Mastering Menu Magic: Boost Your Profit with Strategic Design
Donald Burns walks through menu design tactics that boost profit: how to price items, where to place them, which ones to photograph, and how to structure your menu so customers order what makes you money. He frames it around his 3P framework and promotes his coaching services.
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Coach Effect. We're going live right now and you can join us over from Instagram. Jump into the Facebook page and I'll see you soon. Hey, Good morning. Restaurant Coach Nation. What a day. Happy Friday. Happy Friday. Happy Friday. Happy Friday. I don't know about you, but I love every day. I don't treat any day any different than Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I think you get more out of life when you kind of just go into. I mean, every day is a great day. I just think that's the way to approach life in general is like if you live in. If you're just living for the weekend, living for your day off, that's no way to live. You should live for every day. Take it from someone who's actually died twice and has come back to say that life is very precious and you don't want to wish. You don't want to waste any minute doing anything. So today we're going to talk about some really fun stuff. I get a lot of emails. I get a lot of text messages. If you haven't signed up for my community text message, the community text message is a really great way to kind of, you know, stay in touch with me. You can ask me questions. You can reach out. Actually, it's a phone number and you can reach. You can sign up every morning for my community text message. I send out inspirational stuff. I send out all kinds of cool things. Every morning goes out like clockwork. My assistant John, is really good on top of measuring it, managing any comments you have. Make sure if anything's priority, I will get it back. So cool. Make sure that you are dialed in. Now, I would say if you've ever been to any of my trainings, I would tell you have a piece of paper and a pen and make sure to take notes because research has shown if you write stuff down in your own handwriting, you are 70% more likely to remember the information 30 days from now. And that is always my goal. I want you not just to sit here passively and just listen. I want you to take notes and I want you to actively do something with the information. Tools are just potential. You have to pick the tools up and actually use them if you want them to have any meaning and impact on your life. Today we're going to talk about mastering Menu Magic. Boost your profits. Say it again. Boost your profits with strategic design. Sorry, I just came back from the gym, so my brain's not 100% functioning yet. I want you to make sure that you have all the stuff you need. If you have your menu. That's great. If you want to send your menu over to me, you can send it into the group chat. If you're on Streamyard, you can send it to me right away. So make sure that you are ready to rock and roll. The day's kind of agenda is this. We're going to talk a little bit about some menu magic. I'm going to give you some key takeaways, some things to think about because you know me, I love to give you tools to think about and ponder. We're gonna do a little bit what's known as hot seat. Some people in the restaurant Coach Nation Facebook group sent me over their menus in the in the feed. I took a look at some of their menus where I make a few comments about them. I'm going to open it up for some Q and A's and then please make sure to stick around to the end because I have some very exciting news and I also have something exciting to give to you for free for being here today. As always, I like to start off my all my trainings with a quote is one of my favorite ones. Restaurant success is not rocket science. It's purely people science. Once you understand the people science, it is easy to get the restaurant life you want. But unfortunately, most of it thinks it's very complicated. We got to put in extra hours. We have to really, you know, sacrifice our life to our business. And it doesn't have to be that way. I was just as guilty. If you don't know my story, I am Donald Burns. I am known as the restaurant coach. I am a former, I would say I'm a recovering restaurant owner. I'm a restaurant investor. I'm a consultant. I'm a chef, an author. I have, I think right now I have five, four, five, six books out. Two actually big books and two little booklets. I've got the restaurant, your restaurant sucks trilogy out, which is your restaurant sucks, your restaurant still sucks, and your restaurant culture sucks. And my first book, your Restaurant Sucks, was just translated into Spanish and the audiobook for that will also be available. All my books are also available on audio too. If you don't like to read, you want to listen while you're driving around. Take some advantage of that drive time into learning time. I'm a huge believer of turning my car into a mobile university and listening to stuff while I'm driving. And I'm also a former Air Force pararescue man. I started like most people did. My father was a chef. I started at 15. Washing dishes started during the summer, and shortly after that, I moved my way up the brigade system. A lot of trials and errors. My father was a brilliant chef. He was not a very good leader. He definitely clung to that old school mindset, you know, break them down, build them up mindset. But unfortunately, I don't know about you, but if you've ever tried to take something apart and put it back together, and then you have like, maybe an extra washer or screw or something like that, and you're like, huh, where does this go? See, we're really, really good at breaking people down, but we're not really good at putting people back together. That's where we run into problems. And the last thing you want is broken people running around your restaurant. So all my coaching programs doesn't matter if you're in the restaurant coach, university, restaurant masterminds, my restaurant accelerator, or my team one. One team program. My team, one private coaching program. All of my coaching programs follow a very basic framework. And I'll have to say, when I opened my first restaurant, I was like a lot of people I had. At the time I opened my first restaurant When I was 30, I had probably 15 years experience in the business. And of course, you know, 15 years is a lot of experience in the restaurant business. Had worked at some really prestigious restaurants In Santa Fe, N.M. worked with some pretty famous chefs, like Mark Miller from Coyot Cafe. I had a pretty good pedigree, you know, and then when I was a chef in Taos, I got some good, you know, recognition in the pr, some good press, got some awards. So I thought, you know, I had all the tools I needed to open my own restaurant and be very, very successful. And it did not happen like that. I opened the doors, didn't really understand a lot about building a business. I mean, I understood how to run a restaurant, but not really how to build a business. So. So I struggled, and I struggled really bad. And just like a lot of people, I let my ego, my pride, and just denial. And back then, my excuse was, but next month will be different. Next month will be different. Just wait, next month will be better. Next month be better. And then just kept going on and on and on. And next month never became better. And fortunately for me, I had a regular who came to my restaurant. His name was Peter. Peter sat me down one night, very successful businessman. And he wanted to have the talk. And he said, hey, listen, I'm really worried about you. And I said, what are you worried about? He said, well, I'm Worried you're not gonna be open in six months. I go, ah, you know, try to, try to play tough. Ah, you know, we're just, we're just the best kept secret in town. And he kind of looked at me and says, you know, Donald, the last thing you want to be as a restaurant is the best kept secret. And I was like, oh, he was right. And so he sat down, he said, listen, I'll show you the framework to run a successful business. I'll teach you the combination of restaurant success. Cause if I teach you the combination, then you can open lock whenever you want. I said, all right, that sounds good. What do I have to do? He goes, I just need you to dedicate one hour a week with me. We're gonna go over these frameworks, but not only are we gonna talk about these things, I want to see you implement them. The first time I don't see you implement them. Our coaching stuff is over. