Welcome back to the podcast. You know, up until now, restaurants have not been able to scale their business with an individual location or even multiple locations. And I’m not talking about growing number of locations. I’m talking about scaling your customers to get more customers in the door. Now, e commerce brands, if you put up a website and you’ve got a product for sale, you can cast a broad net around the world.

And restaurants have not been able to do this. And now, you can actually zero in and focus on your target customer. with technology called Dishio. You’re going to want to hear all about it. It’s a way to scale your restaurant. My guest, Brett Linkletter, is co founder of Dishio. com. So, you’re not going to want to miss this episode.

It’s a way to grow your business through digital marketing advertising. You’ve also heard me talk about my restaurant profit maximizer. Now, every restaurant is struggling right now. We’ve heard about labor. We’ve heard about inflation. It’s really challenging because margins are shrinking, and Even if you’re filling your seats, that does not mean that you’re making money or even enough money.

My Restaurant Profit Maximizer will give you immediately actionable ideas that you can execute to boost your bottom line, to fight inflation, to fight high labor costs. It’s available at restaurantrockstars.com./ProfitMaximizer. Now, on with the episode.

You’re tuned in to the Restaurant Rockstars Podcast. Powerful ideas to rock your restaurant. Here’s your host, Roger Beaudoin.

Listen, what would it feel like to lower your operating costs? Double your sales, lower staff turnover, create raving fans and design a menu that literally prints money. Our online restaurant training system will teach you and your staff to rock your restaurant and transform your business. Head on over to restaurant rock stars.com.

It’ll take you less than five minutes to get started. You’ve got this.

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Hey everybody, welcome back to the Restaurant Rockstars podcast. So glad you’re here and Brett, welcome to the show today, man. How are you?

I’m good. Yeah. Thanks for having me, man. Excited to chat.

This is amazing because technology keeps moving forward every single day. And I want to talk to you about tech in general because, I went to the NRA show.

I always go to the NRA show and it’s taking over the show. It’s 75 to 80 percent of the show is all about restaurant tech, so we’re going to talk all about that. But before we do, it’s like you are a digital marketing guru, man. And why did you choose hospitality and why our industry?

So it, it actually was totally by accident, to be honest with you. My background was in a lot of e commerce advertising previously. So we, we sold stuff like sunglasses, hats, clothing gym equipment, stuff like that. And. The beauty of e commerce is look, if I want to sell something online everything’s tracked, right?

So if I want to sell a pair of sunglasses for a hundred bucks, and I can see that through running an ad that I got someone to check out and pay, and it cost me 10 on the acquisition side, and I have a 90 profit margin on that, excluding product costs. I’m going to scale that budget all day long and keep doing that.

The problem with the restaurant space is they didn’t have that. And, it’s very difficult. It’s very difficult to see as a restaurant owner that if I’m running an ad online, that somebody actually walked through my doors. And so when I say it was an accident, we basically had a family friend that owned a rather large restaurant chain in LA, and they asked for some help.

And basically for this reason, I was. Not excited about it. And honestly, in the beginning, I was like okay, I stick to e commerce because I know I can do this, right? Where restaurants, you have all this trouble, but we’ll give it a shot. Long story short, it, we had a lot of success pretty quickly surprisingly enough.

And I thought maybe there’s something here. We kept diving deeper and deeper into it. And basically developed essentially our own model that would mimic what the e commerce brands are doing, but for restaurants, and that was solving a pretty major pain point in the industry is understanding our cost per acquisition.

And it was, Honestly, just with that principle that we decided to go all in on restaurants even change our company name from previously Misfit Media to DineLine to focus on just the restaurant space and we never looked back and it turned out to be the best decision we ever made. But that’s why we did it.

That’s how we got into it. So you love the

business now. That’s awesome. And you had great success with that first chain you worked with. And you’re like, wow, there’s opportunity here. So let’s get back into that. How I opened this with tech is taking over, but this industry has traditionally lagged behind in being progressive when it comes to tech.

Why do you think that is?

It’s something that’s always. To be honest, it troubled me, this question. It’s frustrating, right? Because you work so hard to develop something that you know is so powerful, and you oftentimes receive this resistance. And I think the reason for that is A lot of owners had great success with some old school tactics years ago, and they don’t want to let it go, right?

It’s did mailers and it worked once. It’s got to work again. And they’re not realizing the world has changed. It’s, it’s a lot different now than it was 20 years ago. The other thing I’ve noticed in general is a lot of restaurateurs, have this idea and mentality that all I need to do is create food and service and that’s all I’m ever going to need to grow this business.

That’s just not true. In the world today where people decide where they’re going to eat by first looking on their phones you might have the best burger and service in the world, but how do you get found, right? You’ve still got to create that conversion early on. So I think those are the two main factors, but it’s been very frustrating for me to see this, to be honest with you.

You mentioned that term old school, and I totally relate to that, but, in my experience, there’s a lot of restaurants out there, owners, operators, GMs, whatever, that have a lot of marketing experiments, they’ll try this, they’ll try that, and the kicker is a lot of that, most of that isn’t trackable, you don’t know if it’s working, where the business is coming from, if it is working.

And we’re vulnerable, but we’re also jaded. So I’ve said this a thousand times before in the podcast, but as owners, GMs, the phone rings off the hook all day. People are always trying to sell you things. People are coming through the back door with no appointments, trying to sell you stuff. And in one brief moment of frustration or vulnerability or knowing you need some new business, you might say, Oh.

I might try that, and maybe it’s a radio commercial. Maybe it’s this or that. And again, unless everybody walks through the door and says, Hey Brett, I came in cause I heard you on the radio, or, this particular thing brought me in, you will never know if it’s working. And restaurants are throwing tens of thousands of dollars out the window on this.

