to teach your team that. Okay? Gotta teach your team that. Waste logs has helped me understand where the problems are so we can fix the problems. If I don't know about it, I can't fix this. Hashtag, write this down. Awareness precedes choice and choice precedes change. When you're aware of it, then you can make a better choice. But you have to be aware of it first. Okay? You'll see. I see this so many times. People don't have waste logs or they have a waste log and they put up, but no one ever holds anybody accountable and double checks it so they don't get used. Tools are just potential. I could give you every tool you need to run a restaurant. Every download, every template, every checklist, every training manual you can think of. Okay. 390. I have a flash drive I give out to people that come to my restaurant owner bootcamp. It's a flash drive. 390 templates. It will not change your restaurant. Because here's the number one thing I know about people. Remember I said restaurant success isn't rocket science. It's people science. The people science will say that I can give you all these tools but you won't use them. You say you will. That's why having a coach or having a mentor is huge. Because you need to develop new habits. When you develop new habits, then things start changing. Okay. And then last one, of course, no system for accurate recipe costing. There's tons of great programs out there. Some of the ones off the top of my head I can think of and depends on your POS system. When I'm looking for a a recipe costing software, one, I'll give you some of my parameters I look for. One is it should. Should. Doesn't have to, but it should. It would be nice if it integrates with my POS system. Number two I do like it to be mobile compatible so I can use it on a tablet or a phone so my team's not stuck having to go to the office and using a desktop. Right. I like it to be a mobile compatible format. I do like it where it updates, takes my invoices and updates my recipes. Basically just a couple clicks. I love that. If it does kind of integrate where it can send my orders to my vendors, I love that too. But that's not required. The ones out there that a lot of my clients use Extra Chef, because it integrates. A lot of my clients use Toast, so they use Extra Chef. There's Margins Edge, there's Marketman, there's one called Get Me. A lot of my clients use that. There's also another one out there called Get Filet. It's spelled with two L's. Get Filet, F, I, L, L, E, T. And those are some of the best ones out there. They're all great. They all work. I will tell you this, it's almost like the old joke. How many diets does it take to lose weight? 1. The one you stick with. How many food costing software programs do you need? 1. The one you actually decide that you're going to use and commit. And here's what will happen. This happens all the time. Again, this is from 13 years coaching thousands of restaurants. I see where people get hung up. You buy a software program, it's very, very hard. And they're all hard at first, trust me. They're not easy to implement. They're all complex and hard to use. So your team doesn't like it, it's too complicated for them, they push back. But then they go online and they find another one. Hey, I just got a demo of this one. It seems so easy. It's so much easier than the other one. So then you switch to another food costing program and then of course they get into it and that's hard too. So then, oh, they start looking on the Internet again. Oh, wow. You know, I found this other software program. It seems like the easiest of all. I think this will solve all our problems. Yeah, yeah, this is the one I want. So then you make another switch again and now you have a third food costing software program that still doesn't get implemented. And it's this round robin, going, going, going. No one's ever actually implementing the program and you just kind of like stuck on this hamster wheel of never ever getting the thing done. Do not allow your team to dictate. Do your research. Do your due diligence when you pick one, you say, this is the one we're sticking with and that's it. We're not changing gears, we're not changing directions. This is the food costing program we have committed to using and you will use it. Make everyone accountable. Accountability is the biggest thing you can do. Boom, boom, boom. So most restaurants, just by managing that gap, most restaurants I work with can easily find, easily find 5% hidden in the gap between theoretical and actual. That takes our, our kind of, our, our test restaurant from 5%. Now we just add another 5% that now we're at 10 profit. Wow. We're already jumping up as it is. Isn't this great? You can easily gain 5% anywhere. And I've this, I'm not lying to you. 3 to 7% easily. Just by understanding the gap between your theoretical and actual. It is a huge game changer when you actually do the work. Is it easy to do? No. It's