The Takeaway: The $72,000 Hiding in Your Restaurant

0:02Welcome to Full Comp, a show offering insight into the hospitality industry, featuring restaurateurs, thought leaders, and innovators served up on the house.

0:16Welcome to The Takeaway. I'm Josh Kopel. The Takeaway is a tool, one idea, one tactic, one strategy you can implement in your restaurant this week. There's no guests, no interview, just actionable information that'll help you make money without costing you a penny, all in less than a time that it would take you to count out a cash drawer. Here is this week's takeaway. Here's the thought experiment. What if everyone who came to your restaurant once a month came in twice a month? What if everyone that came in infrequently came in once a month? What would happen? We'd be rich, right? No new ads, no influencers, no PR agency, just more visits from the people who already love us.

0:58That is the magic of customer frequency. and it's the fastest way that I know of to scale profitably without scaling costs. It is so easy to get addicted to chasing new traffic and I get it, new faces feel like growth. It feels like traction, but let's do some quick math. Say our average guest spends$60 and they come in once a month, that's$720 a year. Now, if you can get that same guest to come in twice a month, now they're worth$1 ,400 a year. Same guest, same kitchen, but double the revenue. Now take a hundred of our regulars and get each one of them to come in one extra time a month. And that's 72 grand a year.

1:38And returning guests are easier in every way. They spend more, they tip more, they take less effort to impress, and they already know, like, and trust us. There's no convincing required. I had a client who was blowing cash on ads and press, trying to bring in strangers. New faces, right? So we shifted their focus to bringing back past guests. And revenue jumped 15 % in 30 days. No new reach, just better retention. The fastest money, ladies and gentlemen, it's already on our list. But here's the catch. We can't increase frequency without data. If we don't have our guest's first name, last name, email address, phone number, and birthday, then we don't own the relationship, do we?

2:23So how do we get it? Well, I don't think we bribe people with discounts. I think we offer them the things that matter most to them. Status and access to the inaccessible. Credit card companies have knocked this out of the park, so we're going to do what they do. We're going to offer early invites to off-menu tastings. Whenever we're going to make those seasonal changes, we're going to give our best guests a preview. We're going to give them first dibs on chef's table bookings, experiences that fall in line with what we already do for a living, but they're only for our VIPs. And then we're going to train our teams to pitch that in the same way that they pitch dessert.

2:59Naturally, confidently, like they actually believe in the thing. One of my clients captured over 2 ,000 new email addresses in three months just doing that. And frequency as a result took off because loyalty isn't bought, it's built. And once we have the data, here's the secret weapon, segmentation. We shouldn't talk to every guest the same way because they don't all behave the same way. So I want us to break our list into three buckets. Frequent guests, the ones that are already coming in weekly or monthly. Infrequent guests, the ones that we see every few months. And lost guests. Anyone who hasn't been in in 90 days or more.

3:40And each group gets a different offer. And by offer, I don't mean a discount or a freebie. I mean a different message, a different nudge. One of my clients used this to boost frequency by 22 % just by sending the right emails to the right people. The point is we're not trying to change anyone's behavior. We're not trying to push them to do things that they don't want to do. We just want to influence their behavior. We want to get them to do the thing that they're already going to do. They'll just do it with us. So here's what I want you to do this week. These three things. Number one, start collecting data.

4:15Ditch the generic join our list button on your website and offer inside access instead. Don't bribe them, give them an invitation. Then number two, I want you to segment your list. Group your guests by how often they visit and then talk to each group directly. And then number three, I want you to build a frequency flywheel. Give your guests a reason to book their next visit before the glow of the last one wears off. Here's the takeaway. We need to stop chasing strangers and start turning our regulars into super fans. That's how we grow. Profitably, predictably, and sustainably. That's this week's takeaway.

4:57If it was useful, do this one thing before the day gets away from you. Go to restaurantbusinessschool.com to sign up for my free five-day restaurant marketing masterclass. It's a live workshop where in 40 minutes a day, I'll help you build out your AI marketing team to raise check averages, book more private events and corporate catering, and bring your best guests back more often without discounting and freebies. There are no ads, there's no additional expenses, and no additional work on your end. It's just my strategies, and the robots will do the work for you. And if that sounds like something your restaurant needs, sign up today at restaurantbusinessschool.com.

5:41Thank you.