So the key is trackable marketing, as let’s talk about technology that is replacing the human element in hospitality, for obvious reasons. Okay, the whole industry is struggling with this labor crisis, so anything that’ll eliminate staff and help us get the job done is seemingly a good thing, but that human interaction thing is being lost, and replacing hospitality.

That pains me. I’m sure you see this.

I do. Look, here’s the thing. One example of this that I personally really don’t like is you go to a restaurant, this was especially happening during COVID, right? And they put an iPad on the table and you just order through this iPad, pay through this and whatnot.

I, I can’t stand that personally. I think it’s, I agree with you there. It completely kills the experience. It’s I would just rather like order online and get it delivered than in that case. Like the whole point of going to the restaurant, I like to engage with the staff. I like to ask them questions.

I like to ask for their recommendations. Yeah, totally. So I think in that sense it’s a shame. And I think that shouldn’t happen. Number one. But I think as far as some other ways. That it’s happening and it should happen and it’s not going to maybe replace the human but enhance Thank you.

There’s the word the results. Yes. That’s what I think is the more powerful aspect So like absolutely true, okay so for like our product which I know we’ll get to probably a little bit later in this conversation, but a lot of restaurant trainers or coaches have asked me like Is your product going to replace the server?

And like I just said, just now, I do not want to do that and I’m never for that. All I want to do is enhance the experience for the guest that is delivered through the server. And for example, so I got a good friend and she she has celiac. She can’t have gluten. If she does, she gets very sick, right?

Yeah, my wife’s gluten free as well. Not celiac, but gluten free, but she’ll have a reaction if she eats gluten. Totally, exactly. It’s very common. You go, we go out to a restaurant, she asks the server is Is there gluten in this? More than half the time they don’t know. They just don’t.

The servers don’t know. Yeah, the

education piece is lacking.

Huge! So I think like a product like ours, it makes it obvious. Instead of the server saying I don’t know, the server can say if they don’t know, just go ahead and hit that filter button on the menu, and you’re going to be able to see and filter the items by gluten free.

And so now you’ve suddenly solved a major problem. You’ve built trust with the guest and the restaurant they’re dining at. And you’ve made your servers. Leaps and bounds better because, hey, they don’t have to remember every single item, which I know is the ideal, but sometimes, you don’t remember.

Sometimes, they mess up. And if they do mess up with the wrong person, it could be dangerous. Let’s just be honest.

Absolutely true. It’s such a, it’s, yeah, it’s such a hazard and it’s a really dangerous thing to not be well, informed, not to be able to answer those questions. Not be able to get the information from the chef, but that takes time and that slows down the process.

So you’re talking about an amazing feature of your product and we’ll absolutely get to that. And I can’t wait to do let’s talk about the lifetime value of a guest. That is a very powerful thing. that is lost on a lot of operators. Most of us as operators are just trying to serve the guests that we have in the restaurant, give them a great experience and just hope that online reviews are going to kick in and that word of mouth and all that kind of stuff.

Or they’ll come back just cause they like us because we’re friendly and the food was good. But those are givens in the industry. Our guests expect the food to be good. They expect the service to be good. They expect to have comfortable atmosphere. But every restaurant has that as a given. So what does lifetime value of a guest mean to you exactly?

It’s just what it means, right? Like how do we use, in my opinion, how do we use our resources and or technology to get our guests to spend money over a long period of time, hopefully their lives, right? And I think where a lot of people get it wrong, to be honest with you, is they’re not leveraging all of what we call their different revenue channels.

So for example, so think about this, right? So a lot of restaurants, and they tell me all the time, I just want new people walking in the door. And I say, yes, we want to help you do that too. What about your online ordering? Is that does that matter to you? What about your catering? What about your private events?

Do you do any other high ticket offers? Multiple

profit centers are so important. Not just selling food and drinks, but having all these different channels for revenue. Thank you.

100%. And so I think this is. This is something that’s very interesting to me because I feel like a lot of restaurants, they say they understand this, or they say they have this or that, and they really don’t.

So for example, The first thing that we do when we pick up a client is we have them do this like revenue homework, which is scary enough. Usually the first time they’ve ever done this. And we basically ask them to tell us, okay, first and foremost what were your sales the last three months?

Okay. Total sales. And then we want to know what were their sales across each revenue channel, right? What were your catering sales? What were your order? What was the average order there? What were your in store sales? What were your online sales? And it’s funny because someone might come to us and say, we just really want to boost catering.

And I’ll say, great. How’s your catering going so far? We got one order in the last three months. And I’m like, Okay. So there needs to be some work there and long story short, it’s a lot of restaurant owners, they don’t know where to focus or even how to promote these, what you call profit centers.

So think about this. I always tell them this, Hey, we want to. We want to help you with catering, right? But we’re not going to just run a cold catering ad. People that dine at a restaurant often are more or more likely to get a catering order later. They’re more familiar with Britain, of course, right?

It doesn’t make sense for us or anyone to run a cold ad, which is basically an ad to a brand new audience promoting catering. You can do it. It can work, but we just find much higher conversions after someone came to a restaurant, preferably a couple times. Then we market that, by the way, they do catering.

So now we get someone to come in the restaurant, hopefully two or three times. Then we upsell a high ticket offer like catering. Suddenly, guess what? It converts like 20 times higher. Who would have known? Because they’re familiar with your brand. And that, when I think about lifetime value, those are the things we want to think about, right?

So yeah. It’s not just bringing someone back as often as possible, but looking into other profit centers that you might have. What are some easy wins? If someone came to your restaurant, imagine if we had the ability to know that they were eyeing your steak all night. Or looking at your pizza, but maybe didn’t order the pizza.

Imagine now we can remarket later to that guest that you guys can do delivery for that pizza or burger or steak or whatever it is. It’s not, you took that customer that just came in or that guest that just walked in and you convert them later online, these are the things that brands do not think about.

