Restaurant Revolution - Navigating the Latest Trends and Innovations

What are the hot trends this year? Take a front row seat and join me in Madrid at Hospitality Innovation Planet, where I share the latest trends on how to incorporate these in your restaurant to make an impact and dominate your market. Hola. All right, let's start this thing off. Raise your hand if you want more from your restaurant. Anybody want more from the restaurant? Oh, I got some people back there. They want more from their restaurant. Keep your hand up. Gotta find out where the thing is at who thinks their restaurant could be better. Raise their hand. Keep your hand really high if you think your restaurant could be better. Because I want to ask you this question. If you raised your hand, why isn't your restaurant better? If you know it could be better and you want it to be better, why isn't it better? We're going to talk about those things today. I'm going to give you a bunch of tools to take with you that you can actually start getting those questions answered. That I know my restaurant can be better and I want it to be better, but I don't know how to get there. How many times you heard a consultant tell you you should work more on your business, less in your business? They say it all the time, but they don't tell you how to do it. I'm going to show you how to do it today. If we've never met before, my name is Donald Burns. I am known as the restaurant coach. I am a former. I always say I'm a recovering restaurant owner, a consultant. I've been a chef with an American chef game, Wolfgang Puck. I was a chef for Wolf for five years. I'm a restaurant investor and a former Air Force pararescue. Oh, I gotta do the pose. Everyone always says do the pose. I also have a few books out. My first book was called you'd Restaurant sucks. My second book is called your restaurant still sucks. And my third book is called your restaurant culture sucks. Today I want to talk about when I opened my first restaurant. I had been in the restaurant business for a while. My father was a chef. I apprenticed with him. I had been in the business for, like 15 years. I was 30 when I opened my first restaurant. Like a lot of young people who opened their restaurant, their first restaurant especially, I was very, very confident that I knew what I was doing. And I thought it was going to be a huge success. I thought as soon as I opened the doors, people were gonna flood the place. I was gonna have to have an armored car out back to track all the money and take out the back Door. It did not happen like that. I was really, really disappointed that the business didn't take off as fast as I thought it would. So what happens? You start having doubts, you start having fear, and then, I hate to say, that's when the nightmare started. I started waking up in the middle of the night having nightmares about my restaurant, having nightmares about payroll, having nightmares about the bills, having nightmares about staff. And I didn't want to admit it, but I was a little bit over my head, and I did not want to be honest with myself. And that's the first step to getting the restaurant you really want, is you got to be honest with yourself, is that you are the one that's holding you back. Once you admit that you're the one holding your restaurant back, you can break free and start getting better. I was very fortunate. I was about six months into my restaurant, and there was a gentleman who came to my restaurant a lot, a very, very successful businessman. And he sat down one night to have the talk with me. And you've probably heard, you know, hey, I want to have a talk with you. I was like, okay. He says, don't take this the wrong way, Donald. And I said, all right, Peter. He said, listen, you're a very, very talented chef. I love your restaurant. I. This team's really amazing. When I come here, I always feel like I'm getting amazing service. The food's always out of the park, because I really, really fear that you're not gonna be open in six months. And I said, like a lot of restaurant owners, I was in denial. I said, oh, no, no, no. We're just a little under the radar. Peter said to me, the last thing you want to be is a little under the radar in the restaurant business. And Peter said one thing. He said, listen, I'm gonna share something with you that I share with very few people, and if you understand this concept, it will change your life. He took out a napkin, and he took out this little napkin on the cocktail table, and he took a pen out of his pocket, and he wrote on there three words. He wrote, people, product, process. I did not know that that little napkin. And I still have the napkin actually, to stay. It's in a. In a little box in my office. I still have that napkin because this little framework called the 3P framework. People product process changed the course of my life and also changed the trajectory of my restaurant. It got me from being stuck working in my restaurant to where I can start working on my restaurant. And I'm going to share today. I'M going to show you exactly what the 3P framework looks like. This is. I've spent the last 13 years modifying this, refining it, and I teach this to all my clients. The 3P framework works. If you follow the framework. It's always people, product, process. I will tell my clients this. I will give you the 3P framework. I will tell you the exact order you have to put everything in. They will try to mix around the combination. And it never works because everything starts. Everyone always thinks it starts with product. It's like, I gotta know my menu because I have it in my menu because I'm a restaurant. Well, you know what? Then I need some processes, I