Thanks for joining me. This episode has it all. It’s about operations. critical finances and numbers. leadership, creating company culture, getting the most out of your team, setting expectations, it’s about marketing that you can track.

It’s all about best practices. All delivered by a restaurant professional. Now, I’ve known Josh Kopel for many, many years. He is a Louisiana boy. Moved to Los Angeles, started a really successful bar, which turned into a Michelin star restaurant. he’s been a consultant, a podcast host, a real guru, and impresario in our space.

So you’re not gonna wanna miss this episode with Josh Kopel,

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

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

Josh, my friend. How are you? I’m so good and so excited to be with you again. Yeah, we go back years and we followed each other’s careers, but I consider you, I love the word impresario, because it takes entrepreneur to a whole different level.

It’s someone who has a vision. It’s someone who inspires and leads people. It’s someone that is creative and resourceful and is willing to do anything. To succeed and then help others along the way. So you are a hospitality impresario. I love

that. Oh, thank you.

I love that. That’s my introduction and I say that genuinely from my heart.

But when I first met you your story was so fascinating, and I don’t want to tell the audience your story, but you’re originally from Louisiana. I am and moved to the big city of Los Angeles. And then what happened?

It was wild man. So I I got a random call like we all do. So I had worked in nightlife in Baton Rouge which is exactly what you would think it would be.

I worked at the Alligator Bayou Bar Loc, located on Alligator Bayou Road, located in on Alligator Bayou. And then I’m in Los Angeles, second largest city in the country. And a friend that I barely knew called me one night and was like, Hey, I’m the door guy at this nightclub and they need a patio bartender.

Would you be willing to come do it? I know you bartended. And I said, yes. Roger had I said no, my life would’ve been completely different. But I went, I, they handed me the patio bar. I rolled it out, I went to the liquor storage to stock it. It was a disaster. And so after the shift, which I really appreciated, I made like $120 cash, which 25 years ago, that was a lot of money.

Eureka I turned to, it was dude, I turned to the owners and I was like. Listen, this place is a shit show. Do you mind if I come in and reorganize it? And they were like, we’re not gonna pay you to do that. I was like, I just don’t wanna work in filth. Flashed is six weeks later, I’m the general manager of an 8,000 square foot nightclub in Hollywood.

That’s

awesome.

It was insane. And was that

Hollywood Boulevard or in the neighborhood thereof?

That was, it was literally one block off Hollywood Boulevard on Las Palm. And so it was in the middle of. All of that in the early two thousands. I did it for years. I got really good at it.

Ended up working with other groups in that space. And at some point wanted, I wanted to serve myself candidly in this world full of nightclubs in long lines. All I really wanted was a dive bar, like the dive bars I grew up with, and everybody was zigging and I thought it would be a good idea to zag.

So I opened 5 0 4, which was a 900 square foot patio bar on Hollywood Boulevard. And it was a blockbuster hit out the gate. My only blockbuster hit out the gate.

Did you get a star on the sidewalk?

There were, I did not. But there were plenty in front of the bar. That is for sure.

That’s cool. So you had lots of tourists wandering by, so nonstop traffic, right day and night. It’s like everybody driving and cruising the boulevard and walking the streets and that kind of thing. But you had a mix of clientele, I’m guessing, right? I did a broad mix of interesting people, crazy people, just LA culture.

Oh my goodness. They say if you shake the world and you turn it on its side.

Everything that’s loose falls into Los Angeles. And it was very much the case. You know what I figured out in that bar, and it speaks to your question about who was my client. I figured out that food and beverage is not what people are buying. What they’re buying is an experience. Agreed. And I would argue that if we did well, which we did incredibly well, it wasn’t because of the tourists, it was because of the locals, because we figured out that the core function of that bar.

Wasn’t to serve food and beverage. It was an anecdote to loneliness. I was 30. Most of the people in that bar were in their twenties. Everybody came from different places and the way that people would refer to the bar let me know our job, which was people would say, you should go to 5 0 4. You can go in there by yourself and you’ll have a great time.

And so in a stratified area where everybody is lonely and looking for connection, the bartenders entertained you, they befriended you, and they introduced you to other regulars. It was a home for people that very much felt far from home, and that’s when I realized like everything I’ll build, everything that I preach will never be around food and beverage.

It’ll always be around trying to solve whatever core needs your audience has.

Wow. And therein lies the experiences, but you’re also speaking volumes about hospitality as well. It’s like welcoming and accepting anyone from anywhere that is just looking for something, whether it is an experience, whether it is food or drink.