Oh my God. Yeah. Again, I always say there’s a thousand details to running a restaurant. Okay. Yes. But there are priorities and there are things that move the needle and there are things that besides putting out great food and serving guests and delivering hospitality, it’s like the moving the needle piece is what puts money to the bottom line and being smart, not just working hard in your restaurant 24 seven.

It’s like, how do we leverage these opportunities? And I think that’s where Dishio comes in. So I understand, and then tell us the story, cause it’s interesting, but I think your first date led to the creation of this. platform product called Disho. How did that happen?

Yeah. So it’s actually a funny story and it’s okay.

So my girlfriend’s Brazilian and I’ve been going to Brazil since 2018. I just, I have something about that country. I just love it. And anyway I I’m probably on my third or fourth date with my girlfriend. So it’s very early in our relationship. And big thing in Brazil is a lot of restaurants down there.

I would say, honestly, the majority, they use these digital menus, like QR code or NFC menus. Okay. It’s very common, much more than the U. S. And so I’m at this restaurant, I scan the menu with my phone. I look at the menu and it’s in English. And obviously in Brazil, they speak Portuguese. So I’m confused, like what’s going on.

And I asked my friend is your menu also in English? She was like, no, it’s in Portuguese. And so the waiter then comes over and I asked him, I’m like, Hey, this is very interesting. My, my menu is in English. Like how does, how, what’s going on? He’s Oh yeah, it’s pretty cool. Like we, our menu is smart.

And so it’s very interesting. It knows the settings of your phone are in English. And so it changes automatically to English. And I was just blown away. That’s awesome. And It was hilarious because I was like speechless in that moment and all these thoughts were rushing towards my head. A light bulb went

off your head, right?

A light bulb

went off, it was like fireworks all of a sudden and basically what it was, yeah, I just, I had the realization then, they know the settings in my phone are in English, what else can this technology know about me? And that got me on this search to just start looking deeper and deeper into this and turns out With the right tech set up you can determine a lot about your guests in your restaurant.

And it was just this opportunity that I, I have never even seen in the U S yet. And I just basically took that idea and ran with it. And that was, about a year and a half ago now. And so I just, it, it became so obvious to me where this was all going. And the other thing too, is just if you look at technology today what did Meta just launch last year?

There are little Meta glasses where. They have a camera on it and they have AI incorporated and you can basically look at something and say what is this? And they’ll tell you what it is. It’s crazy what they’re doing. The next phase of this is going to be augmented reality in your glasses.

And if we look three, four years ahead, it wouldn’t surprise me if we’re all wearing these glasses. And we look at a QR code and that menu just pops up in front of our glasses. But it

also brings certain items that you highlight to life and brings them as if you’ve already ordered it, you can already see it, you can already taste it and smell it.

It’s like the power of the mind and the senses kick in that sells the most profitable items. It’s look out, here we go. But this is powerful stuff. Powerful ideas here.

Yes. And I just think, so it’s interesting for me. So our, more about the product. Basically our dishio is a, I’d say it’s a hardcore digital marketing tool for restaurants.

And I say that even before it’s a menu product, because truthfully, the menu is like the Trojan horse. And I say that because the menu exists for many reasons. We want the guests to have a great experience, navigate the menu better find items that are appealing to them. Of course, you said pictures, right?

That helps a lot. For many reasons, but the number one thing I’m after is the data. That is, for me, that makes this product leaps and bounds better beyond anything else and a hundred times better than the paper menu, because the simple reason of someone scans this thing, I know who they are, where they came from, and I can remarket to them later.

Yes, our menu product also increases your average ticket by about 5 to 10 percent on average, which is incredible. There’s like upsells built within the menu and all this other stuff. Yeah,

pairings and upsells and suggestions, which is so important because a lot of team on the floor are still just taking orders, especially in the heat of battle, and they don’t have the time to strategize and make suggestions that increase sales and enhance And that’s the experience like we’re talking about.

So this is an enhancement to your front of house stuff, but it’s doing multiple things. It’s broken into two components, right? You’ve got a smart site, which I really want you to explain. And then there’s the digital menu piece with all the features that go with that. So take us through it.

. Yeah, I’ll walk you through that. So basically actually there’s three sides of it now. I think one of the newest features I don’t think I’ve even showed you yet, but basically So there’s the menu, which is of course in store. It can go on your online website as well.

And it’s basically a, it’s a viewing menu meant for in store or online, of course, but it’s. It’s incredible for a variety of reasons. Number one is it’s easy to navigate. It’s not like a PDF menu that we’re all used to. You have to zoom in and all that. It’s easy to navigate, big text and pictures, easy to read, easy to navigate.

When you click on an item, it’s going to suggest other items that pair well with that. So if you’re looking at a steak, it might suggest the Pinot Noir, asparagus, and mashed potatoes. Makes it easier to sell more for your servers. Yeah, that sounds great. Sign me up. Exactly. And then finally, like I said, the filters option.

If I click filter, I can decide if I want seed oil free I can decide if I want gluten free, I can decide if I want vegetarian or vegan or whatever, or dairy free. It’s incredible for that sense, but then also, like I just said, the data component. I know if you’re a new customer if you’re a returning guest I know a lot of things about you.

I also collect the data from your social media. So let’s just say, you come in the restaurant and I want to market to you later on Instagram, I can do that. That’s what makes it so powerful. The second tool is like you mentioned, we call smart sites and a smart site is most similar to a lot of brands we’ve talked to have used something called Linktree, right?

And Linktree is basically like a little micro website. A smart site is very similar, but the core difference is it’s built specifically for restaurants. And the difference is this in the restaurant space, what do we want people to do? We want them to call our business, we want them to make reservations, check out our menu.