a pain in the ass to sit down at the computer and type in recipes and get accurate recipes and update your food costing. It's, it's a pain in the ass, but it's also very, very profitable. So you got to decide what's more important to you. Going through a little discomfort to get the food costing program set up and running right, or stay in mediocrity. I don't know about you, but I'd rather like tough it out, you know, grid it out and make it happen than get stuck with average profits. Let's jump into the next one. Step two, you're gonna use menu engineering to increase profits. Menu engineering. Now this is another part of my food cost boot camp workshops. We do, and I do a really, really kind of extensive one. And I actually. They have the worksheet they use and I take them step by step. We go over their worksheets. It's a really great thing. I'm going to give you the down and dirty kind of bullet points of this thing so you can get going on this because it's really, really critical. What is menu engineering? Menu engineering focuses on two main elements, basically demand or popularity and margin. Food cost. This is where a lot of people go wrong, okay? They look at their product mix report, their PMIX report, and they see, well, I don't sell a lot of that item. I should take off the menu. And I'll say, not so fast. Or they finally do their food costing and they're all excited about their food costing. And then they come to me and go, oh my God, Donald. This, this item on my food, on my menu is a 38 food cost. That's oh my God, I need to take it off. I'll say not so fast. Because it is the juxtapose between price or profitability and cost. Right. Popularity. So it's profitability and popularity really makes me gives a clear picture of whether an item needs to be on the menu. And also, do I need to move it from. Do I. Can I move it around a little bit by manipulating some of the numbers? And this is where it is a huge, huge, huge game changer. Okay, the menu engineering worksheet looks like this. It has multiple tabs. If you'd like a copy of it, just email me, download the restaurantcoach.com you can easily go online, find menu engineering worksheets and you can get a copy of this. There's all over the place. If you're in my restaurant Coach University, there's a. You can download it. It's in the food cost boot camp. If you're a member of the restaurant mastermind group, it's in your toolkit and the accelerator program. You know that it's in your. Your big huge Food Cost Boot Camp workshop series. So that being said, understanding stratification is the biggest thing. Stratification is basically, it's what menu engineering is all about. Stratification looks like this. It is again the study of profitability versus popularity. If an item is highly profitable and very popular, it gets classified as a star. You don't mess with stars, okay? They're stars for a reason. You don't mess with stars. Now, if an item is very popular but it's not very profitable, it's called a plow horse. You also might hear this called a workhorse too. A plow horse or a workhorse. If an item is very, very profitable but not very popular yet, it's called a puzzle. And items that are low profit and low popularity are dogs. I will warn you now done this for thousands of restaurants. A lot of the items you like are going to be dogs because that's just the way it goes. I don't know why, but usually items you like, but your guests don't really like them and they usually don't make you a lot of money. So they're dogs. Here's the rules. Dogs come off the menu and do not get replaced right away. Stars. You don't mess with stars. Items that are plow horses. Now, here's the thing about plow horses. They're already popular. I just need to make them more profitable to make Them a star. So how do I make something that's really popular but does not make me a lot of food cost? But how do I make it more money? There's a couple easy ways to do it. If it's a plow horse, we usually do a couple things. We either look at the portion, we look at the protein, or I also maybe sometimes look at the price. That's the three P's for. If I want to change a plow horse into a star, I look at the portion size. Maybe I can adjust them to portion size. A lot of times it's easy stuff like french fries. You know, guys are putting like 10 ounces of fries on the plate and most of them are going in the trash. Maybe if we dial that down to like 7 ounces might be better. Maybe we don't need a, you know, a 16 ounce steak. Maybe a 14 ounce would be just as good. This is where we start looking at portioning. Protein's another thing. Do you really need, you know, an imported wagyu beef for your meatloaf? Maybe not, you know, maybe you can just get a really nice grass fed. Okay. And then also the last thing I look at is price. Now if it's a puzzle, that means it's already profitable. I just got to make it more, I got to make it more popular. And the