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna coach you anymore because I only coach people that take action. I said, all right, agreed. So for the next year, he sat down and he talked about this framework. And it was a life changing framework. And since then I've expanded on it for restaurants. But the framework is always the same. It's called the 3P framework. And the 3P framework is always people product process. This was a game changer for me. And I'll tell you exactly why most restaurants are stuck. You have all parts of this framework, but you have them in the wrong order. And like if it was a combination lock, and the combination was, you know, 3, 4, 5. If I don't put 3, 4, 5 in order, the lock will never open up. I mean, you could try as hard as you want, but you're never going to get that lock to open successfully. If you want to open up the floodgates to more profits, I'm talking 18, 20, 22% profitability, getting your life back. Working less than 20 hours a week in your restaurant mean being there only because you want to, not because you have to. Understanding this 3P framework is the key. And the thing you got to do is you got to make sure you know that you gotta make sure that you have these in the right order. It's always people, product process. And again, here's how restaurants get the formula backwards. Everyone starts with product because every restaurant in the world has a menu. And then they realize, oh, you know, I probably need a couple processes in place, I probably need a couple systems, I probably need a couple, you know, I probably need a P. L. I need to look at some things there. And then they go back and go, oh, you know, I probably need to do some hiring. I train people a little bit better. You don't understand that. People, product, process, work in synergy together. And if you don't get the combination right, the people part first, the other things don't matter. I'll have someone call me once a month and say, donald, I'm frustrated. I'll say, why are you frustrated? I'll say, well, my team's not following the checklist. Anybody relate? And I'll say, well, what's wrong with the checklist? And I say, nothing's wrong with the checklist. Dude, you gave me the checklist. I gotta say, okay, if the checklist is right, then what is going on? All right, what is going on? And I'll say, all right, if this. If the checklist is right, look at the 3P framework. It's the people part. The culture's not right. They haven't been bought into why it's important. They don't know the core values. They haven't been trained properly on why it's important things to do, and that's why they don't follow checklist. And then I'll also have people call me and say, I'm really frustrated. I'll say, why are you frustrated? I'll say, well, I went home this afternoon to walk the dogs. I come back and, you know, I come back to the restaurant. Everybody's just standing around. They're not cleaning, they're not doing anything. They're just kind of sitting around. All right, well, do you have processes in place? Do you have running checklists? Do you have side work? Do you have things that should be on a time schedule for them? No, no, no. But they should know what to do. Here's the thing. People don't know what to do. You have to tell them what to do. And that's why you need a process in place. So people feeds process, process feeds people. And when they work together, they protect your product, which. So this 3P framework, if you take nothing else away from the day, take a screenshot of this. And really, if you can understand, and I tell all my clients this, wherever your restaurant is stuck, it's part of the 3P framework. It's like when people say, I can't find any staff. Anybody ever say that lately? There's no. No good people out there. No one wants to work. It's not hiring. It's your culture and your mindset. You always look at this 3P framework and you look at the things before it that set up because everything builds on each other. Like in the people part, it's mindset first, then culture, then hiring. In a product part, it's always food cost first, then menu, and then marketing. A lot of people call me and say, I don't know, I just need to market more, I need more people, I need more butts in seats. You've heard this all, all the time. And I'll say, that's great. Turning on the marketing machine and getting people to your restaurant is not really complicated. But why would you want to market your restaurant if your menu is not set up for success? And if your menu's not set for success, it's probably because you don't know your food cost. I am always shocked when I go speak at a conference and I'll have, you know, 800, a thousand people in the audience, restaurant owners, and I'll say, raise your hand if you have everything on your menu. Cost it down to the penny. And I'm always shocked when only like 2, 3% raise their hand. It's amazing how many people don't cost out their menu. And it is the probably the number one thing that's keeping you stuck in really, really low profitability. We'll talk about that today. So let's jump into some stuff here. All right. Menu magic. How to boost your products profits with strategic design. Again, make sure to have a piece of paper to pen. If you have any comments, you can go ahead and chat in the comments with me. I love to hear comments. If you have any questions, I'll try to answer them as I can. If not, we do have a Q A part towards the end of this session. So if you want to hold them till then, that's also whatever you want to do. This is a funny thing. I found out research says that most people focus on the entree first and then they build their meal around that. That's really good to know when you're using menu magic. If I know that they're looking at those things first and they're building the meal around, I also want to train my team to sell the same way. What are you looking at? Help me, let me allow you, or let me help you build the perfect experience around that and that's really what you want to train your team on. One of the other elements I really talk about, there's only four ways to drive sales. I don't care. And if you know another way, I, I mean, I'm 44 years experience, only four ways to drive sales. One, you can get new people to come to your restaurant, that new guests. That's marketing. You can get your existing guests to come back more often. That's loyalty programs, right? And then the third way is to get the current guest to come to restaurant to spend more. That's upselling, suggestive selling. And the fourth way is you could raise prices. Now, I don't recommend raising prices every time you need to get, you know, increase your sales, because it's a law of diminishing returns. You basically. You'll platform, you'll basically plateau out, and you'll basically position your brand outside the market with your menu pricing, and you don't want to do that. One of the probably the biggest things I get called in to do for when I used to do a lot of consulting was brand repositioning. Someone has basically, you know, pushed their brand out of the position. It would originally end by changing menu too much, changing prices too much, changing everything too