The basics. Or maybe get map directions. To the business, right? Of course. There is what we call smart buttons right there that are all one click navigation on that page. Because here’s the thing a lot of people don’t understand. For me, for example I have a website, DineLine. co. We can learn all about what we do.

But for me, and I spend about 100, 000 a month driving traffic to my business to help me get more clients, I don’t drive any of that traffic to my website. And I tell people that, and they’re like, that sounds crazy. Why would you not? What do you mean? Isn’t the website the most important? This is where everyone gets wrong.

The answer is no. The website is there to further sell someone or educate someone about your business, if they so choose to look into you. The funnel is where we drive traffic to. And the funnel is a very simple webpage. And for us, it’s there’s only one button. Click this button to learn how you can grow your restaurant by 10 to 20 percent in the first 90 days.

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That’s it. There’s nothing else you can do. And the reason we do that is because you can imagine with less distractions, this website is going to convert a lot higher. And the conversion we’re aiming for is booked phone calls. A restaurant wants to convert maybe other aspects. They want more phone calls, they want more reservations, they want more map direction clicks.

Basically the tools that you’re going to see on Google My Business, right? Those are the things we’re going to aim for. So we actually recommend our clients using our smart site instead of their website on like the link in bio on Instagram, for example. Because why, right? It’s also optimized for mobile.

If someone is finds you on Instagram and then they go to your website on their phone, and honestly, I hate to say it, but these are the numbers, nine times out of 10, a restaurant’s website is not mobile optimized. It’s hard to navigate. And it does not convert in the slightest. Meaning someone might go to the website and they just lose that customer I, the or potential guest.

Just, it’s not gonna happen. It just, these are

facts though. These are true and hard facts that I think our audience needs to know because it’s proven and it’s, you’ve seen it time and time again.

It’s sad. It’s hilarious because someone might think my website is perfect and it might be great on desktop, but then on mobile, it’s a whole different game.

So that’s what the smart site solves. And then the last aspect, I don’t know why that just happened. A little thumbs up. As long as it’s a

thumbs up, it works for me.

Yeah. Yeah. And then the last aspect, which is new is. There’s actually a product we just call Funnels that’s built within Dishio.

And this is actually super exciting. And I’ll be honest, Roger, you actually inspired some aspects of this part of the product, by the way, from our last call. No, seriously, because you had some really interesting strategies that can totally be adapted in digital as well. And what it does is you basically can create A pop up that’s going to appear on your smart site, on your menu, or it can be its own standalone website too, but it operates just like a funnel does for my business.

There’s an opt in to collect a phone number and email or birthday or whatever you want. And you give them some kind of offer in exchange, if you’d like. Okay. And imagine now someone’s going to your restaurant, they scan that menu, they’re looking at your menu, and all of a sudden now there’s a pop up and it’s hey, do you want a, a free gift on your next visit with us?

Put in your phone number and email, and we’ll send you the offer. And I look at restaurants that are getting, I don’t know, 7, guests a month, Let’s just say if we’re converting just a percent of these people to now collect that information on the, now we can remarket to them, talk about lifetime value.

Yeah. Oh my God. It’s, and you’re in the moment they’re in the restaurant or they’re looking you up. It’s the easiest, it’s the most low hanging fruit I’ve ever seen. And it’s so simple and easy to use. So many restaurant owners they’re trying to do this, but they’re going about it in, in such a difficult way.

And it can be so simple,

They’re. That’s it! I love what you just said, because it made me think people are into immediate gratification, and if you give them that offer, that’s one of those, oh my god, I need, I want to take advantage of that offer, you’re going to get them back again quickly, which is more likely to lead to continued loyalty from that guest.

I really like what I’m hearing there. And yeah we did a lot of that the old school way, 20 years ago in our restaurants, but now it’s much easier to execute in a whole new way. A whole new way. Yeah.

I love from the podcast, but I had you with, on our podcast, when you were mentioning your.

You had this, I think it was like a what was it? A lottery ticket. A lottery ticket, a chance to win something, but then everyone the first time’s a winner. I thought that was genius. And to your point, it was like, It totally builds even more value because they’re like, I won this thing, I gotta take advantage of it.

I would imagine the conversions are much higher on the repeat visit because of that.

Yeah, what was really powerful was, so many people, if you took a cross section of America and said, who buys lottery tickets, you’d get a very high percentage of people because everyone wants to win something, and especially the chance of winning something huge, right?

It’s very appealing. And I was just in a convenience store supermarket one day and I was waiting in line because the two people in front of me were like picking lottery tickets. And there’s five, 10 different rolls of tickets. And this one is called that sweepstakes. And that one’s colorful. And it’s Oh, which one do I, and I’m like, wow, what a powerful idea that is for my restaurant. Why don’t I create my own lottery ticket that’s branded to my business? And the difference is. Every ticket is a winner, but the customer doesn’t know that, only we know that. And what did they win? They won, we had six or seven different cash cows in our business that cost us very little to serve so we could afford to give them away.

They were very profitable to sell, but I can give these things away. So it’s if I got you in the first time, I know you spent a certain amount of money. I want to get you back again to spend a similar amount of money and here’s a lottery ticket. And when do we present it? After the person paid the check, the server would give it to the customer, put it in the check presenter and bring it to their attention and say, Hey, here’s something fun.

We have a lottery ticket. I hope you win. And the first thing they do is pull out the quarter and they scratch and there’s five different squares that you scratch off. And the first two are always designed not to win anything. It’s try again. And then all of a sudden the third or the fourth or the fifth one hits.

And it’s you just won up. blah, blah, blah. That’s so awesome. People immediately just, wow, this is cool. I’m going to put this in my, and it was colorful and, it looked like a real item. So people came in again and we tracked every time they came back in and we actually, I had my team just attach it to every guest check whenever one of those lottery tickets.

