Restaurant Rockstars Episode 432

Restaurant Expert’s Strategy for Success

 

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These are the most challenging times to run a restaurant, so our focus is bringing you guests that share their “keys” to operations success.

In this episode of the Restaurant Rockstars Podcast, I’m speaking with Jeff Brosi and Terence Tubridy of industry leading IGC Hospitality Group. These guys bring extensive experience to bear on multiple restaurant and hotel concepts in NYC and Miami.

Listen as they share restaurant insights including:

  • Their restaurant company growth strategy, and what’s made the biggest difference to their success
  • How to overcome today’s biggest operating challenges
  • Staying relevant and beating the competition in huge restaurant markets
  • The critical financial systems that make or break your business
  • The technology their restaurants can’t live without
  • Strategic marketing that works

And don’t miss their important acronym S.A.L.T. & 4H philosophy to grow effective leadership and a strong company culture (listen to find out).

Now go ROCK YOUR Restaurant!

Roger

Connect with our guest:

 @igchospitality

https://igchospitality.com

Welcome back to the Restaurant Rock Stars Podcast. Thanks to you, we have now exceeded 430 episodes, so please keep listening. Stay tuned. Thank you. Today’s guests, Terence Tubridy and Jeff Brosi are the Masterminds behind IGC Hospitality Group. Now they’re running some very powerful brands in two of the most competitive restaurant cities on the planet, New York City and Miami.

They have extensive experience and they’re gonna give us. Immediately actionable ideas on how they establish leadership and training, mentoring and shadowing, and getting the most from their labor and retention. We’re gonna talk about marketing that works. We’ll talk about social media. We’re gonna talk about the necessary technology that leads to guest convenience and efficiency in their operations.

All about the critical finances and the numbers, and. In and outs that can immediately help you run a stronger restaurant. So you’re not gonna wanna miss this episode. We’ve talked about our restaurant academy in multiple episodes, but now we’ve broken out the courses into individual lessons that’ll help you run a stronger business.

We have our leadership and accountability course to build your dream team. We have. The mug club. Wow, what a big needle mover that is. If you serve draft beer or have a coffee shop, finances 1 0 1. Figuring out an inventory system and calculating prime costs and establishing daily break even. All the important KPIs in your restaurant and probably the biggest needle mover of all.

You can’t control inflation costs, but you can control menu profit. We have a course called the Menu Profit Accelerator. Which is super powerful using this course. I just showed a restaurant that they left a potential profit of just under $900,000 on the table last year, so check that out at restaurantrockstars.com on our courses page.

Now on with the episode.

You are tuned in to the restaurant Rock Stars Podcast, powerful ideas to Rock your restaurant. Here’s your host, Roger Beaudoin.

Listen, don’t lose birthday business to your competition. People celebrate birthdays seven days a week. The check averages are high, and when they have fun in your place, they’ll come back again. Talk to my buddy Dyson. He’s an operator also just like you and me. But now he runs a done for you birthday club.

Go to jointhebirthdayclub.com/birthdayrockstar. It’s a piece of cake.

 Hey everyone, welcome back. This is the Restaurant Rock Stars Podcast. So glad you’re with us, Jeff, Terence, how are you today? Welcome to the show. Happy to be here.

Thanks for having us, Roger.

I’m so excited you guys have such extensive backgrounds in hospitality and restaurants and bars and hotels.

Like it. It’s a cross section gamut. New York City, down in Florida, where did it all begin? There’s obviously a huge passion there for both of you. Just tell us just a brief background of why hospitality and why this business.

I, I could take this one, Jeff. Jeff and I actually went to college together and we went to college in the Bronx.

And about 20, somewhat years ago, we were graduating. We could either become firemen or we could become, that Irish American kind of background or we could become bar owners. And Jeff was finishing up his master’s degree and we decided to partner up in a few places, especially on the east side.

So it. It’s in our blood hospitality is grew up in the business. My father owned a restaurant out in Rockaway Beach and Jeff’s family owned a bar in the, on the west side. So we were born into it.