way I do that is either by placement, I could give it a better place on the menu. And I have a whole menu engine. I have a whole kind of extreme menu makeover workshop series that talk about psychology and placement is huge. We can also change the font. I could put a box around to get more, you know, kind of more attention to it. I also could put it at the top of the Commodore, the bottom of a column on my menu in my columns. Because that's recency effect. That's a psychological principle. And also it could be just promotion. I maybe got to do some more social media about it. Just got to build up some kind of, you know, some buzz about it. Or I could also work with my team, my service team to talk about it at pre shift. Hey, today everybody talk about the meatloaf because the meatloafs are really great. It's a great item for us, but we just don't seem to be selling, you know, we don't soon be selling a lot of them. So we want to do either placement or promotion. That's how we fix stuff on the menu engineering at a high level. Okay, I wanted to take you down the rabbit hole and show you a case Study of someone in my members my. They're in my accelerator coaching program. This is what we actually did. So they did an initial worksheet, they did the menu engineering worksheet that showed a high food cost. And they had quite a few categories. They had high food costs in their subs, appetizers and soups and salads. And then what I did is I noticed that their subs, they had two different size subs. They had an 8 inch and a 12 inch and their food cost was horrendous. So what we did is we basically eliminated the two different. We took out the two different size and we only did just one size. We did just a 10 inch sub, but we charged it because we have so much meat in there. We left it at the old 12 inch price. This brought that category down to 9.9. It was super high before. And then what I did is we adjusted the price of the appetizers to reflect market demand. Their appetizers were really, really low priced for the market. And they were basically, and I asked the guy, I asked the owner, who's a client of mine, where'd you get the price for that? Well, that's what the other places down the street charge. That's the worst pricing model in the world. Never, ever base your pricing model based on what someone else in the market does, because you don't know if they're making money. You don't know what their overhead is. You don't know what their whole business model is. You have no idea. Basing pricing based on someone else without knowing their backstory is the worst pricing model in the world. Okay. Just by adjusting the prices of the appetizers to reflect the market demand, because they do really, really great appetizers. This brought that category down 4.7%. And then what we did is we adjusted a few prices on the soups and salads. That saved another 1.3%. So let's look at new theoretical versus new potential. Their old theoretical was 27.2. Their new theoretical was 23.2. That's 4% better. That's a good. That's a better theoretical. Okay, but so what does that mean to the bottom line? What does that mean in the bottom line is this. The restaurant does 2.2 million in sales. They ran an actual food cost of 31%. That annual spend is $682,000. If they followed traditional advice and just tried to get within 2% of their old theoretical, that would have been a 29% food cost. They would still. They would spend that $638 and then they would, they would basically save themselves a restaurant $44,000. But I'm always a big believer that, you know, we can do better than that. So what we did is we aimed for, to push to that new theoretical. We aim to push the food cost and worked with the team to get the food cost down to a 2% variance within their new theoretical 23.2. That brought their food cost down to 25% and that put $132,000 back to the bottom line or it added 6% profit. I have now it doesn't matter what kind of restaurant you work. I've seen thousands of restaurants. I was on a call just yesterday with someone, they own a breakfast restaurant, and now they do know their cost and their theoretical food cost was 27%. And just knowing breakfast places, I said, well, there's your problem right there. And that's why your profitability is not where it needs to be. Is most of my breakfast places run a anywhere from a 19 to a 21 theoretical food cost. For a breakfast place, he was at 27. So if we just get them down to, if I can just get him down to a 20 theoretical and then he can run, you know, he runs really good food cost. He runs just a slightly above. If I can get him at 20 theoretical plus, I think he was at a 32 food cost actual right now. If I can get him at 27, 20 theoretical and I can help him get, help him, give him the tools to give him to a 20, you know, let's just say 23 food cost, right? That's going to put almost 9% back to his bottom line. Easy. Let's get. Put 9% back to his bottom