And you read those people and you get to know those people. And you sometimes create customers for life and sometimes. People are passing on the way to somewhere else, but that’s all part of our business, so that’s cool. But what a jump from that to fine dining, take us there. It’s like you go from dive bars Oh God.

To a Michelin star. Like seriously, how does this happen? I, okay.

Not like that though. Okay. So let me tell you the way it actually works. Yeah, please tell us. So what I should have done, even looking back, what I should have done. Just open another one of those bars. All of my success was rooted in failure.

But I love the idea of fine dining. I love the idea of opening a fine dining restaurant. How hard could it be? I had mastered nightlife and my first entrepreneurial endeavor out the gate was wildly successful. So I opened a 6,000 square foot two story fine dining restaurant. And it was a dumpster fire.

It was a dumpster fire out the gate. At the end of year one, we had lost about a quarter million dollars net, so I didn’t have any money to operate the restaurant. And what makes it worse is we were executing poorly. Like it wasn’t that we didn’t do well because the fundamentals were wrong, even though they were.

We weren’t serving a great product and we weren’t serving anything people wanted consistently. And so a year into this process, I fire the executive chef. I bring in a new executive chef, I fire the general manager. I take over as general manager and understand this fine dining restaurant is literally Roger, the first restaurant I had ever worked in my life.

I turned to my fiance at the time and I said. I need all the money we have, which was not a lot. I took out a $50,000 cash advance from Amex, which I wouldn’t recommend to others. But I would also note there is no personal guarantee on it, which is why I did it. And we dumped all of it into the restaurant with the commitment that we were gonna make it the best of the best and we were gonna figure this thing out.

And over the course of 90 days, I figured out the recipe. For what is like repeatable, predictable success in our industry, and that’s what I spend most of my time talking about these days.

Wow, what a learning curve. What a stressful situation. I know that resonates so deeply with our audience right now who have come out of the pandemic.

If you’re listening, you somehow survive the pandemic, but your margins are shrinking and your labor cost is high, and you can’t find great staff, and it’s just the tail of woes. Keep going. And there’s so many people that are just feeling trapped right now. When you and I would like to inspire and have people rediscover the passion that got them into this business in the first place, and somehow come out the other side better, more successful, more profitable.

And therein lies systems. Right?

For sure. And it’s also, so for me, and you tell me if your life is any different, like I have succeeded through focus and I have failed through lack of focus. The art is figuring out what to focus on, and as it turns out, with the fine dining restaurant, in every business I’ve ever worked in or through it is about forgetting what’s broken and doubling down on what’s working.

When we rebuilt the fine dining restaurant from the ground up, we didn’t say, what are our problems? Let’s fix them. We said, what’s working in this business? And we refashioned the entire concept. I love it around what we knew was working. Because if you think about it, everybody spends their time fixing problems, but if they just 10 x what works, they would see a hundred x the result.

That’s powerful stuff right there. How does that lead to a Michelin star? And I asked that question because I just finished listening to Unreasonable Hospitality, which is an great book, incredible book, and I’m sure you know all about it for sure. And and the author, I. The narrator of this book on Audible he talks about the journey of becoming the best restaurant in the world in such a incredible competition.

And you think about that of the millions of restaurants around the world. There’s probably 900,000 restaurants in North America, but millions around the world and becoming the best restaurant and what it takes, and the level of dedication and focus and commitment, not just on the part of the owner and the gm, but about every single member of the staff that is the foundation of that business.

You understand that you can relate to that, and it sounds like you did a lot of those same things where you 10 xd what was working and you focused every single day on the details. And then how long did it take to turn that, that whole ship around and make it and get recognized at that level?

Because to me, I had a family casual restaurant, very successful restaurant, a couple of them, but. I was never gonna get a Michelin star. I was never gonna be the best restaurant. I was the best restaurant in my city. I was not the best restaurant in the country or even my state, let alone the world.

But keep going. How does this, how did that go for you?

So I think there’s a conversation to have around leading indicators and lagging indicators. So the goal was to focus on the leading indicators, which was, yeah. A great sales strategy to create a profitable business to offer consistent service that was intentional.

We did things in fine dining that other people don’t. We did not stand above you, which is traditional French fine dining. We squatted down or we would kneel down and we would explain things to you. Yes. Instead of telling you what you would be eating for the evening, what we did was we asked what do you like to eat at home?

When you go out to eat? What do you like to eat? Because we understood that there is a lot of anxiety, especially in fine dining around choosing well. For even the most successful restaurateurs listening today, your customer frequency is nowhere near a place where most of the people that come in have been in before.