All right, so there’s a legacy there, but can you both say what’s made the biggest difference to your success?

Because again, highly competitive industry and one of the most dynamic and challenging businesses out there. I’ve been in multiple businesses, restaurants for sure have been the most challenging. What’s made the biggest difference in your success?

Oh, I think for us has been not forgetting where we come from.

And making sure that we take care of the people that, that work for us and with us every day. It’s been important for us since day one. Jeff, if you wanna jump in.

Yeah. I think follow, the finding the right people I think is key, right? And being empathetic to those people.

I think also our big success was we followed our trends of as we grew up, right? So we were in our twenties, we had a. A pub club that was very similar to what we are. Went to a little more nightlife, then went into restaurants. ’cause that was a lot of our crowd. And in our backyard of our people that we went to high school with college with.

’cause this is where we started our business. This is the people that followed us.

Fantastic Hospitality is, of course the foundation of our business. What does that mean to you and your restaurant group, your hotel group, and, does it, how does it define your culture?

Hospitality for us. I think it’s the anticipation of a guest’s needs.

Our guests from a management perspective is our employees, so we try to anticipate what our employees needs might be and try to meet them where they are. That helps obviously that, that, that comes full circle for our guests. Our culture is built on something that we develop called four H.

And we use that to help orientate people to our company. It’s human, it’s hospitable, it’s being hungry, it’s being humble,

and I like that. Keep going.

Yeah. And basically it’s a compass that we try to tell managers that that use this compass to make decisions, being human be a person over the process.

When you’re humble, you never stumble. So humility is important, right? The customer is usually always right, but that’s not the case. Always being hungry, right? Drive for excellence. Try to be everyday workup better than you were the next day. And then hospitality is just, what we’re here about.

But it’s not the end all, be all. It’s this kind of. Compass that balances us all out. ’cause it’s a tough business as

yeah, that seems, I like that. Those are four pillars, really. I like the four H concept. That’s great. That seems to me more of a cultural thing that is infused throughout your organization versus just a mission.

And I say this all the time, it’s like mission statements. They’re old and tired. It might hang in the wall, no one cares or practices it, but these sound like they’re pillars that are actually practiced across your organization. So thanks for sharing that. Yep. Cool. Yeah, thank you. Core. I like, yeah, I like that.

Absolutely. Now you’ve created powerful brands that, that resonate. So there’s the word resonate, and then there’s relevant. So resonate is creating something really, strong that gets the attention of the public in a competitive marketplace. But then how do you. That and stay relevant across, say, multiple demographic groups.

’cause we could go on and on and talk about restaurants that lasted 30, 40 years and their population aged out. They didn’t keep up with the, the younger people and now those businesses are dead. So staying relevant as well as resonating, or both important. How would you answer that, jb?

Sure. So I think there’s a. Obviously we gotta follow the trends, we gotta follow the food trends. We gotta stay relevant in regards to our social media presence. And I think the key word to all of this is consistent, right? Even if we’re following these trends of food and elevating our cocktails and our wine program, we still need to be consistent across the board, right?

They’re gonna come in every day. I think what something we always talk about is genuine hospitality, right? So people always come in for the people. And how they feel and what they feel when they come through our doors that will never change. What’s on the plate can change. What’s in the glass can change, but as long as we’re always providing that genuine hospitality and following the trends as we go through that, I think that consistency will continue to elevate and continue to bring people back.

So training is foundational and you probably have veterans that have been with you a long time, and then there’s new people that come in the door in a variety of positions week to week, day to day. And obviously you wanna maintain longevity, you want to build a crew that’s all pulling in the same direction with the same philosophies in mind.

What are your service philosophies and training, and what’s your approach and how does it work?

We take it day by day, but our core is 21 steps of service. And if 21 steps of service is too much, we’ll knock it down to 14 steps of service. But it’s continuing, it’s continual. So every month, even for our management training, we’re doing, we do classes in the office or we’re doing hands-on p and l training, right?