line already. And he was at 5% profit. He's at 14 now just by fixing this one thing. Menu engineering is a huge game changer. Menu engineering can easily add 3 to 7% to your bottom line. So now our restaurant went from 5 to 10 to 15% profit. Okay, so now we're at 15 profit. Step three, you want to drive traffic with massive. Do you notice I have the word massive in all caps and underlined? There's a reason for that, because you need to take massive, massive action. And I show this picture to a lot of clients when I'm doing like, especially when I'm doing, like, staged presentations. And I'm talking about marketing as a picture. And you've probably seen this as a classic picture of a big old grizzly bear on a waterfall and the salmon's jumping up and the salmon's just about in the grizzly bear's mouth. And I asked people this question. When you see this picture of a big grizzly bear just about ready to chomp on a salmon, do you see yourself as the bear or the salmon? 99 of people in the room will say, I'm the bear. You're not. You're actually the salmon. In the marketing world, you are the salmon. You think you're the bear, but you actually, the way your marketing is, is you're actually the salmon. You're about to get eaten by the competition. If you want to be the bear, I'm going to show you some easy to do tricks to make sure you are the bear and not the salmon in your marketing market. Hashtag, write this down. The purpose of marketing is not to get a sale. Everyone forgets that. The purpose of marketing is not to get a sale, is to keep your brand top of mind. Hashtag, write this one down to Best Known beats best. Best known beats best. Every single time, I don't know how many times I try to I beat this into people's brains. Best known beats best. We can all agree McDonald's. If you have a McDonald's franchise, I apologize. We can all agree that McDonald's does not have the best hamburger on the market, but they are a multi billion dollar brand. Why? Because best known beats best. They keep that damn golden arches in front of your face all the time. They have a billion dollar marketing budget, billion dollars just in marketing to keep you just brainwashed about those golden arches flashing in your head. You wake up in the middle of night in cold sweats thinking french fries, Big Mac quarter pounders. The purpose of marketing is not to get a sales, to keep your brand top of mind. Best known beats best. How do we do that? Number one, you got to embrace video. Video is the dragon slayer. Up until recently with the, you know, the advent of smartphones, it took a lot to produce video. You would have to hire a film crew, they would have to come in, they would have set up these complex cameras. There would have to be lights. It would be very, very crazy and expensive. Or you had to go to a TV station, get on camera, record a commercial. Now you can do all that with your smartphone. I, over the years have simplified my life where I can make videos on my cell phone, on my iPhone, I can edit on my iPhone, I can upload from my iPhone. I try to make everything in my life as easy and mobile compatible as possible. And you need to too. You Have a mobile studio in your hand and basically wrapped up as your smartphone. Why don't you use it for something smart? Use it to promote your brand. Use it to get your message out there. Use it to share your story. Use it to show people why you do what you do. Which leads us to the next thing you have to do. If you want to be. You want to be the bear, not the salmon and have massive marketing action, you got to use more emotions. There are 13 different emotions of restaurant marketing. The sad thing is most restaurants only use one or two. Thirteen different emotions. If the only two emotions you ever had were happy and sad, man, your life would be messed up. I mean, messed up. If your life only had two emotions, it would be messed up. If you only had happy and sad. You never had anything else. You're only happy or sad, man. How boring would your life be? Well, look at your. Look at your marketing. I'm telling you right now, your marketing is pretty boring too, because you're only playing a couple emotions. These are the 13 different emotions to marketing. And I will tell you where most restaurants go wrong. They usually just play that one. Food and beverage hunger, thirst. That's usually the number one emotion every restaurant plays over and over, over again like a broken record. And it works if I'm hungry and thirsty. There's so many other great emotions out there. There's community, which is local, that talks about, you know, community pride, local pride. You know, what's. What's going on, your hometown, what are you proud about? Team, family. That's connection. We all want to be connected. We are social creatures at our heart. Maybe the Unabomber wasn't, but most people are social creatures. We want to be connected. We want to show our team. We