For most of us, 70 to 80% of our customers on any given day are first timers, and they don’t know what’s best, and so they need to be guided. And so to become a Michelin awarded restaurant. That was never the goal because candidly, Michelin wasn’t in California for the first four years that I owned the restaurant, so it wasn’t even a consideration.

What we tried to do was create a world-class experience that was rooted in truly understanding what you need, letting you do the talking, and then we just met and exceeded whatever expectation there was. And then where I think we really outperformed and probably got us what we, the reputation that we had was surprise and delight.

I like to think I’m a master of surprise and delight.

Oh I really like that surprise and delight. And, I used to call it the magical journey because I recognize what, to your credit, what you just said is absolutely true. New customers, I like to call them guests. Forget the word customer. Sure.

Guests come in the door every single day for the very first time. They don’t know the first thing about what they’re gonna enjoy, what’s unique, special, or different about your restaurant or your property. It’s up to your team to be so well-trained and so well versed. And I call that taking people on the magical journey and turning them onto an experience, not just what’s on the menu and knowing so what they’re going to enjoy to make these suggestions along the way, that increased check averages, but also up level the hospitality experience.

And I totally believe in that. And I just heard. You know that was a very similar philosophy to you, and you gotta treat every one of those guests like they’re the most important guest or an old friend as if, yeah, we don’t know them, but we introduce ourselves by name. Any guest facing person was introducing themself by name and making friends with guests.

And what do you think happens? They come back again and they ask for you by name, and now suddenly it’s their favorite place because they don’t get that kind of hospitality or treatment. Down the street or at your competitors. So competitive advantage there. And it sounds like you were doing much of the same.

What happened? Did the wheels come off at some point? Okay, we got the Michelin Star, and then you ended up closing, like what happened?

We sold

it.

Oh. So we sold it at the top of 2020.

Okay. Good. Handedly just, yeah, go ahead. The top of 2020. So pandemic starts in top of 2020. So that was pre before this whole thing went.

Did you? No. So time, so the pandemic

hit we closed March 14th.

Yeah.

And I put it on the market March 16th.

Okay. And what was that sale process like? Did you take away to find a buyer? Did you have,

oh my god. We closed escrow by May. Kidding. It was fast. Optimism was still high in the industry. Yeah.

And candidly, Roger and I think it, this is what is so rooted in what I do today. I didn’t sell the restaurant ’cause I didn’t think we were gonna make it. I sold the restaurant because I was worried we would and. All of the fundamentals. We had the dive bar in Hollywood. We had a fast casual that was cranking and growing.

We had this Michelin awarded restaurant externally. All of the metrics were there. It’s not that on the outside we were successful, but in the inside we weren’t profitable. We were very profitable, but I was burned out. I was exhausted. Yeah, I was. Remember miserable. I remember

you were the Matre D, you were the master of ceremonies.

You were dressed to the nines every day. You were meeting and greeting people and running all the details of the restaurant. I remember this. Yeah, I can see. Yeah. And that’s what so many of the audience, it’s that burnout factor. And you know what? I think the key is empowerment because so many people are not empowering their teams.

They’re not creating what I call intrapreneurs within their business to take on a piece of it to. Take on additional responsibility, treat it like they owned it and had to pay for it, achieve results, and they get rewarded and incentivized for doing so. No, I, if I want something done right, there’s still that mentality.

I gotta do it myself. And is there no wonder why you’re there 24 7? You find your key people, you empower them, you give them a chance to succeed. You know what the best part about this is? It’s, it lowers your turnover and it creates careers, not just jobs. People suddenly realize, Hey, there’s a future here and if I can do this, I can do that, and then I can go to this level.

And you always have to be on the lookout for talent and nurture and develop that talent. And I think that’s my definit of leadership.

I couldn’t agree more. I will say though the hurdle for me, and I think it’s true for a lot of us. Some restaurant owners graduated at the top of their class from Cornell University.

But most of us are like busboy that found financing. And so I had every intention of becoming a restaurateur, like a restaurant owner. But the day that the restaurant opened, I reverted back to what I was best in the world at, which was restaurant management, because I didn’t really know.

What restaurateurs did for a living. I had no idea. It’s not like somebody sat me down and said, all right, you’re no longer the manager. Now you’re gonna do this, and this. And I think for the people listening, and this was very much my experience I was afraid, like there was fear and shame around.

Am I too good to jump into the scullery and do the dishes? I’m not afraid to jump behind the register. We grew up, you and I are similar in age. We grew up in an era where. Like you worked hard to work hard and 50 hours a week was a part-time job, and so there was shame around sitting at a desk or making phone calls or being out and about networking.