We’re doing service training. Trying to hold everybody accountable, but at the same time, balance that human side of being, as consistent as possible. But making sure that we’re checking all these boxes because when you have an organization as as large as we are, it’s important that that those things are just, followed through on.

Glen, who’s one of our service managers, he’s one of our operating managers. He’s hitting all of these restaurants and making sure these table tests are being done, making sure that the managers are following through on a DOH checklist every day. Things like that just seem little repetitive, but also they’re important to running successful restaurants.

I.

Anything to add on that, Jeff? Or is that covering it?

I think that covers it, but I also think we use the philosophy of people over process, right? Sometimes we put processes in place that sometimes they don’t always need to. They don’t always make sense. Sometimes we have to put the human side of it before the process as well.

Is there mentoring and shadowing that happens where perhaps a new person will follow someone or even multiple people like your A players? Because different people have best practices and different styles, and you can learn something from different people before you turn somebody new on the floor.

Absolutely. There is a five day, yeah, the five, there’s a five day training. They’ll have to pass a few a few tests, table tests and menu tests. And if they need some more time we’ll give them more time. They work every position in the restaurant, whether if they’re a server they’re running food, they’re busing they’re hitting all the points of the restaurant.

Even at the host stand, they’ll do a shift with the host. We try to. Give them as much as we can, but also we understand it’s a job and they’re excited to get on the floor and start, making real money.

Of course. Yeah. There’s that balance, right? Everyone wants to get going, make some money, but the training is important ’cause the guest experience is the end result.

That’s awesome.

Just to add Yeah, go. Just to add to that on Yeah, please. Please, some, depending on the position, hourly position versus, a management type position. What we’ve learned over time in the last. I would say two years. The technology training to the management is something we really had to pick up, right?

Because there’s so much more tech now that’s been within the business that it takes a lot for the people to understand it. Where sometimes we took our managers, threw them right on the floor, let them get training on the day-to-day, and then the backend stuff that they needed to understand of what technology we had.

It was almost crippling them, right? Because it was taking so much time. So we actually took a few days during that training period, brought ’em back to the office, let them really understand the tech side of it, the business as well before they hit the floor.

I’m glad you brought that up. We’re gonna cover tech stacks coming up, but let’s stick with this question for a moment, and I’m curious what you look for in a new hire, one and two, do you hire for experience or a personality and approach?

Will you hire an experienced person even if perhaps the first impression isn’t? Tell me about that. What do you expect people to bring to the table and how do you hire.

Emotional intelligence is probably number one that we’re looking for. Awareness and people ask what position I’m being hired for?

We don’t hire for a position, we hire the person. And they usually some people are taken back by that. But because in this business, as everything is temporary. We were bar backs growing up, and we were then became bartenders and then, and so on and so forth. This is a road, a path.

And so when you’re looking at a position of their hiring you’re looking at the person first.

Very good. Excellent. So are there labor challenges in your organization and how have you solved those? Everyone’s talking about short staffing, looking for good people, can’t find great people, there’s too much of that warm body thing where people hire anyone just ’cause the show must go on, but yet it affects the guest experience.

What’s the balance there and how have you dealt with it?

It’s challenging, it’s extremely challenging. Since covid, we feel a lot of people have left the industry. For sure. So we’ve been trying to cultivate within, we’re definitely trying to grow within like we just discussed before in regards to, I. Our hiring practices and what we’re looking for, that’s where it comes down to who’s hungry, who’s gonna be looking to grow within the organization, who’s gonna be, wanting to become from a server all the way up to an executive on a management level.

Hiring within I think has been extremely important for us in growing and teaching and educating so they can grow. But in regards to finding staff, I would say. It’s been extremely challenging in New York and I think as long as you know of all the other restaurant operators that we’ve speak to, they’re all facing the same exact problems.

Yeah, and there has to be a future to this industry. We can’t continue to lose good people to other industries. And obviously there’s pay and there’s camaraderie and team spirit and all those things that people look for. It’s not just about how much they make. It’s also about fit and it’s about chemistry and fun.