want to show our family. I'll tell you right now, if you are having a hard time hiring people, it is because you're not marketing your team enough. You're not showcasing and showing me your culture. We have done. The restaurant industry has done a horrible job. We've become our own meme. We've become a stereotype. What do I mean by that? We are known for treating people like crap. We're not going to pay you well. We're going to yell at, scream at you. You're never going to see your family. You're going to work 24 hours a day. You're never going to go home, never going to get any rest. We got to do better than this. We got to show people that we are the kind of place that we invest in our Team that we're the kind of place that we welcome diversity. We're the kind of place that we have fun. We're the kind of place that we sit down, have family meal and break bread together. Show your team that stuff, show your community that stuff, show your Internet that. And I will tell you, you will stop having to struggle trying to hire people if you start showcasing your team and your culture a little bit more. Education, learning. If you have some really complex stuff or really unique ingredients you want to showcase that, don't assume everybody knows what Chipotle's is or what Huela Coche is. You gotta educate me. Gotta show me what that stuff is. Teach me right? Nostalgia memories. If you've been around for a while, you could showcase, like, you know, the journey of your restaurant's evolution over the years. Also, nostalgia memories could also be like, where did you learn to cook from? I have some great memories of cooking with my grandmother. Share some of those memories. You can just post a picture of your grandmother. Say this. This is the lady who really got me interested in learning how to cook. People love that stuff. Funny humor. Some brands really play well to the humor card. Taco places, burger places, pizza places, they all play really, really well with the humor stuff. Trivia or a challenge. Throw out some trivia. Challenge your brain. If you're demographic, if you're psychographic, if your market is really into, like brain teasers, stuff like that, you do family game nights and things like that. Throw that stuff out there. Also, share your values. People like people like themselves. Guest vanity. If you have guests having a great time, ask them if they could take a picture and post it for them. Probably once a week, you will see someone in your restaurant holding their phone up, taking a selfie, and yet you don't ever walk up and say, wow, it looks like you're having a great time. What are you guys celebrating? Hey, do you mind if you tag us in the post? If you tag us right now, I'm authorized to give you and give them a dessert. That's free publicity. They're taking a picture, posting on their social media, saying how much fun they're having. They're tagging you in it. You can't buy that kind of pr, right? How about charity, Compassion? Some of the big charities. Everyone always gets behind cancer. People get behind homelessness, people get behind hunger. People get behind all kinds of child, like child childhood diseases and stuff like that. There's all kinds. Breast awareness, breast cancer awareness. There's lots of charities out there. You can get behind Pick one and get behind it. Don't dabble. Pick one that you really care about. Because I'm telling you, when you really care about it, people will see the authenticity in you and they will actually understand that that's your passion. Convenience time. Do you got multiple locations? Do you have drive throughs? Do you have curbside? Can you order online? How do you make it easy for me to do business with you? Testimonial Social proof. When you see these great reviews, take a screenshot of them, post them up. Thank you so much. Fantastic. Thank you, Deborah, for the fantastic review. I deeply appreciate it. Let me know how we can be of service to you in the future. And of course, happiness. What I call joy and bliss. Stop posting boring pictures of your food. And here's the one I want you to do. Hashtag, write this down. Put a face in your place. Put a face in your place. That food, those take. If you look at all your boring food pictures and you put a picture of someone enjoying that food, it would amp up that pictures 100 times. Show people enjoying your food. Show people enjoying your drink. Show people laughing, having a good time, toasting, celebrating life with their friends and family. That's happiness. That is the ultimate one. And here's the goal. The goal, of course, is to try to use multiple emotions in a single post. So what I do is I tell my clients, use this, this kind of list of 13 emotions as a checklist. And when you're doing a, an audit, before you post something, you want to look at the post and go back through this list and say, all right, how many emotions before I post this thing? This should be something