much. And then the, you know, when. When you're confused about who you are and what you are, your guests get confused. I call it brand confusion. When you get brand confusion, you basically displace your brand in the market. That's a horrible way to be. All right, so let's jump into this. Let's talk first about some menu mistakes. And some of these mistakes are probably costing you money. You might not think about they're costing you money, but they are three things your menu needs to be. I don't know. You know, I don't know why that one keeps jumping ahead. That slide always jumps ahead for some reasons, but I'll talk about them real quick. All right, Your menu needs to be three things. It needs to be containable, approachable, and profitable. All right, what do I mean by containable? It needs to be containable in the sense that your team needs to be able to execute it. There's probably a lot of people on the call that are chefs. And I was a chef for a long time. I was a chef owner of my restaurants. And the thing I realized very quickly is that if I didn't want to be on the line all the time, I had to create dishes that my team could execute without me being there. And this also requires you just having a little bit of ego in check, you know, swallowing your pride a little bit and saying, I need to either create items that I can get my team to execute, or I need to train my team more. Either or that's your two options. So approachable is that your guests have to understand the menu, and you'll see this again. And I'm not picking on chefs today. I'm. I'm a chef, too, so not really picking on chefs, but chefs tend to chef it up. And I always say a lot of times when you chef it up, you basically alienate your guest because you're talking in a language they don't understand. And I'll give you a perfect example. I had a place, small little town in Iowa. A client, small little restaurant chef came from a major metropolitan market, came back to his old hometown in Iowa, decided that, you know, he's going to open a restaurant, open the restaurant, and just couldn't understand why a lot of his items didn't sell. And so I said, let me see your menu. He sent his menu over, and I noticed one dish in particular. He had a filet mignon, right? With pommes a lago her and a demi glace. Now, this is a really small town in Iowa. I said, why don't we change your wording around? Why don't we call it a beef tenderloin with cheesy mashed potatoes, green beans, and a pan gravy? And at first he was like, well, no, but it's, you know, it's a flamingon. It's palms a lago. They're cheesy master. I said, yeah, it was cheesy master. Tis Colbert. All right, all right, let's not do that. So we made the menu a little simpler, we changed the words around, and the thing started selling like crazy. So sometimes you might be displacing your market just by trying to be a little too sophisticated and over the top for them. Right. Don't be afraid to dial it down a little bit. Now, another menu mistake people make is this overwhelming choices now. And I know we try to be everything to everybody, but having an extensive menu is a way to cater to everyone's taste. But actually, in most times, it's actually, it's. It's not really smart. It's actually not too healthy, because what you're doing is you're actually giving people a really, really bad experience. Sometimes too many options, it can overwhelm your. Overwhelm your guests, it can slow down your kitchen. The thing I would ask you to do is start looking at simplicity and focus on a select few, I mean, rock star items that can really create a more satisfying experience. The Rolling Stones recorded, like, I think, 430 something songs. But if you go to a Rolling Stones concert, you don't want to hear all the B side, you know, crap that they never really was popular. I mean, even though they're good songs, right? And I want you to think about that, too. For you, for your restaurant, you have to understand that you have to be able to dial it down and showcase your hits. Your menu should be a representation of your hits only. That's it. I just want to see your hits. I don't want to see everything you've done. I don't want to see all the crazy stuff you could do. And if you want to keep it fresh, I kind of call the Pareto principle. 80, 20, 80% of your menu should be your hits stable. Now, you can also do, like, 20% of, like, interacting or trying out some new items to see if they become hits. But don't go crazy and try to be everything to everyone. It's the worst thing you can do. There's a couple reasons for this, too. One is what we call paradox of choice. Paradox of choice is a psychological principle that says that too many options create stress. A lot of people think that, you know, if I offer more options, it's better. Well, more choices is not always better. When people are confronted with too many options, you'll see them. You'll see it happening. If you ever go out and just sit in your dining room and watch people's body language, you'll see them become anxious, and you'll see their body language get edgy, and they'll kind of squirm around a little bit, and they feel a pressure to make decisions, especially when the server standing there trying to take the order. And what happens is they reach a point. It's called threshold. And you know, though, that people have reached threshold when they say these words, they're looking at the menu. They're feeling frustrated. Let me kind of see. See my. So you see my face here? So they're looking at the menu. You know, you tell them they're shaking their head. They're looking at, like, a little confused, a little shocked. And then, like, they feel pressure to make the decision. They say, this, I'll just have. And whenever they order, when someone says, I'll just have, that means they've hit. They've hit threshold and they've made a buy. They made a panic decision to get something and then usually have. What's known as buyer's remorse, is that when something else comes out and they see somebody else have it, oh, I knew I should have ordered that. But paradox of choice is a real thing. You got to be aware of it that when people feel pressure, they just go to the safe spot. And usually something like, I'll just have the burger or I'll just have the chicken Caesar, they usually go to the safe spot. And you want to make sure that it really help hurts you because you could be losing out on a lot of sales when people go to the safe order for them. So paradox of choice is a real thing. You got to be aware of. You got to watch it. Another thing you have to be really, really super aware of is called the 109 second rule. That is the average time that a guest spends looking at your menu. Gallup, which is a huge kind of survey company, they surveyed this thing a while ago and they found out 109 seconds is the average time people read your menu. If you want to do this thing and you want to do a test, give someone your menu, have a stopwatch, and don't tell them really how long to gay say. What I want you to do is I want you to start reading the menu. Start at the top, read every word on the menu and just start going. And then you let them just start reading and you have your timer on. And when you hit 109 seconds, you say stop and see how far they got in your menu. Nine times out of ten for most restaurants, they don't get to the good stuff. They only get probably about 75% or 50% through your menu before time runs out. That's not good. You gotta be able to make sure people are going through and reading your menu. Another major menu mistake, ignoring the cost profit analysis. It's not just about listing what you can cook. Restaurants need to be very mindful of cost and profitability. You understand what profitability does to a menu. You understand what costing does. That's why when I do the 3P framework, I don't teach menu design until all my clients have been