Espresso - Rory Sutherland - How Restaurants Can Better Use Space to Make PROFIT!!!!

0:00There are a lot of questions we could ask, which is, are in Britain, outside London, are pub car parks massively underused real estate? So if you don't, even if you serve food in your pub, should you allow food trucks to come along? As a kind of once a week destination thing. Why don't pubs sell milk? Why don't pubs sell vapes? Right? I mean, it was a major part of footfall in pubs was getting people in to buy cigarettes from the machine. Yeah. I just asked these questions. Maybe they're legal reasons. Maybe I'm talking total shit. But it does strike me as strange that a pub is a community hub, which would be, by the way, a perfect place to relocate a post office as well.

0:38I also thought that would be really cute. OK. Just as, in a sense, farmers, it all depends, but farmers investigate multiple sources of revenue, basically. In other words, you've got a couple of Airbnbs and a converted stables, and then you've got a bit of office space in what used to be the barn, and then you farm and then you open a farmer's market. That ultimately, you know, one obvious thing is, by the way, it's what capitalism should be. Capitalism isn't the efficient provision of what you already do, which is what it's turned into. It should be a process of discovery of how you create the most value possible with your available resources, okay, which is really an experimental process.

1:20Now, obviously, there are pubs like this which absolutely know what they are and make money doing it. But it does strike me as strange that country pubs could try and become a bit more variegated on the grounds that if I went to get a pint of milk at 10 o 'clock at night from the pub, I'd now be able to park because there's a car park. Let's be honest, I go in and have a pint. Yes. Okay. There was a famous thing, by the way, famous very weird finding from consumer data from 7-Eleven, which was the huge correlation between men late at night buying nappies and buying lager. Yeah. And the theory was, roughly speaking, that you'd been sent out by your wife who had a young baby to buy nappies and you kind of reasserted your masculinity by buying a six-pack.

2:06OK. Now, you know, there are... I mean, it's just an interesting question, which is it is worth asking the question. And sometimes you have tied houses, sometimes, you know, obviously the terms of the lease are totally different. One thing that's really interesting, which I was talking about to a pub co only this week, was you can get the lease of a pub and often accommodation provided for 5 ,000 quid up front, okay, and then a share of the sales. Yeah. I think if people under 30 knew that, okay, I think you'd get a load of people under 30 who'd go and do it and try it. Yeah. And I think that 80 % of them would fail horrendously.

2:47Yeah. It's a shame. But 20 % of them. are young people aware of this? Because it tends to be the retired cop, doesn't it? Who takes on a pub lease. Or the couple who've retired. Or the couple who've retired. Or the worst possible case is people who really enjoy being this side of the bar who assume it'll be just as enjoyable the other side. I think I'd like to go back to the question about, you know, how you can get more customers in. Yes. The one piece of advice that always sticks with me and all my staff and everybody is we get them to watch Simon Sinek's little presentation. I think it's eight minutes long.

3:26Start with why? Start with why. And obviously... He used to work at Ogilvy. I'll give him a bit of a plug. I did it. I realised that. Top, top, top thing. And, you know, he goes into the psychology of why you're doing it, thinking really strong about why you're doing it and the why being the centre rather than how and what you're doing. It's all about why. There's a really interesting segue in there that doesn't get talked about that much, where he has this graph of the people on the very far left being the most influential and the ones who almost decide your popularity. And then you have the early adopters who really get in early and help you out and buy loads.

4:11And then you have the sort of, you know, slightly less fanatical. Then you've got the ones who don't really care and then you've got the lacquers. Oh, is that okay? Yeah. So I think he divides it in six, actually. Okay. But I have always thought that that bottom left-hand corner are so visible, if you think about it, because they give a shit. They care about the pub. They're on Instagram. They'll be in on the first day. They'll introduce themselves as your neighbour. They will say what they do. They'll ask you all about the beer. They will be fanatical about you. and they're the ones who will give you the most influence.

4:50And if you look after them particularly and make sure they feel looked after, part of it, comfortable, give them memories, buy them a pint. They'll bring in their friends. Not just their friends, they'll bring in everybody.

5:16ultimately it helps all of us bigger guests equals better conversations equals hopefully better insights for you, which means you can scale hopefully faster with a little less stress as well. So please hit that subscribe button and yeah, enjoy this episode.