Those are not things restaurant owners do when the truth is. Those are the things that the most successful restaurant owners do.

Now you’re talking about running a business, and I used to always say to my, my managers, and I call them leaders. It’s I never wanna see you in the office because the floor is your office.

There’s so many details, making friends with the guests, taking care of issues, putting out fires, but also being proactive about the guest experience. Okay, that’s true. But you’re right. There’s so many operators that are trying to do all that, but they’re not running the. Business behind the scenes.

Sure. And putting the right people in place to operate the restaurant and to be in their stead. And I think that goes back to that word systems. If you don’t have systems in place you’re tied to that restaurant 24 7 and you gotta do it all and you gotta be there and there’s no, there’s nothing wrong with.

Obviously working those hours but not at the expense of your family and missing the kids grow up and the high school graduations and the soccer games. And that is unfortunately a pitfall in this business unless you empower your team. When the pandemic hit it, it was. And so before we had decided to sell, before I had decided to sell, ’cause I was the one that compelled my partners to sell.

Yes. Uhhuh. I had never, my daughter was almost one and a half. I never, I had changed a couple of diapers, but I’d never given her a bath. I had never put her down. And in the week, just that one week in between shutting down the restaurant because of the state ordered mandate and like deciding to close the restaurant for good and sell it what happened was there was this paradigm shift in my mind, Roger, where I, the whole time I was gone and I was gone a lot.

I thought, what a tragedy for my daughter. That like she doesn’t get this time with me. And what I realized in the week that we spent together and I got to spend with this amazing little girl was that it wasn’t sad for her because she was never gonna remember those days. It was sad for me, for sure, and I was already a year and a half behind and I just, I wasn’t going to compromise that again.

And so then it became about learning and educating myself, which was something. Candidly, I was afraid to do. If we go back to fear and shame everybody listening, if your walk-in cooler was underperforming, you would immediately hire someone to fix it, right? Or if your walk-in cooler was broken, you would not hesitate to spend 500, a thousand, $5,000 to fix that because it is integral to your business.

You cannot run it effectively without it. But nobody looks at themselves that way. And says, you know what? I could invest $5,000 in myself and revolutionize my business, that my business is underperforming because I am. And I felt that shame, right? And so all of that to say everybody is struggling with one thing or another but there are resources out there, and I would encourage everyone listening to go find the resources that resonate with them, because when I did, it transformed my life.

200%. Oh, that’s powerful stuff. Thank you so much. That, that, that speaks volumes about a new approach and use the word paradigm. I love paradigm shifts. Throw out the old and take a new approach to your business. And I also recommend, take a walk out the front door, cross the street, look at your business from a whole different perspective, from the guest perspective, because restaurant owners ourselves, even back then, you get so close to your operation, you miss things.

I even empowered my team to come in through the front door versus the back door and open your eyes and see what the guest sees and empowered them to fix stuff that was amiss before the guest saw it. And if there was something they couldn’t fix, some hazardous situation, okay, bring it to our attention.

We’ll fix it immediately. But it’s like, what you can fix, please fix. And out of the thousand details of running a restaurant, very little was seen by the guest. That was amiss because everyone had, we even had battle stations, in the restaurant it was overlap. Everyone had their section, but then there were duty rosters and bathrooms were checked by multiple people, and it’s it was this team spirit thing and everybody got into it.

It was also driven by recognition and rewards. ’cause everyone works for a paycheck, but people really love to be recognized for contributions they make, and I think that leads to longevity and lowers your turnover. It’s all about that culture thing. Everyone has their own definition of culture. Do you remember what your company culture was like in your restaurant?

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It was amazing.

How would you describe it? What was the aura? What was the image? If you were, if I were to take a survey of, half of your team back then, and just ask them that question, what was our culture? What do you think the common thread would be?

So we worked really hard on culture and before I tell you what our culture was, I will validate with data.

So we closed the restaurant March of 2020. Two years later, my former business partner and executive chef opened a comparable concept about a mile and a half away. And do you know who his opening staff was or staff from the restaurant? Two years later, everybody quit their jobs to go work for him in a comparable concept because our culture was so strong.

That’s, and it was rooted in two things. The first. Values. Yes. I think everyone can throw their handbook out the window. No one’s gonna read it, no one’s gonna retain it. And this is an exceptionally human enterprise. So what are four things that they can remember that will cover every conceivable scenario there?

There is. And so we built four core values that I actually install in my client’s businesses around that, that take care of all of that. And the second is accountability. We were no longer a family, we were a high performance team, focused on education. ’cause we, everybody learned, everybody trained, we cross trained everybody because these are lifelong skills.