need some checklist. Oh, then I probably need to hire some people. Better people. Now it's always people, product, process. And anything that you're stuck in your restaurant, I would tell you Right now, this 3P framework is the key to unlocking success. If your marketing sucks, excuse my language, if your marketing sucks, it's not really you need more marketing. You want to fix your menu first. You want to have a highly profitable menu. And to have a highly profitable menu, you got to know your food cost. Same thing. When people say, I can't hire good people. There's no good people out there. How many people are having problems hiring people? A lot of people having problems hiring people. A lot of times I will say, when they say, oh, I just can't find anybody, I'll say, is it really there's no one out there, or is it that really no one wants to work for you? Ooh, that hurts them. That's kind of like a kick. But you gotta face reality. In my very first book, your restaurant sucks. The very first quote in the book is, the truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off. So true. There's things we know that we're not doing that we know we should do. And I say, we restaurant owners are famous for shoulding. I should cost out my menu. I should market more. I should look at some new tech stacks. I should look at some new stuff. I should, I should, I should, I should. Basically, you should all over yourself. You gotta stop shooting on yourself. You gotta turn that shit into a must. So today we're gonna take this 3P framework, and I'm gonna put it into the lens of some stuff out there that's coming in 2023. Some of it's new. Some of my friends, like Michael Wolf, is going to talk about some of these things in a later talk today. But these are some really Cool ideas. If you take that knowledge and apply it, you're going to get a better restaurant. So new trends coming. We're going to use a 3P framework for this. The first one of course is people. You want to focus on your guests and team. Now I put guest and team, but I want you to start thinking about this. Most restaurant owners focused on the guest experience. We're always concerned about the guest experience. Was the guest happy? How long did they wait? How was the food? What was this? And this? I want you to start thinking in 2023, I want you to focus more on the team experience. Because here's my motto, if I make a better team experience, they will create an amazing guest experience. But so many times we have the combination backwards just like that 3P framework. So let's focus on things that we can do to actually bring people into the place. The first one we're going to talk about is text message marketing, SMS marketing. I will tell you right now, 10 years ago, no one did text message marketing. No one did influencer marketing. There's a great company, Solo Foodies. These guys are awesome. I mean, if you want to like drive traffic to your place with using modern technology, talk to these guys. These guys will get influencers and come to your restaurant. All it is going to cost you is a meal. And they will have people come to your restaurant and they'll use SMS marketing too. A lot of restaurants are using SMS marketing. Here's the stats about SMS marketing. You want to understand 80%. 80% of consumers prefer to communicate with you via text. And the beautiful thing about text message, how many people usually read their text message right away? 90% do. As soon as I get a text message and I say, you know, on my Apple watch, all of a sudden I'll get a message on my phone or my watch right away. You gotta understand. And then there's certain technology you can use. Things like chat, GPT, GPT3, which is new AI technology. You can integrate this stuff to your SMS to be automated where it actually will respond using artificial intelligence based on the words they say and what they ask. It's going to be really, really crazy in the next couple years. It's going to be crazy. But SMS marketing is really where it's at now. This works in the United States. I don't know if it'll work over here. But in the US the business model and the work days are shifting. After Covid happened and all the restaurants shut down, of course a lot of people left the restaurant industry. Why? Because the restaurant industry has a horrible, horrible reputation for being a bad place to work. We have to do a better job of treating people like human beings if we want to bring people back into the restaurant industry. So one of the things in the United States they're looking at is called shorter work weeks. They took that. It wasn't a brand new idea. They actually just took the model of like hospital workers, firefighters, paramedics, and they started doing like these new job models, which is really actually working well for a lot of restaurant brands. Two of them that are really familiar is there's a restaurant called Dig Dig is doing a four day work week that's really working well. And then of course, you know, like anytime somebody comes up with something and says, oh, you got four, I can beat that and I can do three. Everybody heard of Chick Fil A. Chick Fil A is a pretty famous brand in the United States. There's a franchisee in Florida who went to a three day work week. They work three days on, three days off. They work in what's called a pod. So the beautiful thing about this is that when you work in your pod, you work with the same people all three days. So. So you get used to how they work. You get used to their tempo, you get used to their rhythm. You kind of get this kind of gel with them and you kind of get this kind of rhythm going. It's really great. So they work three days on, three days off. Three days on, three days off. It's kind of a weird schedule, but it really works for these people. And he saw turnover drop down to like 5%. And he saw people applying like crazy because they thought this was so cool. You got to start thinking outside the box about how we're going to start treating people a little bit better. In the product part, we're going to really focus on menu and marketing. That's in the 3P framework. The product part is all about menu and marketing. The biggest thing in the menus is pre fee menus are not just for fine dining. 