Yeah, I think that’s brilliant. I think that’s

brilliant. What the check average was, it was like 80 or 90 bucks and that was 10, 15 years ago. Now it’d be even higher, totally based on prices, but you get the idea. Something that 80 or 90 bucks every time.

That’s incredible. And so I’ll be honest, for me, I’ve gone in I’ve gone through a rollercoaster of excitement.

I’ve been excited about offers and anti offers over the years, to be honest with you. And when we first moved from e com to restaurants and really committed, it was 20, I think it was 2019. Or end of 2018, but right before COVID, right? Like great timing, but we did the way we tracked.

It was just like you mentioned. So we actually, it was interesting. We did this offer with an ad through Instagram and Facebook, and you would opt in to get some kind of offer. And then it would, you’d opt in through Facebook messenger. We’d collect a phone number and email, give you the offer through Facebook Messenger, and then the guests would come into the restaurant and basically show them, Hey this is the offer I got, can I redeem it?

And then literally within Facebook Messenger, I know it sounds crazy, but we did this and it worked. We had the guests then redeem it on Facebook Messenger. There’d be an automation say, great, what is the check value of what you spent today? And they would literally type it in and then we would collect that data.

And this was, I like to say it was like a low tech, high tech kind of we created and we don’t do this anymore. This is again, 2018, 2019, but tons of agencies after this. Just started doing this. And I don’t do it anymore because our tech now is leaps and bounds beyond this. And we actually, we have much, much better technology these days.

But it was a great solution because it just, like you said, it was costing the restaurant a couple bucks and we were proving that the return was definitely worth it. Dude, this is crazy. We were getting, God, I think in 2019, we were getting opt ins for like I’m not even exaggerating, 10 cents.

It was crazy. And we probably had a 25 percent conversion rate. Run the numbers, 40 cents to acquire a customer. That is spending, let’s just say, 40 bucks? Oh, wow. Yes. All day long. Oh, my gosh. God, now it’s probably, 10 bucks to get a lead like that or five bucks. I don’t know. Maybe you’re killing it three, four bucks, which is, hey, if you still want to do that route, you still can.

But I’m much more of a fan of what you just mentioned where someone comes in and we might use that to get them to come back versus the initial acquisition. I like your strategy there in that sense, because Just like you said, they had a great experience and hopefully they want to come back regardless, but maybe now they’re coming back a lot faster.

You want to create raving fans for your business, because that has the exponential marketing value that costs you nothing.

100%. I’m like totally for it now.

Yeah.

I like that way more. And I guess what I’m saying is on the initial acquisition, I, look, it depends on everyone’s business.

Everyone’s different, right? At QSR versus fine dining, there’s different models and methods to acquire new guests and get them to come back. But just like you said that the lottery example for me, when you told me, I was like, that is so good. Like it, it’s just really hits home. And like you said, people are excited about it.

It’s a really cool experience to offer.

Yeah, it’s I hate that phrase out of the box cause it’s been way over cliched over the years, but it absolutely is. It’s what can you do to set yourself apart from the competition that they’re not doing that captures the guest’s imagination?

And that is called a hook. And I’m a huge believer in hooks. I talk about it all the time. So you can’t have too many hooks in your restaurant. And it sounds like Disho is a hook, but it provides the data it provides. So many things let’s talk about. The ability, let’s compare the paper menu to the digital menu because restaurants have paper menus, right?

But there’s the time factor of when you need to make a change and the cost involved and all those things and the hassles and it’s not on the fly in real time and suddenly there’s a change and now I can use that data and I can market to my customers. So that’s a huge difference. But what about the ability to test different items and profitability, which is really important, right?

Yes, 100%.

One, one thing I think, you said profitability, and I know when we, again, when we spoke, You have a lot of your students go through and, Hey what is the profit margin on these items? I think that’s, I think it’s so simple yet brilliant and not enough restaurant owners are thinking about this.

They’re not at all. And that’s, it’s crazy. And so what I say too, is like with a digital menu, you can reorganize your menu and test out all this. In fact, with our product, you can see what guests are actually looking at. So for example. If you notice all your guests are looking at, I don’t know, your salmon, but no one’s ordering I don’t know, maybe there’s something wrong with the price.

Maybe you lowered a little bit and now they start converting, right? Or, you, or you say, you know what, like we just launched this new ribeye and no one’s even looking at it. Probably got to bump it up on the menu somewhere else. There’s just, There is so much opportunity with digital.

But it’s also

highlighting the big sellers, and what’s really popular here. And let’s go back quickly because every menu item contributes a different profit. And it’s really important to dial in your profit so that your biggest sellers are also your most profitable sellers. But let’s just face it.

This is giving you data that you can analyze. The old school way is, okay, everyone’s got a point of sale system. And yeah, you can look at a sales report on the screen. And it’s 30 pages of every single thing you’ve sold over a date range. And now you’ve got to glean through, okay, these are the appetizers, these entrees, right?

It’s not a simple process. It’s analytics and it’s homework, but it seems like this is so much simpler and it really focuses your attention on what’s really important.

You, you can change your menu in lifetime the night of while people, while your restaurant is popping and all of a sudden see a difference.

You literally in lifetime if you’re like launch a special boom, you could launch a special in the moment. Just like that. Or take something off the menu real quick if you’d like. Or bump something to the top of the menu because you want to sell more of it. For example, too yeah, we had this client years ago in L. A. and They had this like bread pudding and they were, they’re actually genius because they were using their, if they had an excess of hamburger buns, they would actually use that to create their bread pudding. And it was actually delicious. I tried it, but they basically created this very profitable dessert for them themselves out of nowhere.

And let’s just say, you have the ability to do that. Great. But let’s just say also that I don’t know, let’s just say something’s not selling and you want to put it at the top because it’s a winner and it’s profitable. Yes. You can’t do that. You can bump it to the top. There’s also aspects.