A cook, learning how to bartend could use that for the rest of his life. A bartender, learning how to cook can use those skills forever. And what I found is when people stop learning, especially things they’re interested in, yes, they no longer engage

and they stop growing as people.

They do.

So you’re talking, okay, so these are life skills, but you also had a backup plan.

’cause not only are you enriching their job by training them new skills, but suddenly in a pinch, this person gets the flu or gets hit by a bus or whatever it is. And now you got someone in a pinch that can jump in and the show absolutely goes on, and that’s smart. And some people would look at that as a cost.

Oh, cross training, that’s extra payroll and all that. And that’s a shortsighted view when it’s gonna pay dividends down the road when you need it as a backup plan. It’s an. Investment in the future of your business and in longevity of your team, which costs you a fortune when you turn people over.

Do you wanna know why all those people moved from Pru and Proper to Joyce?

The reason that they did was this, because they were great line cooks. They were great soup chefs, but not when we hired them. When we hired them, they were dishwashers. And so you give someone a skill that they are able to bank on for the rest of their lives and they’ll be with you forever. Nobody in our industry is willing to make that investment.

Everybody’s willing to hire a poor performing line cook as opposed to hiring a dishwasher with aspirations ’cause they think it’s cheaper. Awesome. ’cause they think it’s easier. And that is not the case. I believe that there are a bunch of unskilled workers out there. They meet the criterion from like a disc assessment internally.

To perform that if you just give them the skills they need, they will impress you every day of the week. And I’ve got like the data to prove it.

And they never wanted to let you down. No. Yes. And they take pride. You instill a certain pride in them. Hopefully they bring their own pride to the job but that whole culture that you’re speaking of just up levels, uplifts and inspires people to be better than they are when they walk in the door because they wanna be better and they wanna please the person that’s giving them the opportunity.

That’s beautiful.

So it’s also about changing the worldview, right? Yeah. So what I think we desperately need to do is professionalize the industry. And so like I tell all of the managers I work with, like you’re not a restaurant manager. You’re a bank manager, and the people that work for you, they’re like bank tellers because we make excuses for our teams all the time that a bank manager never would.

Your bartender gets away with things that a bank teller never would. Do you think a bank teller gets a shift drink at the end of a meal? Do you think that a bank teller is allowed to take a shot with a customer? Does that help their performance? No, it doesn’t. We made massive investments in training our teams and then to set them up for success, we created firm boundaries and we help them to hire expectations.

I used to tell people, Roger, and it’s a really useful tool. I used to say, you’re not in trouble. I’m not your daddy. You’re not in trouble with me, I’m gonna write you up. And I’m not even upset about it, like you did this to you. And if you do it two more times, you choose to lose your job.

But like you’re a professional and I’m gonna treat you as such, so I’m just gonna assume me that this is gonna be an issue and you’ll be gone, or it won’t be an issue and we’ll never have to talk about this again. But I think that when you afford people the respect. I just had this conversation with a manager the other day and I said, listen, you don’t give your team enough credit.

If you baby them and they’re not babies, if you treat them like professionals, they will act accordingly. We underestimate people’s ability and I think it’s a critical error.

I hear you saying that you set clear expectations, which were well understood. Let’s talk about the accountability piece, because people start off with the best of intentions and then suddenly best practices go sideways sometimes, and there’s slack or inconsistent performance, but it’s the accountability thing that is not only understood, but it’s somehow promised and you can hold them to accountable to that promise.

Can you do this to the best of your ability? Will you do this to the best of your ability? And if they say yes and sign off on a career description, then you notice something going sideways, you got accountability. How did you handle that?

So I think there’s an evolution. I think there’s an evolution from manager, which is I think what we’re all trained to do, which I would describe management is like controlling human behavior into coaching.

Which is like influencing human behavior. Typically, the way it works, and this is true for me, early in my career, you would do something wrong and I wouldn’t say anything, and then again and again, and eventually either I’d fire you and it was a complete surprise to you, or I would explode on you, and that was a surprise as well.

And neither one was effective. Coaches always adjust in real time. And the players on the team get adjusted to and accustomed to constant positive and critical feedback. And so in a busy service, when a line cook plates something wrong or in a busy service, when a server makes a service error like you would think, it’s too busy, like we’re in the middle of the push, now is not the time to say this.

I would say this. I would bring it up. ’cause you bring it up in real time to adjust their behavior. It’s not a whole conversation. ’cause again, I’m co I’m coaching, I’m not teaching. I’m just putting my hand. Thank on your back. Coaching

is critiquing, never criticizing.