you do all the time. Now, before I post this thing to social media, how many emotions can I check off? And be honest with yourself. Don't reach. Okay, but you're always looking for at least two. Two emotions is the best. Another thing I want you to remember is created. Don't, don't just, don't just create a post. Compose a post. You're gonna see some great ones right here. I mean, they got the one on the left, pyology. I mean, this guy is having a great time eating pizza. I can see the logo. They got their Hawaiian shirts on. It kind of goes with their vibe. That's really cool. The one in the middle, that has a really, really unique theme that they're going with. They're trying to be upscale, very avant garde. That's really cool. The one on the right, they're using some humor. They're using some real. They're talking about some of their promos they're doing. They got some fun things. I would just say, like, you know, those pictures of the pizza, I would like to see a little bit. I would like to see more people in there. They got one about ingredients there. You know, education. That's some good stuff. I would say this is almost. This is one of my clients in Spain. It's Barcelona. I would say this is almost the perfect post. Almost the perfect post. Hawaii, is it almost a perfect post. Okay. They got a clever placement of their logo in there. They've got this really cool. They make these housemade hot sauces. So they got some clever, you know, brand placement or product placement. They got some more branding. You can see the logo of their brand for their hot sauces there. The taco is very centered. You know, the only thing that would make this better. That's why I say it's almost a perfect post. If I had a person in the background laughing, smiling, that would have been a perfect post. This is a great one. And this place is really great. They also understand that they're in Barcelona, Spain. They understand that they're. A lot of their clientele is Spanish, of course, because they're in Barcelona. But I also understand a lot of the people are tourists and they speak English. So when they post, they put their post in English and also in Spanish. That's smart marketing right there. That's super smart. Again, I talked about this multiple times. Show off your team, please. Show off your team. Show your team having a good time. Hopefully we're past the COVID days and you don't have to wear masks in the kitchens anymore. But show off your team. Show me your team. Having fun. Also, another thing you want to do, use hashtags. Hashtags are the filing system of the Internet. You want to make sure you're taking advantage of hashtags. You should always have your restaurant hashtag in there. Should always have your city in there. And then whatever the post is, the hashtag should match up with that. Okay? Make sure you use hashtags and use your, you know, use a signature hashtag just for your brand all the time. And that should be on every post. Never, ever post again without adding hashtags, please, for the love of all that's holy, do not post anything without adding hashtags to it. Some other ways to really get that massive marketing going is you could create a sharing contest. User generated content is a huge thing. You got to get people to share stuff, have a contest. Hey, thanks for being In a thing, show our things, have this, you know, share this, give them the rules for it. Perfect thing like this one is like here's what to do. Post a pic of you wearing these ones. Have their face mask. Tag a friend, you know, have your friend poach a picture of them. All right, share it and we'll announce the winner on Monday night. Create an easy contest, but make sure you put the rules in there. Show them how to win the game, how to play the game, how to win the game. When people play the game for you, you win. Okay? User generated content is like the gold nugget of marketing. And use like reposting tools like regram or repost to get out there and get your stuff out there. Starbucks is the masters of the user generated content. If you want to go see someone who is the master, go watch Starbucks. And he even says on top, you know, re gram and they regram and they repost it and they put, they share the person's name and then they shouldn't they share the text from it. That is, I mean they are the masters of the user generated content. When your people, this is when you create raving fans, when you have such a great dedicated fan base that they post for you, you have reached that kind of like the zenith, the summit of social media. Now if you ever get stuck, you want to create emotions of a marketing calendar. People in my, the restaurant coach, university masterminds and also the accelerator program. They get access to a emotions of marketing calendar that they fill out and that they use on a monthly basis. They plan all their posts out and they actually what they do is out of the 13 emotions, they