We call them special notes where if you want to bring attention to a certain item, you can put like a banner over an item that just attracts someone’s attention towards that, where I don’t know, all of a sudden right now it’s half off. Or, order this, you also get a free dessert with that. You can do that in live time, to just push more items whenever you want.

And, this is something where, honestly, not enough of our users currently on the product are using this, but we’re really trying to encourage it. The other thing, we’ve been talking about this is another really great feature. Next month, the menu, just like my vision individually from Brazil, it’s going to be available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French.

I was going to ask you that next. That whole multilingual feature is just huge. And I don’t say that lightly because you are amazed when you’re in Brazil and then all of a I was just in Italy and Greece with my family and every once in a while in both countries there was a menu that was translated to English but it was a paper menu.

Yes. I still have some basic Italian and I could translate the menus for my wife. Oh, what’s that? Oh, that’s this, right? But most people that are traveling abroad or even in this country could use a feature like that. It’s that simple though. Something that I mean,

look I’m here in Miami and in Miami, it’s like a different language on every street corner.

Multicultural for sure in languages.

Yeah. I think, Spanish dominates Miami for sure. More than English. It’s crazy. My, my barber here he’s Brazilian. He doesn’t speak English. It’s all Portuguese, but you can get by in Miami. It’s one of those things where I realized a lot of these big, major cities, that’s super common, right?

And what is simple way to help you sell more by putting the menu in your customer’s language? It’s so obvious, right? But how do you do it? And this is where AI has been extremely helpful for us, by the way, because, you think of it this way, it’s the typical Google translate, which I think.

Or let’s just say you are manually translating on your own. You have a hundred items on your menu, for example. That’s a lot of work. And you got to type it all

in and figure stuff out. Yeah, it’s a laborious process to get anything figured out.

Yeah, it’s crazy. And so for us now, and I think we’re lucky coming into this product with this day and age of AI, but like our product, first and foremost, it takes about five minutes.

To get live. And the way we do that is all AI. So you basically just take your menu. Hopefully you have your menu that looks decent online, or it’s a PDF. Fine. Whatever the case, you can grab your menu URL, or you can grab a PDF of your menu and you just, Basically, put the link or you upload the PDF into Dishio.

The AI is going to crawl your website or the PDF, grab all the information it needs. It’s going to build your menu in lifetime in about a minute or two. It’s insane. Yeah, that is. Simultaneously, it’s also going to translate it into four languages. Unbelievable. What are the languages again?

You said Spanish.

So it’s

English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French. Okay. Right now to start. There you go. Right on. Yeah. It’s, and it’s and it’s crazy because it was actually very hard to build this because you think about it a lot of menu items don’t translate correctly on just a straight translation, right? So for example, burrito in Spanish.

You know what, burrito actually translates to English? No, tell us. Little donkey. No kidding.

Yeah. You gotta be

careful with stuff like that. You can insult people. Totally. If you just have an old school trans translator, it would say little donkey on the menu in English.

That’s weird, obviously. You want a donkey,

we’ll cook you a donkey.

Exactly. Like people be like, that’s strange. There’s a little donkey on the menu. So you have to, AI, see what’s crazy about AI, no one like understands this or unless you’re in the space, but AI doesn’t just translate, it thinks about the meaning of what it is.

And then it translates.

Minimize errors and loss in translations. Yep,

totally. And so it’s. It’s crazy. It’s crazy how it works. I’m so amazed by it. I’m also terrified of it, by the way. But it’s pretty amazing right now as it stands. And our vision for this product is we want to create an experience that creates transparency between the restaurant and the guests that choose to dine at their store.

And that transparency is. When I look at the menu, I’m looking at it in my language with my dietary restrictions or choices, and it’s easy to navigate. I know what I’m getting, I’m sure of it, and I can feel safe about it. And, obviously for the restaurant, I can increase my profit margins, hopefully.

So we really want to create that transparent world, and I’m getting, I’ll get a little ahead of myself, but I think it’s exciting to mention middle of October, we’re going to be launching a social app and the social app also is going to set this up where right now you go to the restaurant, you look at the menu and if it’s a disheo menu, you can filter it.

You can put it in your language and all this great stuff. Imagine for example, you’re the user on our app. You go to the restaurant and all your settings that you already pre programmed are there. So when I look at the menu, it’s in my language, it’s according to my diet and my needs and my desires. And for the restaurant also, the menu is going to become even more dynamic in the sense of Let’s just say, for example, your Instagram feed versus my Instagram feed.

It’s totally different compared to our preferences, our interests, and our history. Yes. Imagine a world where the menu is different for every person at the table based upon this. And it pushes the higher profit, most profitable items at the top, and to that guest’s needs and desires. Cheers. Suddenly you got a much, you got a much better business overnight.

Yeah. And this is, so this is why when I talk to people and they’re like, I sold my paper menu and I’m like, Dude, you’re missing out. It’s like you’re missing out so big, cause this is what’s happened. This is not the future. This is happening like right now. Yes, it is.

I know, more and more restaurants it’s going away. See ya. Exactly. Hey, let’s talk about reviews, Brett. You’ve got a review feature too, which is pretty powerful, right? Because that’s the whole point. We want to get more positive reviews from our guests, which leads to more business.

And when we want to make it easy for people versus ask them on the way out the door, if you had a great experience, will you please leave us a review? It’s like some restaurants do that, but it’s this is unfortunate because negative reviews are bad. Part of our business. And yes, you can’t please all the guests all the time.

And it’s how you respond to those reviews and make things right and all that. But human nature, more people are going to be inclined to leave a negative view than having a fantastic experience. And they’re going to take the time to leave a positive review. So you can’t encourage that enough, but it’s so important to make that easy.