Correct. But it goes

beyond that.

But I love in the moment, because even in the heat of battle, it’s like everyone knows now what the expectations are. They don’t want to be called on the carpet again during a busy time. During a slow time. They’ll remember that. And I think they’ll respect you for it as long as you’re impartial and there’s no favoritism.

It’s like a three step process. So what I do when I coach Yeah. Is the first thing is I ask a question. I say, Hey, typically we do it like this, and you’re doing it like that. Why would you do it like that? Did you not know that we were supposed to do it that way? To which that gives them the opportunity to either cover and explain, or to just adjust the behavior in real time.

If I see it happen again, I ask for a favor. I say, Hey, Roger, I know we talked about this before. Could you do me a favor? Can you do it like this instead of like that? And then if I need to adjust the behavior again, I come back and I say, Roger, we’ve talked about this a couple of times. I want you to do it like this and not that, and I want you to hear me and never wanna have this conversation again.

And in doing so, there’s finality. That’s three different approaches to create the same outcome in real time. And I’ll tell you, man, 1% of the time I’ve had to use that third tactic.

I’m also hearing disciplinary procedures for minor and major infractions and consequences, right? Because that also makes the rubber hit the road.

We’ve gotta look internally, right? So like everyone’s gonna talk about, oh, this generation, this and this generation that. Yeah, if our teams are inconsistent, it’s because we are inconsistent. So if somebody is late repeatedly, it is because they know that they won’t get fired or written up if they’re late repeatedly.

A question that I love to ask is, and this is on the onsite consulting side like somebody would show up late and I would say, can I ask you a question? Say, yeah. Say. If I fired you for this, if you knew walking into this that you would be fired for being late, would you be late? I said, no. So you would’ve worked it out, right?

And they say, yeah. To which I say that’s what we’re gonna do now, right? If you’re late, I’m gonna fire you. And if not, you aren’t. And it’s as simple as that. But there is no accountability or there’s no consistent application of accountability, which is probably the bigger issue. It is our consistency that breeds their consistency.

1. That’s,

that’s awesome. You probably you’re still in the Los Angeles area, are you not?

Yeah, for sure.

And I’m sure you dine out in a wide variety of places. What do you look for? Us as respirators or former respirators, we have high standards. Of course we do. We know what happens behind the scenes.

We, we know what’s going on, even when the average public doesn’t know what’s going on. The controlled chaos that’s happening in so many restaurants. What do you see is happening today with hospitality, with service, with attention to detail, with value proposition? Because again, if there’s this labor crisis going on for so many restaurants and they’re short staffed, it affects service.

It makes other people step up to the plate more, and the guests can usually see and feel that. And with inflation and higher menu prices, guests have higher expectations. Do you see this going on in the places you dine? What do you see?

I do. So the lens that I always look through is what are they selling here?

What kind of business is this? Because if it’s a manufacturing business, so I had been in multiple tiers of dining as an owner, right? So what I figured out when I moved from fine dining to fast casual was I’m no longer in the food and beverage business. The manufacturing business.

Yes.

There is no experience here.

The best chicken sandwich, and this was my first week open.

Yeah, the

best chicken sandwich in the world that takes 30 minutes to make. Is the worst chicken sandwich in the world, right? There’s no getting around that, Roger. And so once you understand what business you are in, I think that you adjust accordingly.

There’s a deli that I love to go to that’s right by my house. And they are in the manufacturing business. Nobody goes to a Jewish deli for world-class hospitality. Like you’re going for a sandwich, you can barely fit in your mouth. And they don’t know that they think they’re in the service industry.

They think they’re in the hospitality business. So as a result, they have servers. They’re understaffed because nobody wants to work there ’cause none of the servers are making any money. But they have these servers. So the service is. Horribly slow. And because they’re understaffed, it’s also not world-class service.

’cause they’re just blowing you through it. They don’t know it, but they’re in the manufacturing business, if they had tablets on the table people are able to order by their phone. They just would because the server’s not adding any inherent value to the experience. So what I see is I see a lot of distracting from it.

There are a lot of full service casual restaurants that need to transition to a fast casual model, understanding the use case for their restaurant, and then in full service they people lack the understanding that people wanna be told what to do. It’s first thing I learned in fine dining. It was like people wanna be told what to do.

Nobody’s been there before. Everybody wants to be guided through the experience. They want an advocate for them. And what I see is, I see that sales by and large is still considered this dirty thing, but like I want you to tell me what to buy. And if the special’s great and you had it in pre-shift, tell me that, right?