pick 10 emotions and then they pick 10 different topics or 10 different things. They brainstorm, this is a brainstorming session. They brainstorm 10 different ideas for each topic like food and beverage, team, community, testimonials, happiness, guest, they got education, maybe charity, whatever your 10 emotions are. But pick 10 emotions and then you have 10 ideas for each one. That's 100 pieces of content. It's so amazing, it's so easy to do. Takes a little bit of work. Remember I said it's not hard, but it's not definitely easy. It takes a little bit of legwork on your end to get going. But once you get going, I'm telling you it's gold. In fact, here is my massive action plan for your marketing. If I had to do a social media marketing strategy if I was opening a brand new restaurant or right now in 2022, this would be my, my Massive action plan for my marketing to make me a bear, not a salmon. There's 13 different emotions of marketing. You got to use at least 10 different emotions. Stop posting boring food and beverage pictures. Put a face in your place. Number two Instagram feed. I would do two times a day. Instagram Facebook stories. I would do four stories a day. I would do at least one reel a day. I would do one TikTok a day. I could also use my reels and my TikTok if I needed to save myself a little time. Facebook post. I would do 14 Facebook posts a week. I would do twice a day. Now, ideally, if I was going to take this down the rabbit hole a little deeper, I would do a morning Facebook post. I would do a video or maybe a live around lunchtime or right after lunch. Then I would do another afternoon post if I really wanted to be the bear, not the salmon. I would do a weekly newsletter, email. One time a week I would create a brand awareness video. If I was opening a brand new restaurant, I would do a brand awareness video where I did like a 30 second to 60 second, basically a commercial just doing a highlight of who we are. Not really selling anything, just saying, this is who we are. This is what we believe in. This is what we stand for. Show my team having a great time. If you ever want to see a really great one, go go to Fox Restaurant Concepts, go to their About Us page. They have a really, really fantastic brand awareness video. A lot of my clients and my coaching programs have put together amazing, amazing brand awareness videos and they are really helping them drive awareness about who they are in their market. Now after I have a brand awareness video, then and only then would I start doing retargeting ads and putting, putting money behind it. And you want to have at least two to five different retargeting ads. And that's for the people who watch three seconds of my brand awareness video. So people, this is how marketing works. You have awareness and after I have awareness, then I have action. It's pretty simple. So awareness campaigns get people to know who I am. Because I'm telling you right now, most people don't know you exist. And then after they know who we are, then I start getting with awareness retargeting campaigns like come down for happy hour. Hey Thursday we have this Friday we have this, you know, brunch we have on Sundays. Then you start telling them very specific things. But remember, every retargeting ads, it's only one action. Don't say join us for happy hour and for brunch and for, you know, Tuesday night. No, it's too many items. One item, one promotion per ad, one promotion per per retargeting ad. One only, right? Spend five to ten minutes a day interacting with on the apps. That's when people make comments, they like stuff. I'm going to say that's called engagement and that's very, very important. Most people don't interact with their, with their guest online but you only need to do like five, ten minutes a day. You can usually go down the rabbit hole, start watching those goddamn cat videos and get lost in the, in the storm of social media. Don't do that. Spend 5 to 10 minutes using user generated content. You can easily find user generated content. It's people who tag you, post like you. And each post needs strong hashtags and a strong call to action. Strong call to action should be like be here now. See you tonight. Make reservations online, order online. That's a strong call to action. Not like we'll save a seat for you. Doesn't do all right things. You should always be promoting, always be promoting loyalty programs, gift cards, if you have any kind of pre fee, fixed price menus or happy hour menus. Should always promote your culture. Should always promote your why. And then you can easily use a social media management tool like Meet Edgar to help. I use Meet Edgar. It helps me keep my brand top of mind all the time. It puts out. Remember I talked about that 14, you know, Facebook posts. It puts out two Facebook posts a day morning and one at night. Keeps me on LinkedIn morning, afternoon and then I just go in and add a supplement it