And you’ve got a process to do just that. So tell us about it. Yeah,

exactly. And I think you’re totally right. Look, to your point, before I even get into it, think about that experience, you’re at the restaurant and your server says, if you liked your meal, please leave us a review. What does the process look like for the guests to then do that?

They take out their phone. They maybe go on Google, they search the restaurant, they find the Google my business, then they leave a review. So talk about conversions. That’s a somewhat long process to make the guests do. It takes

effort.

Totally.

And motivation to do it.

Totally, right? And a lot easier way to do that is they’re already looking at the menu.

If you just swipe right on the menu, there’s another page that says info about the business where you can learn more about the restaurant if you’d like. But then right there, there’s a big red button that says, leave us a review. And you click that, it goes directly to the Google My Business for that restaurant.

It pops up right there. You can leave your five stars, maybe some comments, hopefully. And move on. So it’s two clicks, and so I’m all about conversions, right? Like, How do we make it easier to accomplish the things that we really want, right? Hey, two clicks, you’re leaving a review.

One click, you’re looking at the menu. Two clicks again, I got a phone number and email. It’s just simple, and you, this is a favor that the restaurant is getting from the guest. Make it easy for them to do a favor for you. Make it simple. Don’t complicate

this. Of course.

Absolutely. So again, there’s another feature that, that is a huge benefit. So you mentioned quick onboarding process. Like we could talk minutes here and then you also have like dedicated people that work with your clients, right?

Yes, 100%. With strategy,

it’s is that part of DineLine, or is that automatically part of Disho?

I love what I’m hearing about Disho, and I’m gonna get started today. Do I have someone that works with me to get me up to speed? Tell me about the process. Yeah.

There’s, so there’s two sides to our business, right? So we have the agency side and then the software. And Look, the agency, we’ve been around for almost 10 years, and so That’s DineLine we’re talking about.

That’s DineLine, and that, that is our bread and butter, the service offering. But for a lot of restaurants, it’s expensive, and it’s especially expensive to start out of nowhere, right? But for a lot of brands, and a lot of brands where we’re encouraging them to go is exactly Dishio. And the reason, because it’s, first of all, there’s a 14 day free trial, so it’s pretty much a no brainer, like, why not at least just Make an account, check it out.

Okay, excellent. Whether, yeah, and everyone with that 14 day trial, you’re going to get a dedicated account manager that’s going to help you get started. Now, a lot of our clients that they go through the process and it’s actually, it’s exciting because the onboarding process, the account manager, that’s going to be assigned to your account to help you be successful with AI’s help.

Now, what’s very exciting to see is we’ll get to that onboarding call to help them get started and they’re already done with the process. So then it’s just about optimizing, right? Which is incredible. But it’s, It is a product that requires your attention, especially early on to get things set up.

And for a lot of restaurant owners, we recognize that they’ve never done anything close to this high tech in their lives. They’re used to a newspaper ad, a radio ad, a TV ad, maybe here and there. But this, there are some technical components, right? And so we definitely make sure that every single person is getting a one on one touch to make sure they’re successful.

There’s an

enhancement too, right?

Yes. Enhancement

with the Dishio experience. Not just, okay, here it is, it’s turnkey, you’re on your own, see you later, good luck. No, it’s this works, this is how it works, we’re gonna help you make it work, we’re gonna help you get the value out of it. I love it. Yes.

That’s the way it should be.

Yeah. It’s, here’s how I look at it. And it’s I, okay. I told you earlier, I spent about a hundred thousand a month on ads for our business. And I am a hardcore advertiser. Yeah. It’s yeah. It’s been good. That’s awesome. I’m a hardcore advertiser and I have been for years and the, what I’ve realized is We’re in an industry like we talked about from the beginning of this phone call where people are very resistant to some of this new tech.

And resistance comes from their, how do I even explain this? It’s the unknown, right? They’ve never had the ability to understand truly what cost per acquisition means. It’s such a foreign concept to think, wait, how can I spend 5? And know that every 5 I spend, someone’s going to come into the restaurant.

That is possible with our product, right? It’s possible to determine an actual cost per acquisition. It’s possible to use data in incredible ways to grow your business. But the disconnect is what we really want to make sure people understand when they’re using our product or working with our agency, because yes, it’s The truth is my, the biggest reason someone doesn’t buy the product, honestly, it’s not the price because it’s a 14 day free trial and then it’s 200 bucks a month per store.

That’s pretty cheap, right? The biggest resistance is the unknown. I just don’t understand it. I want to get it or I don’t believe it. I, I don’t think this is possible and I’m here to say it is possible and it’s really exciting because, for example, in our business look. We get word of mouth clients all the time.

People, recommend a friend or this or that all the time. And that’s great, but my business isn’t growing or doubling or tripling each year. because of word of mouth. It’s happening because of my ads. It’s happening because I see the value in data and I know how to turn data into dollars. That’s it.

And this is a big thing. I really want restaurants to understand because it’s something that if they just paid more attention to it, it would make all the difference in the world. It’s not making your burger 10 percent better. Honestly, I’m sorry. It’s just true. It’s the stuff also you mentioned, right?

Like it’s the stuff where you mentioned also in profit margins, like. Why are you pushing your pasta if it’s not a good margin for you? Oh my gosh. I could go on all day about that. It just, if owners would just take a step back to just think about these things. It would make all the difference in the world.

And they’re not, they’re, it’s just the, if they’re always in they’re always like fight or flight or like defense mode. Like they’re always like putting out fires is what

it is. It’s reactive, not proactive.

Well, a hundred percent. And there’s too much

of that in this industry, unfortunately and the labor crisis has contributed to that, when people are doing more with less and it’s something’s got to go, but the bandwidth is, and the motivation and the passion for the industry, unfortunately, these are challenges that need to be overcome. But if you had a system like this, that is going to transform your business, and

Here’s the crazy part too, is a lot of people in my ads, they always say, Oh, who’s this guy, Brett? What does he know about restaurants? He’s never owned a restaurant in his life. And yeah, that’s true. I never have. But my job I’m not an operator, right? I don’t know what happens back at house. And I don’t know how to train staff to perform the best in house.