If this wine pairs really well with this item, I would like to know. Like I am not alone in this. Like I have done really well as a restaurateur and a restaurant coach. ’cause I understand my audience and I want to serve others the way I want to be served, right? Like I’m not a restaurant coach for everybody, Roger, I’m a restaurant coach for me 10 years ago.

So if that’s who you are and where you are, I can help you. And if not, I’m probably not the guy for you. So when you look at my base in the business that I was in, once I understood it, I built the entire experience around that and I just don’t see that happening today. Everybody’s following the same playbook and it’s a failed model.

Well,

I’ve always believed, and I say this a lot, that the restaurant businesses show biz it’s entertainment.

It is and

and half of the restaurants in LA are staffed by wannabe actors that are practicing their craft on the public in hopes of being discovered or being somebody famous. Yet that’s a life skill, right?

To meet new people and to turn them onto an experience and to use their unique personalities and to walk people through and guide them. We talked about this at the beginning of the show. And then to suggest things that are gonna increase the check average while delivering a better experience. And hospitality like that is such a skillset to do.

And I’ve always, I used to train my staff that I’ve said it a hundred times, but I’ll never get tired of saying it. When the doors open for business, it’s like the curtain going up and it’s showtime and you’re not a buser and you’re not a host, and you’re not a server, you’re not a bartender. You are an actor on stage, and you’re here to deliver experiences and give people lots of reasons to.

Come back again and spread the joy on social media and positive reviews, and that is powerful. But also to make friends so that they come back and ask for you. And that enhances your pocketbook and that keeps people staying in your restaurant versus going, because the grass is greener at the competition down the street.

And the whole thing just kinda has this domino effect that if you build that culture that you’re talking about. What a powerful thing and empower people to run your restaurant as if they owned it. All these things come together and eureka, right? That’s like capturing lightning in a bottle.

I love it. What about finances? What was really important to you when you were successful and profitable? Were you taking regular inventory? Were you calculating cost of goods? Were you doing all these things and costing your menus and just keeping all those things in line?

Oh, that’s such an unfair question, Roger.

Yes, those weren’t my numbers. So the chef did recipe cards and all of that. Yeah. So that was being done. If we go back to what we were talking about earlier with leading versus lagging indicators I never cared about revenue. All I cared about was my per customer average spend. And so I spent a lot of time around menu engineering because I knew if I could pick up literally $1 on my PCA I’d make an extra a hundred thousand dollars this year. So that was a number that I tracked really well also, and I’m salesy and marketing. Yeah. And I’ve always been that way.

Yes. And so the other thing that I focused on as it relates to profitability and numbers was diversifying revenue at high margin. So we went, we zigged when everybody else zagged. My fine dining restaurant only existed to promote my private events business and my fried chicken joints. Only existed to promote my catering business.

And so that was the business we were really in. So what we would do is we were averaging probably about 12%, which is decent and fine dining in our B2C business. But on private events, I was pushing 30 to 40% profit.

Sweet. Oh, that’s beautiful. And they all fed each other.

And they do Nice. ’cause your B2B strategy is your B2C strategy.

Yeah. If

I hold your holiday party and 150 people show up and 149 of those had never been to my restaurant before, they’re gonna come back with their friends and family.

Yeah, you could average out that profit margin and say you went much higher than 12 because that led to something somewhere else that you wouldn’t have had if you didn’t have this as a feeder for that.

It’s okay, that’s powerful.

It’s also like looking, you control that’s so nice in your business. So B2C, you can’t control like Raach if you don’t wanna go out on a Tuesday. Like I would’ve to give away the house to get you in on a Tuesday. But B2B is different. So when you look at like B2B event sales, I’m just trying to find the law firm that’s already having a holiday party and I’ll just convince them to do it with us.

And so if we go back to leading indicators, it wasn’t about how many parties I booked, it was about how many calls I made, how many emails I sent. ’cause the more calls I made, the more emails I sent, the more parties I booked, the more money I made at a 30 to 40% profit margin. And so everybody listening is trying to get better.

1. But the problem is you can only control what you can control. There’s this really great thought leader. His name is Naval Han, and what he talks about is high leverage behavior. And so I’ll give you an example of what high leverage behavior looks like. I’ve got a client, his name’s Daniel. He’s a chef.

He hates sales, he hates marketing ’cause he is a chef and I, and we created like a world class ca or events PAC for him. And I was like, I just want you to make calls. Five to 30 minutes a day and let’s figure out who in your market is doing holiday parties and let’s sell it. Two weeks later, he comes to me and he goes, it’s just not working.