3 course menu. Fixed price menus have really made a comeback, especially United States. This was based off. There's a popular promotion that goes on in the United States. It's called Restaurant Week. Restaurant Week is a. Restaurants will come together and they'll do a special three course menu for a low price to drive traffic. Well, a lot of people said, why do we have to wait for Restaurant Week? Why don't we just run a, you know, a fixed price menu during the weekdays when it's slow to Drive traffic. So a lot of people are doing this fixed price menus, I like to call them different things depending on your market. If you're a little more upscale, you can call it a pre fee menu. You call it a fixed price menu. A lot of my clients, they call them a locals menu and they run your locals menus on like Tuesday, Wednesdays, Thursdays to drive traffic on those slower nights. It's usually a lower priced menu, like 25 to $35. But then you make the money up on wine flights and beer flights. And every time they do a wine or beer flight, they offer always two flights. They either do a vertical tasting, like the same type of, you know, wine, or they do a progressive tasting. So they always offer two types of flights with every meal. Vegan tasting menus are big now in the United States too. And then there's this one restaurant on Sunday night. This is really getting popular. They call it Sunday supper. Sunday supper club is a family style dinner. They serve it family style. It's almost like all you can eat. And now these guys do it with fried chicken. I don't know how much fried chicken I could eat. I don't know, maybe four pieces. That's about it. But they do a fried chicken supper club and the place is packed every Sunday night. So you want to start thinking of creative, really, really innovative. What can I do to drive traffic on those slower nights, not the busy nights, because that's the last thing you want to do. Another thing making a big comeback in the United States is non alcoholic spirits mocktails. Non alcoholic. What do we just have? Dry January, right? Which flowed over to. Now people are doing dry February. I just hope it doesn't travel onto March. You can't do dry March. Come on, we got St. Patrick's Day. You can't do dry March. But non alcoholic spirits are huge business and you're missing out if you don't offer some of these things. And the beautiful thing is some of these brands are really, really good flavors. You wouldn't even know. I mean, they have some really, really cool brands out there. Like this Liry is a really, really great brand. They make this triple sec, the orange sec. They also make like a blanco, which is almost like a blanco tequila. It's amazing. It tastes just like, just like a margarita. Especially when you put your sour mix in there. Beautiful, beautiful stuff. And then for marketing, short videos are in. They say the average person has an attention span of a goldfish, which is about 9 seconds. Short videos are the new frontier and the beautiful thing about YouTube shorts is that they're the same size. The long format of, like, TikTok also reels. It is the only kind of frontier where you can still get organic reach you. YouTube is investing a lot of money into shorts. So when they invest something into the shorts, they put the algorithm behind it. When they put the algorithm behind it, it's really easy for you to get 10, 20, 30,000 views of your stuff. And then when you get some views, you can put in some ad money to retarget those to get people to actually come in the door. TikTok ads right now in the United States is probably the best bang for the buck as far as marketing dollars as you can do. It used to be Facebook ads. Facebook ads aren't really as effective as they used to be, but TikTok ads are the place to be. You want to start doing short content. You want to start doing really, really cool, creative little videos and get your brand out there. And the biggest thing you gotta do is you gotta market a lot more than you do. Most restaurants, like, post once a day. I say if you post once a day, that's like getting a big pebble of rocks, going down to the ocean and throwing a pebble in the ocean and think you're making a splash. You're not doing nothing. You gotta market more consistently. Studies have shown Overall on TikTok, by itself, 38% of U.S. users of TikTok have ordered from a restaurant they saw on TikTok. 53% of millennials on TikTok have ordered from a restaurant. 