You Should Close Your Restaurant

What are five words no restaurant owner wants to hear? Stick around. And in this episode, I'm going to share them with you and show you how to make sure that you never have to hear them. Hey. Welcome to the Restaurant Coach podcast. It is the cure for the common restaurant. I'm Donald Burns, the restaurant coach, author of the your restaurant sucks trilogy and Savage Restaurant Success. And also I am the creator of the TRC method. So what are those five words? You should close your restaurant. Honestly, I can't believe the words that just came out of my mouth. There was an exceptionally long silence on the other end of a zoom call I was having with a coaching member of mine. I mean, enough silence that you knew deep down this person never, ever expected you to say that. And yet there I was, telling a restaurant owner those very words. You should close your restaurant. It actually made me sick to my stomach and quite frankly, relieved at the same time. Every week on his coaching call, it was the same bullshit and excuses because he could not implement the tools that I had been giving him over the last six months. His general manager was just one excuse after another why she couldn't complete any of the tasks that I assigned to her. She was overhead and would not admit that she was drowning and taking the entire restaurant down with her. Now, in 14 years of being the restaurant coach, I have only told three restaurant owners those five words. You should close your restaurant. Now, you would think that with book titles like, your restaurant sucks, your restaurant still sucks, your restaurant culture sucks, that telling people this would be something that would be easy for me to do and that telling someone to close the doors is actually something that you want to do sometimes. No. I mean, no. It's hard to tell someone to close their restaurant. It's a soul crusher to see someone who invested in a coaching program who knows that they must change or become extinct. It's also my duty as a coach to protect your brand, even if that means protecting the brand from yourself. So here's the thing. When you commit to working with me, I'm committed to doing everything I can to get you to implement the changes that you must turn your restaurant and life around. But here's the thing. You must take new action. Now, you can call it tough love, straight talk, or even being rude. And yes, I will curse. I will get extremely frustrated at times. But I will never talk down to you. I only want you to care as much as I do about getting the restaurant and the life that you desire. So many people want a better restaurant and a better life. But when it comes down to making the tough decisions and to really, you know, cowboy up, they back down and retreat to their comfort zone. Do you know of anything great that came from being comfortable? I can't think of one. And believe me, I thought about it a lot. Getting comfortable is the most dangerous place, mentally, that you can ever reach. Because when you become comfortable, you really are just numb. I mean, think about it. You don't want more, you don't want less. You settle for whatever you have and convince yourself you that things are good. When a restaurant owner says to me that their restaurant is good, what I actually hear them say is, you know, I've tried a few times to raise my standard and push my team to be better, but here's the thing. They resist. And it was too much of a fight. So I just basically accepted that this is the best will ever be, and I could just lose so much if I keep pushing them better to keep what I have. All right, maybe that was a little over the top, but you kind of get the idea. I mean, that's what I hear when you say to me that things are good. So here's the real problem. When restaurants fail to make the changes that they must make, it doesn't take much to see where the real issue is. And that would be the owner. Well, to be specific, the owner's mindset. And I would estimate easily that 99% of what holds restaurants back from growth or. Or even profitability is mindset. Now, right now, you're probably saying, all right, Coach, well, who would not want a profitable restaurant? I didn't say it didn't make sense. I mean, most of the crazy shit I see restaurant owners do doesn't make sense to me at all. Here's what I've learned to understand. It might not make sense to me, but it makes sense to them. Their mindset. And your mindset, too, sees the world through a unique pair of eyes. Your eyes. Now, no one has your eyes in which to see the world. No one has your upbringing. No one has your experiences that shaped your beliefs that you have in life. No one has been through exactly what you have been through. Now, what do these hidden triggers do to your mindset? Well, honestly, they make you a little less trusting and perhaps a little jaded about the world. And if you aren't, congratulations, because you're one of the very few people who don't have some emotional baggage to drag around. Now, here's my bet. I bet that you probably have some emotional baggage that