through a food cost workshop. We have a couple different food costing workshops depending on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go. The most elaborate one I have is called food cost boot camp, where we actually really dig you down and we dig into the 40 thieves of food costs. We dig into your theoretical food costs, all that stuff. It's a really, really great. Because once you understand cost, then you can understand what's known as stratification. Stratification is a beautiful thing. This is where a lot of restaurants go wrong too. Menu stratification, or menu engineering looks at four quadrants and there's basically two axises. We look at, we look at Profitability and popularity, Right? If an item's popular and profitable, it's called a star. If it's just profitable but not popular, it's a puzzle. If it's just popular but not profitable, it's a plow horse. And if it's neither, it's a dog. And dogs are important to understand. And now for every category, there's something you can do, because I'll have someone every month call me. And this is where they do it wrong. They'll run their food costs for the very first time. And I go, oh, my God, I'm really shocked. What are you shocked about? They say, oh, I ran my. I finally did my food costing it. Wow. This item's a, you know, a 38% food cost. I need to take it off the menu. I say, whoa, whoa, whoa, not yet. Or someone will run their product mix report from their POS system and say, you know, I don't sell many of those. I should take off the menu. And I go, not yet. It's the juxtapose. It's the positioning of where it is with profitability and popularity that makes it a stratification. And we look at stratifications. There's two. There's things you can do to improve two categories. Now, stars are stars. They're profitable and popular. I don't touch those now. Puzzles. Now, remember, a puzzle is profitable. It's just not popular yet. So how can I do that? I can do it by giving it better placement on the menu. I can promote it, have the team talk about it. I can promote it on my social media. These are the things you want to promote on your social media. I would guarantee 9 out of 10 of you. If I asked you, if you look at the last five food pictures or drink pictures you posted on your Instagram, if you know what the cost is. 9, 9 out of 10 of you probably don't know what the cost is on those things. And you might be promoting something that is actually a loser for you. Something that's very, very popular, but it's not profitable. So how do you improve puzzles? Again, placement and promotion. How do you improve plow horses? Those are items that are popular, just not profitable yet. You got three options, actually. You can change the portion size, reduce the portion size to increase. To decrease the food cost. You can change out the protein. You can change the protein size. And last resort is you could raise the price. I don't like throwing it in there, because that's like the easy one. And a lot of people just kind of go to the easy, and I want you to kind of work for it before you go to easy. So that's the way we do that. But this will really help you get a really super profitable menu. Another thing people do is they start ignoring price psychology. You just can't pick prices out of the air. Okay, please don't just pick prices out of the air. You need to reflect on the value of the dish. You have to understand your demographic, your psychographic, your ideal guest avatar, and you have to follow the rules of pricing psychology. Let's talk about pricing psychology. All right. First is called charm pricing. Charm pricing is a classic technique. This is where the prices end in 0.99 or 95 instead of rounding up to the nearest whole dollar. Some people like to do it like that. We all know that 999 is practically 10. But the trick works because we read from left to right and the first number seems to make a significant impact. Now, I would also say this varies depending on your brand. If you want to be more of a perceived higher end brand, then staying with the $10 over the 9.99 is a better deal for you. All right? Because you want to make sure that you're perceived. Remember, this goes back to what I say about pricing psychology. You got to match up your ideal guest avatar and what your demographic is and psychographic is. If not, you're going to lose out. Another thing you can do is you can eliminate the dollar sign. Research shows if you take the dollar sign away, people actually spend 8% more without the dollar sign associated on your menu. Because money triggers thoughts of cost and loss, making guests more cost cost conscious. So instead of stake at dollar sign $25, just say steak 25 point. All right? That's an easy low hanging fruit. A lot of people can find some easy ways to make a little bit more money just by taking the dollar signs off your menu. Another thing you want to understand price psychology is called the power of anchoring. Place your higher priced items at the top of your menu and make the rest of your items seem more affordable. This is a technique they call anchoring. Even if your customers don't order the expensive item it refers as a reference point to make the other items feel like a great deal. This is an actual menu I did at a steakhouse up in Beaver Creek. We put on the menu we had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a PB&J and a bottle of Cristal for $197. And then right underneath that, and I did this on purpose, I Put a chilled mixed seafood platter for $87. We did not sell a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in a bottle of Cristal. Of course you have those people that want to show off to their friends that do it just because they want to show their friends that they can afford it. Afford it. But most of the time people went for the mixed seafood platter because that $197 price point. And then I see the 87. They think the 87 is a deal. Right? Another thing you can do for menu psychologists called tier pricing. Tier pricing, having a variety of price points that can cater to a broader range of customers. Right. Offer some luxury options for those willing to spend more. Make some more affordable choices for those on a budget. Just make sure to provide exceptional value at every level. This is a restaurant here in, in Phoenix called Bourbon and Bones. I think it's a chain, but they're pretty good about doing that. They have like some lower price steaks on their menu and then they also have some higher priced items. They have some wagyu, they have some other items on there, but they also have a lot of tiered pricing. That's a good way to kind of show that you're not just a high end place. Like especially if you offer like, if your menu is like a tasting menu, have some other items on your menu, like have a burger. Where people would feel like I can come down and I can spend maybe 20, 30 bucks with a drink and get away and not have to spend 80, 90, 100 bucks every time I come to your restaurant. You want people to know that you're not just a one, you're just a special event place. You want to be a little bit more approachable. Remember talking about the three things your menu has to be, has to be approachable, containable and profitable. This is part of the approachability part. Gotta be approachable. If you're not getting consistent stream of people all the time and you're just filling up on Friday and Saturdays, that's because you're probably perceived in the market as a special event or a high end place. And the reason why you break out of that is you gotta make sure you have some tiered pricing. Another cool menu psychology trick is called the price decoy. And you've seen this one before. This is a clever tactic tactic where you offer three options and usually it's a low, medium and high price. Most customers stay away from the low price because they think it's too cheap and they also