I said, why isn’t it working? And he goes I’ve made hundreds of calls and I’ve only sold $9,000 worth of events. And I said okay, but like how many hours did you work on it? And he said, six hours. I said you’re a chef, you’re a business owner. Let me ask you something like you’re making $1,500 an hour, right?

By making calls. Simple math. Yeah. Sitting on your ass at your house.

Yep.

Not, he’s not over a stove. He’s not sweating. And so I was like, if you just 10 x this effort, what would happen? So instead of dedicating six hours to it, you know what, if you dedicate 60 hours to it. Here’s what I’ll tell you, and this is the real math from a real person that owns a real restaurant.

So he 10 x the effort, he put 60 hours into it, but that $9,000 didn’t turn into $90,000 because he got reps, he got better, right? He was able to prescribe what they should get better. His pitch got better over time, so he sold 150 for a thousand dollars worth of events. Over the course of about three weeks by dicking, 60 hours in St.

Simons, Georgia.

And then he should sell that course to other people on being a sales superstar. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. But really, and it’s leading

with curiosity. It’s not like he became a great salesperson. He would call a business and say it was

smart and it was strategic.

That’s it. And it’s, it was just trying to find the need. Where’s the unmet demand? That is what I’m always seeing. I was like, dude, where’s the unmet demand? He calls a law firm and he says, are you hosting a holiday party this year? Yes. Have you booked it yet? No. Would you like me to plan it for you?

Yes. It is literally that easy. Three questions. That’s it, right? And again, you’re not selling them, you’re doing them a favor. I. It’s one thing that’s on their list. They don’t have to worry about it anymore.

Yeah. That’s beautiful. What a different that’s a paradigm shift unto itself. That’s not the typical cold call that was very strategic in how that was framed and phrased.

And yeah, like you said, you’re solving a problem. You’re not selling a party, you’re solving a problem.

Absolutely.

That’s true. We’re

advocating for the guest.

Yeah, that’s tremendous. Last question. Let’s talk about relevance. I see so many restaurants that have been around for decades and their po, their guests just aged out.

They didn’t stay relevant with the younger people coming up and all that kind of stuff. They didn’t rebrand, they didn’t reposition. They just kept doing the same old thing until. They didn’t. 50 year restaurants are now out of business. What would you say to a restaurant that needs to stay relevant?

That needs to be ahead of the curve? Play your best game, but know what the competition is doing, but constantly reinventing yourself. Don’t fix what isn’t broken, but don’t be a dinosaur. I see that all the time and it scares me. I hate that I

1. So here’s what I’ll say, and this is my own life experience paired with having done this through literally hundreds of restaurants at this point and owning 500 plus interviews on my show.

Here’s what I’ll tell you, like you’ve gotta go where people aren’t, I did really well in one of those competitive dining markets in the world. And it wasn’t because I was the best restaurateur in town. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even compete. I didn’t even try to compete. The success or failure of any restaurant brand is directly tied to their ability to effectively market their brand.

That’s it. I am not the best restaurateur in the world, but I am damn near one of the best restaurant marketers in the world, and it serves me and it serves my clients. So instead of reworking your menu offering, rework your menu. Work on your language. Look at the high intent pages that exist. Everybody wants to focus on social media, which is an inherently low intent platform.

And look at your website. Don’t refresh your menu, refresh your website, right? Look at your Yelp listing, your Google listing, your Trip advisor. There’s this fascinating statistic. The bounce rate on, or the average conversion rate on a restaurant website is 10%. One out of every 10 people that go to your restaurant’s website say, nah, not for me.

So what happens to your business if you can double that? Two outta 10, five outta 10, seven out of 10. So we all wanna improve the day-to-day operations of our restaurant, not realizing if you go into the back end of your website or the back end of your Yelp or Google profile, all of you. Are getting hundreds of hits a week, thousands of hits per week, and you’re not seeing that traffic ’cause you’re focused on what’s happening in the four walls and not focused on effectively marketing your brand and giving them very clear reasons to come in.

Wow, that’s unbelievable. And I think the key word there is brand. You’re not running a restaurant, you’re running a business, you’re building a brand and that unto itself lies the power and all those details you just mentioned. This is, this has been awesome. You’ve just given us a crash course in running a super successful restaurant, and you’ve lived a dream and you’ve got so much value to share.

And I can’t thank you enough for being on the show.

Oh, it was my pleasure, Roger. Thank you so much.

Terrific. That was the restaurant Rock Stars podcast. Thanks audience for tuning in. Thank you sponsors for supporting our show. Can’t wait to see you all in the next episode. Stay well, stay tuned. We’ll see you there. 

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.

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