This is a. Fun industry, but it’s unfortunate that a lot of people start here only as a stepping stone to get somewhere else where you really want to cultivate people that have a passion for hospitality and they want to grow within this business. ’cause there really are so many opportunities.

You don’t need a formal education. You can travel the world and make a good living. Just with hospitality skills and people skills and the things you’re teaching your people every day. So it is sad and it’s challenging and we’re all hoping for a solution, but everyone’s struggling with it.

Every person should work in a restaurant at least once or one day or one hour. There’d be a lot more empathy in this

world. Absolutely. What are today’s restaurant guests seeking and. Their experiences and how are you constantly, you mentioned trends earlier and following trends. When do you know when, okay, this is time to move on to something else?

Because something’s hot now and it’s fleeting. It is a fickle industry after all too. It can be, unless you’ve got that consistency, your menu doesn’t really change. It’s tried and true, but that can’t be true either in an organization as large as yours. So where’s the balance with that?

We’ve. We’ve built contemporary restaurants.

As far as design goes we’ve had better luck with classic restaurants again, trout and true dark woods, taverns, um, things that just don’t go outta style. Yeah, we call it like, finding their little hole people. People want to be. Number one, I think people wanna be recognized.

They want to feel like a regular, and through tech and through good management training, we’re able to build really a great regular base as far as food trends go. The cheeseburger is now the hot, it’s the hottest food and it’s been the hottest food for 20 year, for 50 years. Whereas every restaurant has a barta on it now and 15, 20 years ago, that wasn’t the case. I think that shift is happening and people’s pals are always changing and their tastes are always changing. Obviously covid through a whole wrench into even the cocktail world.

For us, what we found is that people are drinking a lot more martinis than they were. Pre Covid. So I think it’s listening and tweaking. It’s not flipping the apple cart. And it all, again, it all comes down to what Jeff said, like just consistency. And we used to call it salt, right? Like we’re the manager, it’s sound ambiance, lighting, temperature, salt.

I try to explain that to people now and they’re like. A 20 something year old manager’s like I, I don’t know what you’re talking about. So I say vibe check.

I like that. What’s the

vibe? And I, what’s the vibe? Check, what are we doing? How’s the vibe in here? And how’s the music? How’s the temperature?

How’s the lighting? How’s the energy? Are we matching it? Is the staff matching it? Sometimes you gotta bring it back, sometimes you gotta go forward. We, even like on our training, we have to change the words that we’re using because, this is our third decade in the business working in the industry.

We started working in bars in the mid nineties and now here we are in the mid 2020s. It’s crazy.

I like that acronym. Salt is good. Consistency is so important, especially when you’ve got multiple venues across the city, down south. How often do you. Shop, cross shop, for lack of a better term, your different venues, just to get your perspective on how well are these places being managed and what’s missing.

The thousand details are constantly ever present when we own properties like this and it’s so hard to reach perfection in this business when there’s so many details. What do you think about that? Do you travel quite a bit? Do you have other people that mystery shop for you? What’s your plan there?

I think it’s across. Yeah, I think it’s across the board. We try to get into the venues as often as possible to check in on that vibe check as Terence described. Yeah. Also on top of that, we do use secret shoppers. We have a few different organizations that we’ve used to just go in to check in on the consistency.

And then we also have our executive level that are in and outta the venues every single day. So they try to map out across the board that. Somebody is in each venue as at least on a regular basis for that day or for a ship, just to make sure that we’re staying consistent to all of that salt that Terence was describing.

All right. Very good. New York City don’t need to talk about how expensive it is to do business in New York, but regardless, no matter where you are in this country it’s becoming harder and harder to maintain the value proposition to a guest amidst inflation, rising costs and short staffing. How do you do it?

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Good

question. I think, there’s a few, there’s a few ways like, largest cost for us is the labor side, right? I would say is number one. The second largest cost is occupancy cost, so that’s our rent and utility bills and all that other stuff besides our cost of goods. So we always look at what’s the easiest, not easiest, but what’s something that we can negotiate, that we can manage and maintain occupancy cost is probably it.