you're dragging around, even if it's just a carry on size. This is where consulting and coaching differ. Consulting is about solving the problem you tell me about. Coaching is about solving the people problems that you don't tell me upfront about, but that are lurking in the shadows ready to pounce upon your restaurant. Yeah, you've got some shit to deal with. Now, as your coach, my job is not to give you a pass on your bullshit. My job is to get you to deal with your bullshit. The problem is this restaurant owner and let's call him Harry. Harry's dead. He just doesn't know it. Now I mentioned earlier I had to tell Harry that he should close his restaurant and it wasn't easy. And the sad part is that Harry is, I mean at the time was roughly losing around $2,000 a day. And the other sad thing is that he thinks increasing sales will solve all his problems. Now sales does solve a lot of issues. And take note here, if your restaurant is set up to be profitable from the start. So how do you do that? Well, you do the necessary groundwork before you open. This includes having every item on your menu cost it out down to the penny. That means knowing what the minimum viable staffing is that you're going to need to run a shift. Oh, and here's a little inside tip. Your team always thinks they need more people to handle the workload. The only exception to that is the service team that always wants fewer people on the floor so they can make more tips. When you set your restaurant up to make it easy or better for the staff and not what's best for your guest or for your profitability, you are dead. You just don't know it. When your team runs the restaurant on their terms, it's very much having like the tail wagged the dog. It doesn't work. However, there was still an option. If Harry doesn't close his restaurant, it's going to drain him so badly financially that he might never ever recover. Now, my follow up advice was that he shut down and start fresh. Now here's the downside. No one ever wants to think of all the crap they have to do to start over. However, Harry was in such a bad situation that it was either start fresh or close it down for good. You need to understand that culture drives your restaurant is so important and yet so many don't give it the attention or focus that it truly deserves. That, my friend, is a sad thing because culture is created by either design or default. You want to be as active in the creation of your culture as you are with the other areas of your restaurant that you love to do, like the menu design or the restaurant design. So let's Talk Culture Design 101. The first step is to get clear, and I mean crystal fucking clear, about what you want your culture to be. I mean, you do it with other areas of your restaurant, so why not your culture? If restaurant owners would shift their attention to the team experience as much as they do as the guest experience, the industry would not have the labor turmoil and trouble that it currently has now. So let's get things started the right way. Let's give a definition of what culture really, truly is. Now, most people think culture and brand are one and the same. Not quite. Brand is what your guests say about you to their friends, their family. And in online reviews, culture is what your team says about you to their family, friends, and to each other. Now, they exist in a symbiotic relationship. One feeds the other. Now, you want to take notes, lots of notes, because this is going to give you a couple gold nuggets on how to create a really great culture that's going to allow you to make more while working fewer hours in your restaurant. So whatever happened to Harry? Well, after a month of deliberation, Harry finally decided that he was not cut out for the restaurant industry. Like many who start a restaurant, he believed that it was easy. And for the record, restaurant success is simple. Now, I said simple, but not easy. I mean, hey, if it was easy, we would not see 50% of new restaurants close their doors within three years. The good news is that you're here now, feeding your brain some good stuff. Just remember that everything you read in one of my books or listen to a video or on my podcast, it's going to give you knowledge. Taking that information and applying it to your actual restaurant is going to result in real power. So I encourage you not to take any of my books, my podcast, or my videos lightly. The things I share with you have changed the trajectory of over 2800 independent restaurants. And I know they can help you if you apply them. Hashtag write this shit down. Taking new actions is the first key to long term restaurant success. Hey, make sure to hit that like and subscribe button before you leave. And subscribe. And please share this video with someone that you feel could really use the information and the message. Now, for those that really want to create a culture of excellence and a culture of accountability, then grab a seat in my free 2 hour TRC method masterclass. It is a live training, so no replays. Just head over to restaurant coachmasterclass.com to save your seat today.