think cheap is inferior. So they tend to stay away. But a lot of times they stay away from the most expensive one to save money. And the medium one makes it more of an attractive price. So I'll give you a great example. Now this also works as I can actually push people to my higher end if I want to. And I'll give you a great example of it. And you've seen this before at movie theaters. They'll have a small, medium, large popcorn. The medium is 6.50. For 50 cents more you can get the large. They don't sell a lot of mediums. They go for that extra 50 cents and get that large. Now you might think 50 cents is not a lot, but think of how many people go to a movie theater during a week. Those 50 cents start adding up. Don't forget to catch. You want to. You know, so many people try to pick up a dollar when they could easily pick up $0.50 or $0.25 and easily start making a lot more money. Don't give, don't just automatically go for big bucks. Try to make sure. Try to make it where it's perceived value and you're actually getting a little bit more. Sometimes I'll do this with beverage flights. I'll have like a tasting menu at a really good price and then I'll offer like a wine flight or offer a cocktail flight or a beer flight that goes with it. That actually is where I make my money up. So I get people to buy the, you know, the pre fee menu and then I go to that next level and I upsell the flights. Right? And remember, you have two. If you're ever doing a flight, you have two different types of flights you should offer, you should always offer a progressive flight and a vertical flight, right? A progressive flight and a vertical flight. Anytime you're doing any kind of beverage tasting, you should do a progressive and a vertical. What I mean by progressive. Progressive is basically where you go from a lighter to a more complex. Like for wine it might be. I start off with like maybe a light, you know, Pinot Grigio. Then I go to maybe, you know, something a little more in the middle ground and. And then I go to like a full body, you know, and I could go from like light or from a white to a merlot to maybe a cab. And then a vertical tasting is where I basically go in the same genre, but I just go different ones. Like maybe I go like a whole, a cabernet vertical and I go from maybe a lighter cabernet to a medium cabernet to a full body. Cabernet. And you can do this with. With beers, too. You do this with cocktails. We should always offer two beverage flights, a vertical and a progressive tasting. Both of those will help you make a lot of money, right? The power of nine. Another menu of price psychology thing. Nine is a powerful number. Studies have shown that in certain cases, pricing an item at like 39 can outperform its $34 counterpoint, which is actually pretty. Pretty cool. So if you have something on your menu, and I saw this the other day, somebody had like, I think it was a sea bass, and I like sea bass a lot. I went to one restaurant, I think it was $43, and then I went to another restaurant and it was $49. And I asked how many ounces it was. Same ounces, pretty much the same setup on the dish. But. And the thing is, I like sea bass. And I just thought the. I thought it was kind of cool. That one was, you know, was, you know, 43 and one was 49. It was pretty cool. So try it out. See if it works for you. It's a good one. Another huge menu mistake that people make, not updating your prices regularly. Menu costing is so touchy. All right? You don't want to overcharge, but also, you don't want to. You want to make sure you're covering your cost and make a profit. Another thing you need to do is you need to know what your costs are. This goes into what I call the biggest menu mistake of all, is not knowing your food costing. There are two types of food costing, ladies and gentlemen. There's what we call theoretical food cost and actual food cost. Every month, someone will call me and say, hey, Donald, my food cost is 30%. Is that good? And I'll say, I don't know. And they'll say, what do you mean you don't know? And I'll say, what's your theoretical? And they'll say, I don't know. And I say, that's the problem. So if your theoretical was 28, 30%, food cost is actually, that's a pretty good food cost. But if your theoretical is 21%, you got some issues, and you got to work on your food cost. So many people go to Google, and when you Google what's a good food cost for a restaurant, it's going to give you what the average restaurant is going to have. It's not your restaurant, your restaurant. Every restaurant's a little different. Every restaurant has different profit potential. So if you go by averages, you tend to get average so, and that's one of the things I say to tell people is don't go by what Google says, because Google will give you the average. It'll say the average restaurant runs at 30 to 34% food cost. I know, but who wants to be average? Average sucks. The average restaurant in the United States has a variance between their theoretical and actual food cost of 9%. Most of the time, when I'm working with a new coaching client and they're running a low profitability, like they're running maybe the national average, 5, 6%. We can usually find 5% just by understanding their theoretical food cost. What the gap is between theoretical and actual and closing that gap a little bit tighter. We usually find 5% pretty fast, too. I think within, like, 60 days, we can add 5% to your bottom line just by understanding that gap between theoretical and actual food cost. It's a huge game changer for a lot of people. I mean, think about where your profitability is right now. What would I mean? And even if you're running a good profitability, what would, like 2 or 3 more percent do? It really changes the game for a lot of people, especially if you're doing big volume. It's a real, real game changer. Not knowing your food cost is probably the number two greatest sin of all restaurants. If you want to know what sin number one is, it's mediocrity. If you are wondering, all right, menu mistake. Not training your staff on the menu. Failing to train your staff in the menu is. It's a grave mistake. It's horrible. Your staff should know each dish inside out. Its ingredients, preparation, products. They should also know how it tastes, and they should be able to answer guest queries and upsell appropriate. Allow me to share a story with you. This is honest to God, true story. You can't. I mean, seriously, you can't make this up. All right, I was actually. I travel a lot, and when I'm on the road, I try to eat healthy. And so I was at a restaurant and I ordered a Caesar salad. They had a really nice Caesar salad that sounded like a really great dressing. I think they had a roasted lime Caesar dressing. I thought that sounded really cool with jalapenos in it. Oh, that's. Know anything kind of sounded really good to me. So I thought, all right. So I asked the server, I wanted some protein. And I asked the server what I thought was a really good question. I said, what kind of salmon is it? Because I was wondering, you know, is it sockeye? Is it king? Is It a, you know, is it farm raised? What kind of salmon is it? And she said, and I quote, I think it's mahi mahi. I said, I don't have to check in. Gotta know your menu. You gotta know the menu. Please, people, there's a huge opportunity there, right? And when you're training people, I will tell you this, please, please sweat the small stuff, because the small stuff does matter. Small stuff does matter. It really does. It has a huge input, impact. All right, let's take a look here. Let's do a little hot seat. So a lot of people sent me over some of their menus. The menus were great. I got some really co input, got some really cool ideas. Now, remember, when I'm giving you stuff to talk about and we're talking about things on the menu and I'm giving you suggestions, they're merely