We’ve taken in about 10 years ago, we decided to get into. Into the hotel industry originally because it was lower entry cost to get into it at that point. ’cause we were more amenity hotels, so we weren’t paying premiums for our rent, so we were able to get in there at a lower cost. That is something we’re really focusing on as we go forward, is how do we get the initial cost to keep these places open and vibrant and still manage it with labor and cost of goods.

The cost of goods and labor. Obviously we need a set amount of staff to be able to maintain these restaurants, but they are still manageable costs that we can maintain. The ocracy cost of the rent in these high locations are stuff that we don’t have control over. So when we go and we start a new business, we always say, where do we start with the ocracy cost?

Then we build in our projections for our cost of goods. We build in our projections for our labor. Hopefully at the end there’s money for us to be able to survive.

There you go. In a low margin business, and it’s so important not only to maintain those margins, but try to grow them through efficiencies, but you’ve got some leverage, some economies of scale.

You must be strong negotiators with suppliers. That’s all important, right?

Absolutely. We try to leverage that as much as possible.

Of course, right? You do business with people for a long time and they wanna maintain your business. They work for your business, but you don’t ask, you don’t get, I say that all the time and I’m sure you’re adept at that.

And we look at our vendors as partners, right? So we try to stay consistent with them and we try to stay loyal to them. As long as they’re loyal to us, then it makes sense financially.

Right on. Let’s talk about leadership versus management. I talk about this all the time on this show and I’m not, that word manager I think is just overused, and it doesn’t mean that someone either is competent or experienced to lead, or they’ve got experience just because they hold the title.

There’s a difference between a true leader and a manager. What’s the philosophy there with your company?

Same, the same guiding principles as four H. We’re a servant. We’re servant leadership. There’s no job beneath us. And you can find us obviously if we need to dishwash, we’re dishwashing if we need to park cars ’cause valets backed up.

We’re going to pack park cars. We’re gonna try to find out why we’re parking cars later on. But when a guest, when there’s an expectation for a guest where we’re gonna meet their, we’re gonna meet their needs and try to help and support our managers. But we do come from this. We are servant leaders and we try to teach that not just preach it, but actually do it.

And I think we have a great management team. Most of them been with us for five plus six plus years, some even 15 years. I. They understand, they all have this kind of idea that there’s no job beneath anyone

that’s leading by example, for sure. Alright, so you’ve got longevity with a very strong leadership team.

How are you recognizing and rewarding those people and making them feel like their opinion, their voice matters, that they’re doing an amazing job and you wanna keep these people so that they don’t jump ship and go somewhere else? What’s that look like?

It’s, it can be challenging but it’s constant communication.

It’s the weekly, it’s a weekly meeting. It, it’s reaching out and, recognizing them just even on a personal level of Jeff and I, you, we we’ll take care of people who we know are are going the extra step the incentive side. We build in bonus packages through financial rewards that are driven by the p and l.

So talking about what they can control, when they see that they’re spending $25,000 on smallwares why are we spending $25,000 on? They control that. So giving them a piece of the profit is how I think we’ve been able to retain some of that core management.

Thanks for answering.

And I also think transparency, we’re very transparent on, as was saying, with the bonus structure.

We, we treat them as almost owners, so they see every aspect of the business. I think that helps them on the education side and I think as, as long as they’re continuing to be educated, they feel like they’re empowered.

I love that word, empowerment. That’s great. Very good. Let’s shift gears and maybe, Jeff, you’re the person to answer this.

Let’s talk finances and KPIs. Starting with menu costing, is that something that happens regularly and analyzing the profitability of menus?

Yes. Yes, we definitely cost out our menu. Would I say that we’re costing it out absolutely perfectly from top to bottom, every item. I can’t guarantee that some, what I can guarantee is I would say our top sellers.

100% cost it out. Some of the other ones that are fluctuating, if it’s a seasonality thing, we cost them out as best as possible, but to get it absolutely perfect, I would say we’re not doing it as best as we should.