72% of people prefer to have a video instead of a text. So instead of posting that boring photo of your feature, get your chef on camera and have him say something. And you say, you don't want to see my chef on camera. All right, well, get somebody else on camera. But get somebody on camera. It's like, I don't care. Just get somebody. Just put them in a chef hat if you have to, but, you know, get somebody on camera. Talk about what's going on in your restaurant. Don't do boring photos. Don't do texting. The worst thing I can see on social media when I go to someone's social media page is I see a picture of their menu. Oh, my God. I mean, talk about, like, you were so lazy. All you did was just put a picture of your menu up. I mean, that's. I mean, that's like the epitome of laziness. Get on camera. I will tell you this about being on camera and if you're scared about being on camera, I just want to tell my clients, nobody cares what you look like. It's more about the message than the messenger. So if you're scared about I don't look good, my hair's not good, I don't look like this, I don't look like that. No one cares what you look like, long as the message is good. Then I'll have people say, oh, Donald, I don't like my voice. You know, there's tons of AI out there that will actually do voiceovers for you. There's a company out there called well Said Labs. I put a video on my Instagram page because I wanted to show my clients how easy it was. I created a video on my Instagram page. I used AI to write the script. I used free stock video from Pexels and I used well Said Labs AI to make the voice recording. And then I put it on my Instagram page and I did it in like 20 minutes because I wanted to show them how easy it was and not to have any excuses why you can't do video. You can do video. You just got to say you want to do it. They're estimating by 90, by the end of this year, 90% of all traffic on the Internet is going to be short form video. You want to jump on that bandwagon right now? You got to. Social media is also not just a place for you to talk about your restaurant. It's also a great place to interact with your guests. Having stuff on your call to action. Message me. DM me. Want reservations. Message us. A lot of people are going through social media because a lot of these, these, especially these Gen Z's, they like to stay in the apps and when they're on your like Instagram page, they, they want to go where it's convenient for them. And if they can just hit a button and message your restaurant and talk to someone live time, they're going to be converted and they're going to come to your place. The worst thing you can do for a younger millennial or a Gen Z is make them go all over the place, make them have extra clicks. The fewer clicks, the better. You want to make sure you keep them engaged and interact with them as soon as you can. And a lot of this stuff can be integrated like ChatGPT to have an automated responses. It's pretty cool stuff coming up this way. The other thing you want to do is you want to sell a journey. You've probably heard of like the traditional pub crawl. A lot of, like, bars do a pub crawl where they, like, go from Irish bar to Irish bar. Well, then someone got the idea. It's like, well, why don't we do it for other stuff? Why don't we do, like a taco crawl? Or why don't we do a pizza crawl? Why don't we do a burger crawl? And then they started getting together with restaurants in their town and started organizing together. Remember, you think that you're solo and you think that your competition's out to crush you. They're just trying to survive too work with people. Compound your social media. Because let's put it this way, if I have. If I did a. Like a. Let's say, let's use the example for Spain. If I wanted to do like a tapas crawl in, like, Madrid, I could get like, there's all different types of regions, different type of tapsas. My friend Ramon here was telling me about the. You know, I love going out to dinner with him because we're sitting down, he's telling me, this is from this region of Spain. I love the history of it. What if we took, like, in Madrid, we had a map of, you know, a map of Spain, and we had, like, we got a group of like 10 restaurants that had different tapas from different regions of Spain in Madrid. And every time somebody took this little map you could print out pretty easy, they went around to that restaurant, they got a stamp on it for every place they went to. And by the time it was like a treasure hunt, like a tapas treasure hunt, and they stamped this map and then they brought it back and they could enter a drawing for a prize. 10 restaurants working together. Let's say you all have 5,000 followers on Instagram. Think about that. 10 times 5, that's 50,000 people. Now you're reaching and it didn't take you anything. Just a little collaboration, just working together a little bit more. It's so easy. But you get so stuck in your head about, they're out to take my business. And then the big thing, chat GPT AI this thing is amazing. My clients use this all the time. We use it for stuff like writing better social media posts. So I took a social media post and I said on here, I said, draft out an Instagram post for an online pizza restaurant using the tone and style of Guy Fieri, a famous celebrity chef. And ChatGPT made this, this, this post, including the emojis and hashtags. It was pretty cool. We also took the chat GPT and I said, oh, what Else can it do? Hey, would it write out a video script for a restaurant so they can start doing short form videos. So I put in there draft out a three minute video script for Altavino restaurant who makes their pasta from scratch. It even gave me the cues for the video. Starts off with a sheet of this cuts to this. Narrator says this cuts to this scene. It is amazing what this stuff will do. And then you're thinking, well, you know, I probably should email people more often. Well, hey, don't know what to write in an email. Just get ChatGPT to write an email for you. I have clients that use ChatGPT to write emails for them. You want to be out in front of your guest all the time? You have to be out in front of your guest all the time. In the process part we talk about strategy and profitability. Two big things I talked about a little bit. Number one is partnerships. You want to start partnering with people, partnering