suggestions. You can tell me, Donald, you know, you can. You're crazy. And all right, you just go take a hike, whatever you want to say. These are my opinions based on my experiences, based on working with thousands of restaurants, based on 44 years in the restaurant industry. Take it for what it is. All right, so first up, this menu was sent in. Now this is a really, It's a nice little menu. Very, very nice menu. And I got some notes here on the side. And this is some of the fun stuff I like to do. I like to look at menus. I look at menus all the time. I actually, it's kind of one of my weird things. I'm really big into fonts, I'm really big into typeset. I'm really big into copywriting. I'm really big just looking at designs and layouts. So on the, on the surface, this menu isn't really actually too bad. You know, on the front side of the menu, build your own bowl or PETA kind of takes you through the steps. Remember, you're telling people exactly what you want to do. Pick your base, pick your protein, add your toppings, add your dressing. All right, Pretty straightforward. That one's pretty good, right? The only thing I would say is. And he does do the pricing, right, he's got the 95 or the 99. He could. I would, I might even just go 99. Get the extra 4 cents. Depending on your volume, you might be able to make a little bit more money if you just go up from 95 to 99. I don't know. Why not? You know, might as well. Now, on the back side, this is where I kind of have a little bit of things. I would like give some feedback on menu cannibalization. You gotta watch items that compete with each other too much. Like, if you have everything chicken or everything this and that, you have a lot of chicken stuff. Chicken dishes are. It's called menu cannibalization. And items like that will start to cannibalize each other. And so you gotta watch. And I see this a lot. I'll have people have like, 12 burgers on the menu. And I was like, 12 burgers, man, that's a lot of burgers. And when you have that many burgers in one category, number one, you get paradox of choice. And number two, the menu items start fighting each other and they start cannibalizing sales. And if you don't know the cost on the items, it could really, really hurt you because you might have one of like, let's say on this one, there's like three. It's got three chicken items on there. Let's say one chicken item is super, super, super profitable, let's say. And I'm just gonna go off the. The chicken kebab and Greek salad and the Mediterranean chicken Caesar, right? Which seems like they're very similar. So that's like the first thing I look at, and what I would do is I would say which item is my most profitable item. Now, if they're very similar in profitability now, they're just going to cannibalize sales. Now, one typically tends to be a little bit more profitable than the other. Just in experience. I would actually take one off, run it as a feature or an LTO as a way to kind of just kind of give people a really cool, interesting thing. But I would keep my most profitable item on the menu only, and I would run the other one just as an lto. And I would use that lto, especially if it was kind of popular. I would probably run it on my slower days. So, like, let's. And I'm. I don't know his cost on his menus for this, but I'm just gonna say. Let's say that the Greek salad was his more profitable one, and the chicken Caesar was a little bit lower, a little bit more expensive food cost. So the profit wasn't that good. I might take the Caesar off and just run it, like, maybe as a weekday feature, or maybe run it as a Tuesday Wednesday lunch feature or something like that. Okay? So be careful about that. And, like, especially, like, you got a lot of, like, he's got two. He's got three chicken items. He's got one Beef and lamb. He's got two falafel, he's got two salmons. And then you got the pita wraps down there. And then again, you know, I got a chicken kebab Caesar pita. And then I got a chicken swarma pita. It's a lot of similarity here. So you want to make sure you're not cannibalizing your menu too much. Another thing I do is on, if you look on that second page, he has a lot of ingredients I love. There's a big thing out there called semantic salience. Remember we talked about earlier, when you take the dollar signs off, it actually increases sales. What's called semantic salience. Semantic salience means we have an association with symbols. Number one thing I'll tell people do right away, take the commas off. Take the commas off between your menu and add plus signs. That gives more value. So like, you know, have chicken kebab and Greek salad. So it's chicken kebab plus tzatziki, plus feta plus cucumber plus tomato plus kalamata olives plus plus dill plus romaine. And then paired with, then I would just say plus lemon vinaigrette. All right. Make sure to place items according to profitability too. So at the top of the columns, when you're looking at columns, let's look at the Peter Rat for a second. The pita wraps stuff at the top of the column is that Caesar pita. And then the bottom of the column, the beef and lamb PETA. There's a thing in psychology called recency effect. Recency effect would say the stuff at the top of the column. And the bottom of column tends to sell the best. The stuff in the middle is where I hide my higher profit items. So the things that cost me a lot more in food cost, I basically hide the high food cost items in the middle. And I put my low food cost, my higher profit margins at the top and bottom of a call. That's called recency effect. And then personally, this is a personal thing. I'm not a fan of all caps on the titles. I like to have. I like the bold part, but I don't like, like everything Mediterranean chicken Caesar. Because it feels like you're yelling at me. I don't know, like if I texted you Mediterranean chicken Caesar, in all caps, you say donald, why are you yelling Mediterranean chicken Caesar. So watch that. I know you do it to draw attention, but there's different ways, there's different tools. And in one of my menu engineering work, or what my Menu design workshops I show you probably, I think I have like 6 or 7 like menu Jedi mind tricks that I use that uses psychology and also graphic design to increase sales. Okay, but that's a good one. That was a good menu. I mean overall, nice little menu. I like to, I like the simplicity of it. I just would like dial it down, make it even tighter if I could right this menu here. Now, photos psychologically reduce the perceived value of your menu, depending on, depends on what you're, how you're positioned in your market. But anytime you put pictures on a menu tends to drive the value down as far as perceived value of what people think you are and who you are. So I always tell people, watch the photos. Don't. If you're trying to be like a mid, you know, a mid price or an upper end restaurant, watch the photos specifically. And another thing about photos is people tend to think that it better look like that. I've seen that before. Like, you know, you see these pictures all the time at these restaurants and the food does not look like that. McDonald's is notorious for having pictures on their menus. And then I'm sure that your, you know, Big Mac doesn't look like that big, huge, fluffy Big Mac on the picture on the menu board, right? So make sure that you have to back it up with that. All right? Now on this menu, I would say the prices, like they have like the Dixie chicken sandwich and then they have 16. This is a number one. This is another common thing a lot of restaurants do. They put the pricing in the wrong position. You want to move the prices not after the title but after the end of the description. Right? And don't bolt it out. We don't draw a lot of attention to the prices. So you got like this, you know, mighty lb lo lboe burger. And then you got the price right