Okay. That’s good. Thanks for answering that. I’ve been a coach of restaurants for quite a while, and I’ve specialized in analyzing a menu’s profit.

So once, let’s just assume that your menu has been costed out in any particular venue. Everyone’s got different categories, whether they’re appetizers, some people call ’em starters or they’re entrees, desserts, soup, salads, whatever. Every one of those items obviously has a plate cost. I rank. Every single dish in each category from the most profitable to the least profitable.

And it’s amazing how many restaurants have a huge profit spread difference in each category, where we’re talking multiple dollars and then you run a. Point of sale sales report or product mix or whatever. And you see the volume of sales on more popular items are lower profit items, taking sales away from what you wish you were selling.

And there’s so many things you can do to tighten up that profitability. And there’s so many operators out there where that concept is lost on them. And it’s amazing to me that exists when rising costs, inflation, things, you can’t control volatility of markets if you don’t have leverage like your group does, and you’re at the mercy of your suppliers, the only thing you control is maximizing your profit to improve your bottom line, maintain a margin, grow a margin.

Yeah, I was just curious if that resonates.

Absolutely. Yeah, it certainly does. Jeff, you should talk about Patty. Our marketing. She came in last week and, came up with an idea saying, Hey, can I get a pix from the managers every week? Because I actually wanna highlight the highest, the highest, the most profitable and the top sellers.

So we can match that on where we’re marketing our social media. And that’s, that goes back to that kind of transparency of showing everybody the numbers. And it was amazing to see, uh, one of our, our young marketing that’s terrific. People has come in with that.

It was like, brilliant.

  1. That is fantastic. So I love the word intrapreneur and it sounds like you’re growing intrapreneurs because your people treat the place like they owned it. They run it to the numbers and they care about Phil, the hospitality approach and all those things. They’re not just employees, it’s like they’re part of a team that understands the bigger picture.

You may, you might train for that, but you can’t have too many people like that in your organization. It sounds like that young lady is one of those people. Very cool. Yes,

absolutely.

You touched on tech stacks earlier. What tech is vitally important? You mentioned okay, there were a couple hiccups along the road and, and training people in a new technology takes a little bit of time.

But if it increases efficiency and enhances the guest experience, it’s we need this stuff. What really is a needle mover for you? What can’t you live without? From a tech standpoint,

I’d probably say seven rooms. Is our CRM reservation platform is what we use across the board. We’ve been using it now for let’s see, what are we on almost 10 years now oh, yeah.

We probably have over a million plus members within our CRM now from our client base that we’ve built. It allows us to, to. Monitor on what they’re eating, the trends that they’re coming, how often they’re coming, the money they’re spending, just so we can truly understand our guests, I would say is our number one tech.

I would say our second largest is we use a company called Margin Edge. That is our inventory and our bill pay system that we use throughout the, throughout, throughout the organization. What else do you think t.

I mean, pss but I want, go back to seven rooms, just even thinking about how your inventory is your seating inventory and relaying that back to A-A-A-P-M-S or property management system that people use in hotels.

Allow several rooms, allows you to control your inventory and dishes it out to all those. Other third party services. That’s the idea of it. And that’s where we were really attracted to it. We saw how much we were spending with OpenTable in 2013 and 14 and 15, and we said, we, there’s gotta be a better system out there.

And seven, we’ve grown with seven rooms, so I, we can’t speak enough about it. And and then, we were early investors in Bebot, which was, um. Which was a delivery platform system that we integrated into our the hotels that we were in. So the QR code was in the hotel room.

They could just snap it and direct order to, to the kitchen. And that was in pretty easy integration for us in some of these, in, in the hotels that we were, servicing.

Excellent. Everyone needs technology. There’s been a hesitation in this industry, not necessarily in the larger restaurant groups, but overall in this industry, tech is something that people just there’s some stumbling block about it and there’s new technology coming out all the time, and there’s a monthly residual payment to it.