That’s not my specialty. My specialty is on the digital side. And getting someone to come in and continue coming back through the use of digital and through the use of this thing that’s in everyone’s pocket today, right? Absolutely, for sure. And I know what I’m good at and I know what I’m bad at, right?

And so I’m not trying To be a restaurant owner and coach on that. Cause that’s not what I know. That’s something that you’re really damn good at. And I’d recommend anyone should talk to you about that, right? Cause that space. And that’s why, again, I’m interested in partnering with you because I’m the digital guy and you know what it’s like to actually own a restaurant and make it really damn profitable.

And so I think it’s one of those things where like a lot of owners have to realize that same idea though, they have to know what they’re good at and they have to know when they need help. And a lot of owners are just they’re stubborn and they don’t want to admit they don’t know something.

And it’s okay to admit that. It’s actually really good to admit that because then you can go get help and fix it immediately. So I just think that’s the problem. They don’t, they, I don’t know if it’s a control thing or just, there’s a lot of reasons, but they got to know where they need to get help.

And they got to know that doing the same thing over and over again is not the solution, nor will it ever

1. So besides the 14 day free trial, which you cannot argue with at all, you also have a, Jump on the phone with someone. We’ll explain all this. We’ll, yeah, no obligation. You don’t have to take our free trial, but we’ll at least, you can get on the phone with a live person, right?

You’ve got a free call as well.

Totally. Yeah. Yeah. We, you can book a 15 minute phone call with us. You can book, if you’re qualified for the agency and our phone call with us. I look I get a lot better at what I do from these calls. I learn so much. I personally, by the way, I take probably.

Two or three sales calls a month, still. I have eight guys with

your clients and your audience. Yeah,

absolutely. I think, and also, I don’t know if anyone here listening to this podcast is maybe it’s services, the restaurant space, if they’re a software provider also, or whatnot, but I think if you’re in that industry, if you’re in this space.

Which is the service industry. We all are in the service space, but yes, you’re the, whether you’re the owner or not, there is so much valuable talking to leads, to clients. The learnings you get from that are incredible. And that’s why we’re all for it. Look, if someone decides to have a phone call with us, And they don’t buy.

What we lost 20 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever.

From the experience as well.

Totally. I, but I learned why someone didn’t buy to maybe help my product become better for the next guy. Sure. So it’s never a loss. No. And that’s why we look at it. Yeah. It’s never a

loss. So worth it. Oh my God. Always. So Brett, you also have your own podcast.

Tell us about restaurant misfits.

Yeah, Restaurant Misfits I think we started it right before COVID, or maybe in January? Nice, alright, you got a track

record then.

Yeah, it’s it’s been a couple years, which is crazy to think about, because I remember, It is. I remember when I was first deciding to do it, and it was funny, because I looked, I started looking up like restaurant podcasts.

I also looked up like just restaurant books, like on Amazon. We also have a book, by the way, too. And it’s a little outdated now. It talks about some of the old strategies I was talking about earlier with Facebook Messenger and whatnot. Okay. That’s also called misfit marketing for restaurants. But restaurant misfits today is As I talk to people like yourself, I talk to owners in the industry that have had a lot of success and we just chat about what’s working right now, what they think is going to work where the future of restaurants is going.

Yeah. And best practices, all that good stuff. Best practices, all that good stuff. A lot of technology as you can imagine. And for me also it’s a great way for me to personally learn. I remember there was some interview that Joe Rogan did. And he was talking about the whole reason he did his podcast was he just wanted to learn about all kinds of random stuff.

And I think for me That’s taken off.

That’s huge.

Totally, right? I think it’s crazy. He was number one in the U. S. I think Tucker Carlson just passed him this last week as number one, which is also crazy. It’s hard to knock somebody off the mountain like that, right? Totally, that quick too, but yeah I think the podcast is one of those things. I do it because I number one learn a lot. I connect with amazing people like yourself. I think it’s a huge value add to our listeners. And I think I think a podcast is a great medium to, it’s long form content, right? We’ve been talking for what, over an hour at this point.

It’s such rich information for listeners to get from. And it’s such. You can go so much deeper than a reel on Instagram. You can have extensive conversations specific to an industry about what’s going on, best practices, the future. And there’s so many learnings to come from it. That’s why I love it.

That’s why we keep doing it. I think. I think more business owners in general need to have more of these intelligent conversations with their peers, with their partners, with their community.

Yeah, it’s teamwork and it’s collaboration and it’s best ideas and it’s share the strength that’s up leveling our industry.

Exactly.

Now I, it’s also one of those things where man it’s not only fun and educational, but it’s It helps you elevate your personal brand in so many amazing ways. I talk about restaurant owners all the time because some people ask me, should I do a podcast? I say, if you want, why not?

Like, why not? If you’re such, if you’re such a passionate chef about what you do, and you want to talk about your dishes, do it. What an awesome way to promote your brand. Like, why not give it a shot? If you got the time

for it, it’s cool. Awesome. Brett, it’s been fantastic talking to you. And it’s so awesome to dive into technology that really works, that enhances hospitality, like we talked about, doesn’t detract from it, but gives you the real data that you really should be capturing, but not just capturing, using in a meaningful and profitable way.

And you brought all that to life for us. So thanks so much. You’re welcome.

Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s been

fun. That was the Restaurant Rockstars podcast. Thank you so much to our audience for tuning in. Thank you so much to our sponsors for supporting our show. And we can’t wait to see you all in the next episode.

So stay tuned, stay well, we’ll see you then.

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