Today, I want to talk about one of the most common
mistakes I see in all restaurants,
it's called a spiral.
I'll talk to you about in a second.
Hey, everybody. My name is Ryan Gromfin. I'm an author, speaker, chef,
restaurateur, and I'm the founder of TheRestaurantBoss.com,
RestaurantProfitAndPerformance.com,
as well as Clickbacon.com.
Like I said earlier, this is a very common mistake that I see in restaurant,
I call it a restaurant spiral.
Well, there's downward spirals and there's upward spiral.
And then in the middle of the spiral, you can coast.
Let me explain.
We all get pretty comfortable in our restaurants at certain
points in certain areas of our restaurants.
We get good at it and we kind of forget about it,
it's not that we forget about it or that we're purposely ignoring it,
we just have so many other things to do.
So if we open up our restaurant and a couple years later,
we've made a few tweaks to our menu,
but we're pretty happy with our menu.
Our staff is doing a pretty good job executing the menu,
so we coast and
we worry about other things in our restaurant now,
that gets more of our attention, right? For obvious reasons.
The challenge is, sooner or later that coasting is going to hit you
like a ton of bricks.
Something's going to happen, you're going to run head into a Mack truck.
Either your food cost is going to be out of control
or customers stop coming in as much.
You've gotten complacent.
So then, what ends up happening, let's say it's a food cost issue,
right? You're not making as much money,
you go, you do some research and it's a food cost issue.
You have been raising prices, you haven't been keeping up with
with new trends and things.
So here you are, your food cost issue, you just got hit by a ton of bricks.
So you have a couple of choices.
The downward spiral is what often happens
and it doesn't happen on purpose, it's not…
we don't intentionally do this,
but we start cutting corners.
We get more careful about portioning, maybe we cut back portioning.
We go from an 8-ounce burger to a 7-ounce burger or 6-ounce burger.
We try to find a cheaper alternative, right? We call up our vendors, we say,
I used to pay $3 a pound for meat, now I'm paying $4 a pound for meat,
this is ridiculous. And then your vendor says,
I'll get you meat for 3 bucks of pounds, you don't need to worry about it.
And they get you meats for $3 a pound, but it's a little less quality.
You change your bun, you change your cheese, whatever it is,
we don't do it on purpose, we just do it.
And then customers notice it.
They may not notice it exactly,
but something's not the same.
I tell the story a lot of times,
I was working at a really high-end Mexican restaurant,
we were using cheese that was $4 a pound.
The cheese was more expensive than any of the protein
that we purchased at the restaurant,
well not the shrimp, but any of the meat and the chicken,
but it was really good cheese.
It held up really well, it didn't separate,
it was just delicious cheddar cheese and it made certain things
awesome at their restaurant.
And they could more than afford it.
They stopped working with me and they changed their cheese,
they went to you know some vendor walked in,
I can get you the same cheese for two dollars fifty cents a pound.
Well, it wasn't exactly the same cheese, it wasn't as good.
And people don't necessarily know, oh,
they've changed their cheese, I'm not eating there anymore,
but I get a phone call one day and someone says,
I used to eat at the restaurant all the time and I would buy their enchiladas,
but they're just not as good anymore and I took them home one day
and the cheese did some weird thing in the fridge and anyways,
I don't know what you're doing different, but I just don't like that restaurant anymore.
Well, for that one person who called me,
imagine how many other people
out there were experiencing the same thing and the way I know that
because the restaurant went out of business about
three months later after they made some of these changes,
that's the downward spiral that we go on.
We make one little change
and then that affects our customer’s satisfaction
and that affects how many customers we have in the restaurant,
then we need to start focusing our marketing more
and we ignore the operations and we're spending more money on marketing
and then we can't afford to hire the staff that we need
and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Before you know it, we've downward spiral out of control.
I want to propose to you the upward spiral,
which is when you find out that you have a food cost issue,
double down on it.
Go to better quality product, call up your vendors and say,
I will not pay more than this and I want product that's the same or better
than what I'm using now.
Have them bring you six different cheeses, test them.
When we weren't able to work with a vendor anymore at our pizza restaurant,
we had to change cheese providers because this specialty
cheese that we got was only coming from one vendor, whole long story,
anyways the point is, you know they're like, oh well,
everybody uses this cheese instead of that cheese, it's no problem at all.
I'm like, well, that's great, bring me that
and five other cheeses, more expensive and less expensive.
And then they brought in the cheeses and we made pizzas
and we found the two that we really like on the pizza when it was hot,
but we were a pizza by the slice restaurant,
so our pizzas sat for an hour or two under heat lamp and then we reheated it,
so then we tested it that way. We liked them both,
then we put the pizza in the fridge for overnight
and tested it the next morning as the customer may be taking home a pizza would do.
Well, one cheese stood out well above the others,
but it was more expensive than we were paying for the other one.
So we went to the vendor and we said,
we want that cheese,but we wanted at this price.
And we went back and forth for a while and finding the vendor said,
well, if you agree to buy this cheese from us for a year
in these quantities,
we will lock in that price for you, and if our price goes down,
we'll pass the savings on to you.
We got it all written in a contract and then here we are with a better
or equivalent cheese,
at least it was equivalent, I actually think it was better
at the same price or in some cases less,
that's the upward spiral.
I highly suggest that every time
you need to make a change in your restaurant,
you choose the high ground, you choose to go on the upward spiral.
If customers aren't coming into your restaurant, instead of focusing on marketing,
focus on operations, focus on your menu. Come up with new things,
increase the food quality,
let people have an amazing experienceat your
restaurant and tell the whole world
because when you operate the best restaurant,
you don't need to worry about marketing.
I hope you enjoyed today's video.
My name is Ryan Gromfin and I look forward to bringing you
another great video next week. Have a fantastic day.
Hey, everybody Ryan here. I really hope you enjoyed that video.
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Until the next time I see you, go out every day
and improve the lives of your customers, your employees,
your vendors, and of course, your family.