There’s a learning curve for your people. We’ve talked about all these things and I’d really like the industry to. Embrace it a little bit more. How about artificial intelligence? You using that in any degree?

Yeah, we use it in our phone system right now.

Uhhuh?

Yeah. I use a company called Slang, which is a.

Automated system that actually is hopefully gonna integrate with seven rooms. So when people are calling in regards to their phone number pops up, we’ll develop their profile that’s built into our CRM so we know when certain guests are calling VIPs, whatever people that have been with us multiple times, if they have a birthday or celebration coming up, that’ll be able to recognize that because that information is inside our CRM.

 Of the AI stuff is still pretty new. For the restaurant side of things, we are looking at it on some of the inventory stuff as well to be able to, ’cause what’s happening now is we’re realizing that we have all these different technologies, but none of them speak to each other. That’s great. So it’s still taking all of this data that everybody’s collecting from all different sides.

You still need a human to put it all together. So we’ve been reaching out to a few different AI companies that are able to possibly take all the data that we have and then spit out the information that we need.

Okay. Very good. Let’s shift gears and talk marketing. Besides pr, what is a big, marketing strategy that really works?

Do you use influencers? In a city like New York, there’s so many different restaurants to compete against. What’s your marketing plan look like?

We just throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks. Roger, okay. It seems to work these days though. We, internally, we have a marketing department and they’ve been focusing on social media ads.

But it still goes back to the fact word of mouth still. Number one,

always will be. And

that starts on premise. Buy that person a drink. If we messed up, buy them the meal, don’t let them walk out the door feeling that we didn’t take care of them. And that person is going to go and tell, five to 10 other people, Hey, they took care of me there.

Hey they did the right thing. They messed up, but they did the right thing. I’m gonna give them another shot. It’s been so many times where you walked into some of the best restaurants in New York. You’re just like, how is. They didn’t even, they didn’t say goodnight or, it, it was just weird.

So I, the marketing for us starts on premise and taking care of the guest. But as far as we use a company called Targetable that we’ve seen a little bit of, success with with social media influencers. We haven’t gotten we haven’t paid, I. For influencers, but we will do, some credits here and there.

So what we found is that the organic viral videos are usually from people that just like what we’re doing, whether that’s at the Rockaway Hotel, where, a TikTok, is now at a few hundred thousand on just her stay there. And she got the true essence of what, what we’re trying to do at the Rockaway Hotel, even in the winter.

Which is a beach side rush, beach side hotel. So you could obviously, tell that winters can be a little bit, on the quieter side. But organic tried and true.

How about online reviews? It’s unfortunate that human nature tends to lean toward the negative, so they’ll slam you on an online review for a minor infraction.

There’s some people that are just impossible to please, not everyone, of course, but you almost have to ask for a positive review. You can. Deliver amazing experiences and not everyone is gonna go right to, online and give you guys a five star and that’s unfortunate. Do you do anything to encourage that?

Do you ask for reviews if people had a great experience? It’s about communication on the floor with your people, what do you do?

Going back to that,

Right ahead, Jeff, with the incentive of. Incentivizing our managers, they, their bonus is structured around maintaining a certain level of guest reviews.

And we respond to every review good or bad online. And then seven rooms has an automatic review and. Weekly. We look at all those reviews and we are letting our management team know Hey, here’s the follow-up. What happened here? Do we need to make this right?

Or, let’s get some more information and go from there.

Fantastic. Anything else you’d like to share? We’ve covered a lot of ground today.

That was great. Really appreciate it.

We did.

I really appreciate you guys being here, hospitality professionals, your credit to the industry, and I just love talking shop with people that are like-minded, that are moving forward and progressive. Thank you so much for being with us.

Thank you, Roger. Thank Roger.

Appreciate it.

That was the restaurant Rock Stars podcast. Thanks so much to our audience for tuning in. Thanks to this week’s sponsors for supporting our show. Can’t wait to see y’all in the next episode. Stay tuned. Stay and we’ll see you there.

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