with a couple nice little videos that I can do on my phone in five minutes. Like I said, I've made my life easy. Do not over complicate this, okay? Do not over complicate this. Do this for 90 days straight. Don't miss a day. You will see your marketing take off. Marketing indirectly drives profits by increasing sales. And if you've been measuring, manage and doing this other KPIs keeping that gap between your theoretical and actual food costs within 2% of each other. Doing a new engineering worksheet exercise every quarter, you're going to see another 3% added to your profits. Now our theoretical restaurant went from 5% and now is sitting at 20% profit. That's the goal. Use these three tools will get you there. Some other tools that you can use for your toolkit. I always say, what's next? You're welcome to check out any of my books. I have quite a few books out now I have three of them. They're all Amazon best sellers. Your Restaurant sucks. First one, your restaurant still sucks and your restaurant culture sucks. There are also available on paperback, Kindle and hardcover. They also are available on Audible and itunes in audiobook format. Please invite like minded people to join the Restaurant Coach Nation. If you are a member of the Restaurant Coach Nation, invite other people in the restaurant industry. Let's get the word out there. Let's make this a group effort where we can help each other. Remember to join the mentor program. If you want to mentor, go to the Restaurant Coach Nation. Look under the button says mentorship and you can easily find a mentor to help you. Follow me on Instagram. Also on Twitter at Donald Burns Pretty straightforward. Subscribe to my YouTube channel. Listen to the Restaurant Coach Podcast. Restaurant Coach Podcast is available for wherever you listen to podcast, itunes, Google Podcast, Spotify. It's on Audible. It's on Stitcher Radio Player fm. It's all over the place. Anywhere you listen to podcasts you can probably find the Restaurant Coach Podcast. And if you want to speak to me about a coaching program, if you're not sure which coaching program is right for you, please you can always book a one on one strategy session with me. Just go to my website therestaurantcoach.com there's buttons all over the place says book a strategy session. That's my call to action. Book a strategy session. Talk to me. Let's see how I can help you out. I have different coach. I have a coaching program for every level, every restaurant. Doesn't matter if you're big or small. I have a program for you from the Restaurant Coach Nation is where we are right now. This is how we're basically it's an I call it an integrated coaching suite. We're moving from the valley of mediocrity. That's where bad restaurants live. And we're moving up the up the kind of levels from good to great to outstanding. We want to hit the summit of outstanding. To get there you have to transcend. You want to get some tools. You want to get some coaching and mentoring. Along the way TRC Nation will get you some mentoring eight week program. After that you might want to look into the Restaurant Coach university. That's my 24. 7 online training library. You get access to 24 different online courses plus a two hour monthly call with me live restaurant masterminds. You get access to everything in a Restaurant Coach university. Plus you get two weekly group coaching accountability calls. You get a Monday educational call plus a Thursday Q A call. If you're not, even if you're on the fence about that, I would recommend getting a ticket right now to the restaurant success summit October 24th, 25th 26th. Because it includes three months of mastermind coaching with that and you can get that ticket@the restaurantsuccesssummit.com and of course my top line coaching program is called the Restaurant Accelerator. That includes the group coaching with the Mastermind group. We also have an accelerator call each week, a group call. But the beauty of the accelerator program is you get a one on one call with me each week where I hold you accountable. We make an action plan that's really, really specific to your restaurant, your needs, what your challenges are to you getting to that, some of outstanding, the fastest way. And again, please join me here on Fridays we do our live training. I love sharing information and knowledge with people. If there's any way I can be of service to you, remember my mission is always to help you build your brand, strengthen your team and increase your profits. If I can do that in any way, please reach out to me. Donalderestaurantcoach.com I love hearing from all my all the people out there. It's fantastic. And thank you so much for over the years for all your support. Thank you for buying my books. They have become Amazon bestsellers because you have made them that way by buying them like crazy. I want to say thanks for being here today and everyone have a fantastic, fantastic Friday.