Restaurant managers and owners as part of this how to manage a restaurant series.
I'm going to take you through the process I use when designing a menu.
Hey, everybody. Ryan Gromfin here. Author, speaker chef restaurateur
founder of therestaurantboss.com, clickbacon.com, scalemyrestaurant.com
and of course author of our newest book, Make It Happen
which is designed for you, the restaurant manager, the restaurant owner. It's a
tiny book for building a big restaurant business. It's a great book.
We've been getting amazing feedback on. And you can get a copy of it
completely free at our website, the restaurantboss.com
/books or just go to the restaurantboss.com, and you'll find where you can get your copy for free.
So we're going to hop into my computer for a second.
I just wanted to quickly say hello,
face to camera here before we go behind the scenes.
But in my scale program which you can learn more about at
scalemyrestaurant.com and then you can also
become a member at the restaurant boss where you get access to scale
as part of your monthly benefit.
But in the first module of scale,
one of the things Iask restaurant owners to do is to submit a copy of their
menu to me, whether it's digital or print or, however.
And I'll do a quick about 5 to 10 sometimes 15-minute
kind of video review where I'll bring the menu up on my
screen and we'll talk about kind of tips and tricks and menu engineering.
Last week's video was kind of a throwback.
It was a couple year old menu engineering video that we did.
We'll put the link here so you can go watch that.
If you're not familiar with the term menu engineering, you're not familiar about
different font sizes for prices and eliminating
dollar signs and where to put what. Go check that out. It's a great video.
But we're going to go on my computer right now I'm going to take you through my process of more of the
design part of a menu.
So let's hop over there and I'll show you how I do it.
All right. So here we are inside my computer at one of my
favorite websites. It's a company called underconsideration.com.
Honestly, I don't even really know what they do,
but I just like art of the menu.
All you have to remember is art of the menu.
Just google art of the menu and you'll always come back to this page.
This is a collaboration of menus from all over the world.
menus from all over the world. Sorry, if my throat's a little scratchy I have a little bit of a cold.
But you can see here St Louis Missouri, Italy, Poland,
South Carolina, Baton Rouge, right, all over the world.
But you can search by cuisine
you can search by location
you can search by all types of things.
But what I love about this website is
these are the best menus you will ever see anywhere,
and they range so dramatically like
look at this place in Newport Rhode Island
where it's just got this very simple menu. No pictures,
no images, nothing. Just
a beautiful menu it is an absolutely beautiful menu.
You could design this in word yourself you don't need any help for this, or
we can go back, and we can look at really elaborate menus like this that still have no pictures.
No food pictures, but really give more of a theme.
You might not be able to design a menu like that yourself.
Something like this, right. There's just all kinds of these fun menu.
So I come here for inspiration. This is where I start.
I first come here
to get inspiration. What do I like? What don't I like?
What style do I like? I mean, look at this style. This is just so cool.
Again, for some restaurants not for all restaurants. So
there's really two tools that I use and that's going to depend
on whether you want to design the menu yourself
or whether you want someone to design it for you.
If you want to go down the kind of design it yourself,
but you're not a designer, there's a program called imenu pro.
I love imenu pro. They do a great job.
Their templates are fantastic.
They've got QR codes, and they have
codes that you could put on your website.
So when you update your menu online,
it also updates it
on your website. It's a really great program.
I've been using this program for years with clients.
And you could literally jump right in here and start designing a menu today.
This is one of my favorite menus.
I've actually eaten that this restaurant.
It's not called Dave's fish camp it's called something else fish camp.
It's in Baltimore -- it's in the Rehoboth beach area
but it's a great, great menu design. I've got clients using this menu format.
I've got clients using I think this one. Doesn't this one,
look exactly like the one that we just looked at
on art of the menu. And that menu probably cost
tens of thousands of dollars to design and here
for like 19 bucks a month you could do it yourself.
I just absolutely love this program.
It's super fine. You can do really great things with it.
And if you're going to design it yourself or if you want to be able to
work on it yourself, this is a great option for you.
If you just don't want to do the work and you want someone else
to design the menu for you, then I work with 99designs.
And we have a coupon on our website.
If you come to our home page and then go to partners
and then go to 99designs,
I think you get 20 off. There's me
on our 99designs restaurant boss. But if you just
come to their website and look at um
their menus, right, like I just come in here and click menu --
why didn't that work. Of course, it never works when
I'm doing this on
live. So let's try restaurant menu.
Let's try that.
There we go.
So menu design. They've got some really great
designs that they start with. But what I really like about 99designs
is you get assigned a
designer, someone that you like and then you can go back and forth with them.
And they do a really good job at a fairly
reasonable price.
But the one thing I will say where I've had people not
find the success that they want is if they don't come in with a general idea of
what they're looking for, they're going to struggle.
So to me, this is really balancing the art and science of menu design.
So the first thing I would do
is one is
first find a style of menu that you like.
I said like going through art of the menu,
find one or two menus that you really like.
Then lay your menu out in Microsoft word or
google documents or something where you have
the name of the item, the description and the price in a very organized manner.
Then at that point,
you can either come into imenu pro
and try to design it yourself or hire someone very inexpensively
from 99designs using our $20-off coupon.
And you'll end up with a menu that you absolutely love.
A couple of tricks
that I talk about in that other menu engineering video.
I don't want to get into the really too much of it, but I don't love pictures.
If you're going to use pictures,
make sure they're really high-quality pictures and not stock photography.
You can get good quality pictures by going to a local --
excuse me, by going to your local community college
and finding someone in a photography class to come take pictures for you,
trade it for food.
But don't use stock photography and don't use bad photos.
I prefer sketches. So I prefer to just google like
hamburger sketch or chicken basket,
chicken finger sketch or salad sketch.
Me my voice is really going out with this little cold that I have.
I prefer sketches
over photography.
That's just me personally. It depends on your menu,
but that's just kind of one of my little tips there. But
generally, this is the process that I help people because most of the menus that I get are
really poorly designed. And so the first thing I want to do is I want to make sure that they have
a way of getting a menu designed really well.
Then what I encourage people to do,
if you're part of the scale program is get it designed
and send it back to me as like a rough draft and then let me work with you on
where to highlight items, where to lay them out before you get your final draft.
But please go ahead and spend some money and get a really,
really well made beautifully designed menu.
It's going to make a huge difference.
And I hope these two little tricks
of kind of doing it yourself or having someone do it for you at a very reasonable price,
help you on your journey to becoming a phenomenal
restaurant manager, have an absolutely amazing day. And remember
systems create freedom, freedom creates value, value creates scale.
Bye-bye. I'll see you guys next week.
I hope you enjoyed this week's training video.
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Remember systems create freedom,
freedom creates value and value creates scale.
Manage systems, develop people and be awesome.