there. You want to put that down here in the menu and like hide it right after the description. Think of how people logically process information on a menu, right? Like Angry Bird, you know, chicken sandwich. And then I want to read all the ingredients. I have all the ingredients plus this, plus this, plus this, plus THIS, plus THIS, plus THIS. And then for $16, that's a deal, right? Don't overuse graphics either. You see, like a lot of times they have the stars. They have a lot of boxes on the menu. Boxes are great if you don't overdo them. You know, I want. This is usually my typical rule. One box per page only draw attention to one item. And it's usually My most profitable item is. I want to draw my attention to. Got a lot of people will put boxes around the item if they don't know their food cost. You might be just actually killing yourself because you're basically just. You're bleeding out money. Because now you're drawing attention to an item that's highly. I mean, it's really popular, but doesn't make a lot of food cost for you. So you gotta make sure that you're like only one box per page and make sure it's the most profitable item on the page. Move the prices to the end of the description. Watch the all caps, right? Don't overuse the graphics. I know a lot of times people put these graphics in here, like, you know, signature disc, signature dish, signature dish, right? Pick. I like to pick out, like, again, what's my most profitable item? And then I want to pull attention to that. Another cool thing you could do is you could change the font color too. So let's say like this Mighty lboe burger is really, really super profitable for you. I might change the font here to maybe red to really draw attention to it. Or maybe like orange or something like that. Stay away from blue. Blue tends to suppress appetites. It's one of those colors we try to avoid on menus. But I might change the color there, the font. But watch the graphics. Don't go crazy on the graphics. Watch the pictures. You know, just because. And if you go to any kind of fast food chain, most of them have pictures on their digital menus, because that's what they know how to do. Because they want to be. They want to be seen as a value, right? And if you're trying to get, you know, if you're getting anywhere from, you know, $16 and up for a burger, you got to make sure that, you know, you're getting that thing dialed in pretty tight. Okay, so good menu. I would just make a couple tweaks on there. I just move the pricing around real quick. I change some of the fonts. I wouldn't, you know, do all caps, put the pricing in the end. I probably would dump the pictures also. One of the other things too is like, you see, like here they have all this stuff, all the Excel, you know, Southern sandwiches, and they have all the stuff it comes with, comes with this, this, and this. We call this the junk drawer. The junk drawer is all the stuff that comes with the menu or tells the stuff you can't do. I usually put all that stuff at the bottom down here in this empty space. So if I was on this menu, I'd be. I'd put it down here in this spot, right? So all this stuff right here on the menu, you know, comes with this, comes with that, comes with this salad for this, all this upsell stuff upgrade to larger salad. All this stuff, I want to put it down here in this empty spot. I want to free up this stuff, and I might even make this title a little bit bigger just to draw more attention to it. Especially if it's a high profit category for me, I might want to draw those a little bit bigger. So many times we tend to like, we tend to make all the categories the same font size. When I want to maybe change the font size up a little bit. If I really want to get those things kind of amped up, Mac and cheese probably is a huge profit margin. I definitely would probably move that. I would probably move my Mac and cheese and my Mac and cheese and my chicken sandwiches. So this is another thing about profitability. This is why knowing your food cost is so important when it comes to menu design. So if I know my Mac and cheese is like, just kill it. I make a huge profit on those. I would probably move it to the top of the page and make a big, huge hoopla up. Instead of putting at the bottom of the page, I would put up at the top of the page. I would chick move the chicken sandwiches and the Mac and mack it up around. If my Mac and cheese was more profitable, I would really amp those things up. All right. I always love the thank yous on air, supporting our family business. Boom, boom, boom. Always nice. Always nice to say thank you. Perfect. All right, one more. I got one more. I got one more. All right, so this is a. This is actually one of my clients, Farrell Restaurant. They're up in Colorado. You know, great use of diet restrictions. So diet restrictions that you tell people if it's vegan or it's gluten free. This is a big thing. It's a big, huge trend. If you haven't noticed, there's a lot people that have a lot of dietary restrictions make it easy for them to find stuff. There's a restaurant here in Chandler in Phoenix that my. My girlfriend and I go to because she's gluten free. We go there because majority of the menu is gluten free. It's easy for us to find stuff because they put the big GF next to everything. It's for her to make decisions really, really fast. So this is a really great way. And this also goes back to knowing Your guests, if your guests are into this, and that's really a concern for them, make it easy for them if it's dairy free, if it's vegetarians, vegan, make it easy for people to find stuff. Now the only thing I would suggest on this menu is maybe perhaps offering a mid price adventure menu at a three course. They have this adventure menu, it's a six course menu at $90. And then they got a beverage pairing for $40 per person. I would probably, I would probably see about dropping my price a little bit maybe on this. And I would offer the beverage pairing and make up my money on the beverage pairing. And I might even offer a three course menu one too. And maybe not on the weekends, but maybe I offer this on my weeknights when I'm trying to drive that traffic on, you know, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday nights. And then just leave this one for Friday and Saturday. Right. Don't bolt out. I'll say, like, don't draw attention Every time we apply 22 service charge to all checks. That's great. I love it that you do it. She does what's known as a fair wage fee. It's really, really cool. But you don't really need to bolt out. You want to draw attention to it. I would just take that, not bolt it. All right. Position items by profitability. Again, I would put my items in here by profitability. Stuff at the top of the column, bottom of the column tends to sell better. More so I would make sure, like my steak tartare, you know, if the turnips is a more profitable item, I would probably switch around with the steak tartar. Right. The lamb, of course, probably not, as, you know, probably a little bit higher food cost. Carrots again, those are a great one. So I would move my items around by profitability. Chefs get really weird about this. So you gotta be careful with chefs. And then maybe change the wording. I said something about bread and the number of pieces. There's a thing in psychology called price juxtaposition. Price juxtaposition is like when you put something out there, I have to have something to compare it to. So when you say four pieces of our seasonal bread number and I see six dollars, I have to search my database, my brain, to see if that's a good deal. It's called price juxtaposition. That's why I'm always really leery about people putting prices on social media. Like, don't put a pizza for 12.99. Because when you put a pizza for 12.99, I have to look through my database of my brain and understand is that a good deal