with places. Starbucks has a deal with Delta Airlines. Think about who in your market could you partner with to help cross promote each other. It doesn't necessarily have to be an airline. Could be maybe a car dealer, stuff like that. Think of like who could you promote with or cross promote in your market to get more business and get more exposure. Another thing is like pop ups with Chef. Chef's collaborations are a huge thing. A lot of times we think this is only for the super high end restaurants. It doesn't have to be call up some people, hey man, I'd love to have you come down and like do a dish of the night, do a pop in, do some video, have them hanging out and stuff like that. You got to have more collaborations. We got to start finding ways to start working together if we want our restaurants to survive. Not thinking it's all just me and I'm not going to work with anybody else. And then lastly, with inflation supply chain issues, you really need to double down on your food costing every month. I'll have someone call me and they'll say, 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? I'll say, let me ask you a question, what's your theoretical food cost? And they say I don't know. And I said, that's the problem, you see, theoretical food cost is the one you want to know. Theoretical food cost is called Perfect World. That's where I cost out everything on my menu down to the penny. That's what I call theoretical or perfect world. To me, I look at theoretical as potential. Actual is how most people do their food costing. Most people take their invoices, divide it by their sales, and they say, that's my food cost. So this guy who calls me and said my food cost is 30%, is that good? I'll say, I don't know. If Your theoretical is 28, 30% is a pretty good food cost. But if your theoretical is 21, you've got a big gap there. The average restaurant has a gap between theoretical and actual food cost of 9%. When restaurants say to me, I'm only making 2 to 5% profit, I'll tell them right now. The first thing I'll ask them is, do you know your theoretical food costs? And they say, no. I say, we can find 5% right there. Just by knowing the theoretical and actual food costs and closing that gap. Trust me, you can find anywhere from 3 to 8% in your. In your profits right there. If you just did the work on it. I'm always shocked when people don't know what their food cost is. It's probably. I always say it's like. It's like gonna give me a heart attack. It's gonna be bad. So double down your food cost. You must know your cost. You must know your numbers. I always have a saying. If you don't know your numbers, you don't have a business. What you have is a hobby, a very expensive hobby. And your spouse is probably very tired of that hobby. Like, when is this hobby going to pay the bills? When is this hobby going to get us vacation? When's this hobby going to buy me a Louis Vuitton? You know, they want to know these things now. Everything I talked about today is basically a tool. But tools are just potential. Like a hammer on the table is just potential. You have to pick up the hammer and actually apply it. And how you use a tool depends on the results you want. I can pick up a hammer on the table. I can put a nail on the wall and hammer, you know, a nail on the wall. I can hang up a picture of my family. Great use of tools. I can take that hammer, hit someone in the head out of anger, go to jail for a very long time. Bad use of tools. Tools are just potential. It's how you apply them. It's going to make the difference in your life and in your restaurant. The biggest thing I will tell you above everything else, please, if my slides work, please, whatever your goals are, don't wait. We all have these big Audacious goals. I call them bags. We want to make this much money. I want to get my restaurant to this many million. I want to make this kind of profit. I want to take these many vacations. Whatever your goals are, don't wait, please. You know why? Because the problem is you think you have time. And I will tell you right now, you don't. Let me share a story with you. September, September 27, 2018, I died twice. I had cardiac arrest. Just blacked out. If it wasn't for a couple really good, like, off duty police officers that gave me CPR and brought me back, I wouldn't be here today. The problem I did with a lot of my stuff I had up until then with a lot of my goals, well, pushing my brand, writing books. I thought I had plenty of time. And then time was just up. I didn't get a warning. I didn't get a message in the mail saying, hey, Donald, next week you're going to have a cardiac arrest and die. You might want to get all your stuff together and make sure you get all your goals done. No, you don't know when your time is up. Do not wait to take action. You got to start making moves today and you got to start making a plan. Do not wait, take action today to get the restaurant and the life that you truly, truly desire. To help you with that. I do have books. My first book is called you'd Restaurant Sucks. My second book is called you'd Restaurant Still Sucks. And my third book is called you'd Restaurant Culture Sucks. And then everyone's been on me, I've been coming. This is my sixth year at Hip. Everyone's saying, hey, Donald, when are you going to put your book in Spanish? It's done. So your restaurant sucks. And then your restaurant, tu restaurante. So I have those books available for you. They are available on Amazon. If you'd like to hang out. I'll have some books to give away. It's going to be a first come, first serve basis. You gotta line up over here. I want to say thank you so much. I appreciate you guys so much. Thank you.