Restaurant Alley

Global Warming or Global Marketing?

I saw this on NRN this morning.

The World Wildlife Fund is asking individuals, businesses, governments and organizations around the world to turn off all electric lights for “Earth Hour” from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. local time on Saturday. The largely symbolic gesture is designed as a way to show support for efforts toward environmental sustainability and planetary good health.

So my first thought was... do restaurants really care about global warming or do restaurants care about their guests who care about global warming? The tough thing about the restaurant industry is that it's hyper-local. The people eating in your dining room are your neighbors in most cases. Large chains have a challenge to be both local and widespread in appealing to their guests, but at the end of the day it's all about attracting your neighbors.

What better way to attract your neighbor than clinging on to an issue that your neighbor cares about? But then you have to figure out a way to let your neighbor know you're supporting it.

It's easy for the big chains...

McDonald’s restaurants around the world, for example, are participating in various ways, such as turning off their road signs, roof beam lights and other non-essential lighting, both inside and outside units. The giant McDonald’s advertising sign in London’s Piccadilly Circus will be switched off for the hour, which will be preceded with a countdown timer to Earth Hour promoting the event.

But even the independents can get in on it...

The Pyramid Restaurant at The Fairmont Dallas, for example, is featuring a special four-course menu by candlelight for $45 including cane-sugar gravlax made with sustainable farm-raised Scottish salmon, grapefruit-lacquered quail, a wild boar chop with Texas Winery Cabernet Sauvignon veal glaze, and limoncello cheesecake.

Taking a public stance or featuring a promotion on any issue can be risky, it has to be sincere and can't be too gimmicky.

Guests can look at it two ways, they can be cynical and see the restaurant promotion as a typical marketing ploy, but I think most will appreciate the fact that their neighborhood restaurant is bringing attention to a cause they support. But the ultimate success of any campaign will be determined by how well a restaurant knows its neighbors.

Does your staff have ideas? Are you listening?

I was speaking to one of our clients a while back and we were talking about a contest he did. He asked employees for suggestions and would reward any ideas that were implemented with a cash prize. He  posted the details for the contest in all five of his restaurants and employees could email in their suggestions any time over the course of four weeks.

I believe he told me that he got about 5 suggestions (none of which were usable). With about 80 employees at each restaurant, he has approximately 400 employees, which means that only 1% of his staff participated in the contest. What happened? Did the staff not have any ideas? Did they not hear about the contest? Did they decide to keep their ideas to themselves? I am curious to find out, but I applaud the effort on the part of management.

An organization is wise to actively pursue ideas and suggestions from everyone in the company. This needs be done in some organized manner otherwise you may have chaos, but you might be surprised by the tremendous amount of collective wisdom available for you to tap into.

One of my first jobs in New York City many years ago was at a very large and popular cafe in midtown. I worked behind the counter making coffee and getting pastries for guests. It was extremely busy in the morning and at lunch. After my first few weeks on the job, I realized that the coffee station could be better arranged to allow for an improved traffic flow for workers. I approached the fairly new day manager after my shift and explained my idea. He thought it was terrific and told me that we could try it out next week. The next day I came in to work my shift and after I was done, I was called into the general manager's office. I was fired. I was told that the company didn't need any ideas and that things work much better when people just do what they're told. He said he could give me a good recommendation, but that I just wasn't a good fit for his place.

To this day it still baffles me that a general manager would be so afraid of even discussing change, that his first instinct is to get rid of the person suggesting it. Regardless, they still ended up using my idea and I am happy to report that my ideas and suggestions have taken me quite far ever since.

So the moral of the story is listen to your employees. Create a culture that respects and encourages everyone's thoughts and suggestions.

Listening to your employees leads to a few things:

• Better general attitudes - everyone likes to feel heard
• Increased feeling of ownership among staff - results in better job performance
• New ideas for saving money and making money - your staff touches your food and your guests more than you do and can always provide new insights

"I remind myself every morning: Nothing I say this day will teach me anything. So if I'm going to learn, I must do it by listening."

— Larry King

If anyone has any stories (successful or not) about listening to employee suggestions, I would love to hear them.

Can your restaurant benefit from "Business Intelligence (BI)"?

What is business intelligence anyway? According to wikipedia:

Business intelligence (BI) refers to skills, technologies, applications and practices used to help a business acquire a better understanding of its commercial context. Business intelligence may also refer to the collected information itself.

BI applications provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence applications are reporting, OLAP, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarks, and predictive analysis.

Business intelligence often aims to support better business decision-making. Thus a BI system can be called a decision support system (DSS).

You may have read about BI tools and are maybe even using some. Typically, business intelligence software has been looked at as something for a large enterprise. Big company = lots of stores = lots of data, and so they invest lots of money in a software system to crunch all of their data to tell them things like their burgers can be priced higher or that they are wasting labor dollars due to inefficient scheduling or where in the country to open the next 10 stores.

I am here to tell you that things have changed.

1. It's Easier - with the growth of the Internet, it's much easier to move your POS data from each store to a centralized place for processing.
   
   
2. It's Cheaper - the Internet has also allowed web-based companies to build less expensive infrastructures and methods for collecting and processing the data. They require no large up front investment and you just pay as you go.
   
   
3. Size Doesn't Matter - now that business intelligence tools are easier and cheaper, there's a high return on investment for independent restaurant owners to load up their sales data and finally get some assistance with business decisions.

As an example, the company I'm affiliated with offers a product that fetches your POS data and gives you multiple reporting tools for analysis of your data for less than $3 a day and there are other great BI tools out there as well.

Even a well-designed spreadsheet can do the job, but the point is that your restaurant generates a large amount of very useful data. This data can tell you about the past and just as importantly tell you about the future.

As the old saying goes, "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it," and in a recession, you'd better be measuring.