or not? So four pieces of bread doesn't say how big the pieces are. Stuff like that. I know it's house focaccia, it's house made. I would just say, you know, delectable slices of our seasonal boiled bread served with, you know, whether the accoutrements are that go with it for $6. But be very careful because that four pieces, I gotta understand what are the size of the pieces because we've all been to that restaurant where you order something and it's a, you know, price and then you get like little bitty, tiny little pieces and you're like, what the hell? That wasn't worth six bucks. So now we have to do what's called confirmation bias. When something comes out and it's not the way I want it, I have to justify it. Okay, cool, right? Anybody have any questions real quick? We'll wrap this sucker up pretty fast. If you have any questions, type them in the chat. I'm gonna try and do these, these workshops on Fridays here inside the restaurant Coach Nation and on also on YouTube available too. But I wanted to roll out something cool for you really quick before we jump in, before we leave today, here's my gift for you attending today. So my coaching programs, I have quite a few, a few different levels or different coaching programs available. Most people, Restaurant Coach Nation is the first one. They start off. It's that free Facebook group everybody jumps into. We do a little training here. You can ask me questions, of course. You can direct message me whenever you have questions. A lot of people ask me stuff all the time through direct messaging on Facebook. It's a great way to get a hold of me. And then we moved up. Then we next step was the Restaurant Coach University, which is my online university, which has I think it's 27 online courses. And there's a two hour group call every month that we go over like a high level topic like marketing or hiring or something like that. Restaurant Masterminds is my mastermind group. They meet twice a week and they get two weekly calls plus a whole toolbox, a whole set of training courses for them. They get a whole toolbox of stuff that takes them deeper down the rabbit hole about hiring, culture, menu design, food costing, systems, profitability, marketing. And they also get included with. They also get the Restaurant Coach University and then the Restaurant Accelerator was my high end program. That's where you get one on one coaching with me each week, plus you get three Group calls a week. So it's, you know, probably the fastest way to get to the top. I call the summit of outstanding. But I was thinking, like, how can I get people a little more involved? How can I? Because I'm really dedicated to helping you learn, grow, develop and become better. So what tool could I give you to help you make people start like, oh, I don't really know about coaching yet. I don't really know who you are yet, Donald. I really know what this is all about. Coaching seems like a little woo wooish. You're going to make me think I'm crazy. And I always tell restaurant owners you are crazy. I'm just trying to try to calm down the crazy. So I decided what if I have something in between Restaurant Coach Nation and Restaurant Coach University? So I'm rolling out today and you guys are going to be the first one to get beta access to it. I'll put the link in the chat after this call. It's called the Vault. Right. And the Vault is going to be a really cool new tool. It is. I'm really, really super excited about this because it's going to allow you to not only get some really great training, but it's also going to hold you accountable. It's a really cool program. It's an online community portal and where we're going to have, you can have group chats, we can reach out to people. Let me kind of break down what it is. It's an online 247 online private community for independent restaurant owners, chefs, team members who want to become better at their craft. I'm all about learning. One of my, my philosophies is called Kaizen. It's one of my core values. Kaizen's constant, never ending improvement. All my members know that we subscribe to a 1% improvement mindset. We want to be 1% better today than we were yesterday. So the Vault was designed to help people get that. It's going to hold you accountable. It actually is really cool because it has like leaderboards available. If you participate, you can jump in and you can get like points for doing stuff. It's really, really going to be a really cool program. So you can network with other restaurant professionals. There's going to be other experts in the Vault. They'll be able to give you some of their input. I got some marketing guys, I got some guys that know ghost kitchens. I got people that are good at media, I got people good at marketing. We got all kinds of people in the, in the Vault. They're going to be organized meetups around the globe. So like, if you want to head up a chapter, like you're in New York City and you want to do a meetup with some, some people in the vault in New York City, we can do meetups and stuff like that. We can get together. We're going to be monthly challenges that if you do the challenge, you earn points. And here's the beautiful thing, you can use those points to get access to training from the Restaurant Coach University. Right. And then the leaders can win tickets. So on the leaderboard you can win tickets. If you're in the leaderboard for like a couple months, you can win tickets to my live workshops. In Arizona. I do quarterly workshops here. I do one called the Restaurant Owner Boot Camp, which is a two day workshop here going over the eight driving force of restaurant success. And then every October, I have my big three day restaurant success summit in Arizona. Six speakers, 18 workshops, three days. Normally goes for 1500 dollars a ticket. You can get tickets if you're on the leaderboard and you're, you're like the top leader for like the next four months. You're gonna get tickets to Restaurant Success Summit in October for free. All right. It's gonna be awesome. And I'm gonna start you off right away with 12 hours of free training. I'm gonna give you access to two courses right away. I got a bunch of great training in there from the Restaurant Coach Nation training sessions. There's. And then also got some stuff from the pizza summit I did with Bruce Irving. 12 hours of training to get you jumped in jump started. All you gotta do is just gotta go in and sign up. I will put the link in the chat. Use that link to sign up. You're going to be in the beta group, please. It is a beta group so it's going to be a little bit learning from all of us. I'm learning how to use the platform. It's called Community. It's on a platform called Kajaba. It's where I usually host all my training for all my coaching programs. They added this new feature called a community section. And I figured it was a great way for us to get together and for people who really wanted to learn and grow and develop. We're gonna do that every Friday morning if time available. If I'm not traveling, we'll try to do Friday morning trainings here, 9:00am Pacific Standard Time here on the Restaurant Coach Nation and on YouTube. If you miss it, you can always go and watch the replays. I keep the replays up for about three or four days, and I usually take the replays down. But if you'd love to jump in anytime. If you have any questions for me, you can always email me donald the restaurantcoach.com you can always DM me on Facebook. You can DM me on Instagram. I'm at Donald Burns. I appreciate everyone being here today. If you have any other questions, please reach out to me. I'm more than happy. My mission has always been to help you build your brand, strengthen your team, and increase your profits. If I can do that in any way, please let me know how I can be of service to you. Everyone. Have a fantastic day.
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