Espresso: The Devonshire Founder Reveals Secret to Make Any Restaurant Incredibly Busy

0:00Yes, yes, people. So, The Hungry Reading List is here. right if you listen to the podcast regularly you know i love reading i think books are the most beautiful thing in the world as stephen king said they're teleportable magic or something like that these books i whittled down my gargantuan bookshelf into 46 absolute 30 bangers the link is in the show notes to get the list whatever and it'll also make you a subscriber to our weekly newsletter which i think is sick so yeah get your fucking books buddy i think it's safe to say that all organizations over invest in customer acquisition and under invest in customer experience and retention and retention yeah uh for a variety of reasons i think one of them is that a lot of the activities that make for experience and retention you don't get bollocked for not doing them that in other you see what i mean yeah wait so what do you mean by that okay so if you fail first of all Well, I feel sorry for anybody in the inverted commas hospitality industry, because let's face it, marketing is always the thing you can put off till tomorrow.

1:06You have a load of fires to fight right here and now. And marketing comes into that category of things that are important, but which you can always. It's the equivalent of that email, which you know is important, but you can always click snooze. Yeah. For one more day. Then you have things which are very measurable. And, you know, generally in a business, customer acquisition is very measurable. and therefore it's very easy to justify the expenditure, albeit often using fairly fatuous metrics. Whereas customer lifetime value, if you like, or relational value as opposed to transactional value, is slow to measure and it's hard to prove.

1:43And also, as you said, involves often doing things which are difficult. They're not expensive necessarily, but they're difficult to do and require acts of imagination to do it well, I think. Yeah, active imagination and time investment. Yeah. Because you've actually got to be there to make those customer moments better. And I always, quite often get asked, what's the best way of marketing a pub? I'll tell you what it is, is you buy someone a pub. You know, but to actually go out there and buy, you know, 10 people a pint, it takes an hour because you've got to say, great to see you. How are you?

2:25What are you having? Have you tried this? There you go. By the way. And the impact of that, by the way. A Cardo found that giving people a tea towel was just insane. Because the great thing with a Cardo is you can measure the effect of an act of kindness on future relational sales. But the impact of – has a Poblana bought you a pound recently? Funnily enough, no, but someone at the wonderful – I'll plug them here. Go on. Eat and Mess coffee shop just outside Seven Oaks brought me back some speciality coffee and gave me a bag. You've just proved the point I was trying to make. Yeah. You do that to someone, they tell everybody.

3:05Yeah. And they go and they tell their friends and they say, that's a good place, you know, because that happened. And pubs are about relationships. And you have a relationship with the pub in the same way as you have a relationship with a friend when you get it right. when you get it right and you create that kind of advocacy that turns someone into a regular their value is way way bigger The Angel Hotel in Abidveni also gave me soda bread to take away Isn't it fantastic? Absolutely joyous What's so good about it? By the way, soda bread it was Sunday Times Food Pub of the Year so they don't need me to recommend it They certainly won't complain But it's...

3:51First of all... OK, this is a bit of a joke, but it's true. I always recommend people, English people, go on a holiday in Wales, OK? And the reason is that all English people think that Wales is a bit shit, and it isn't. So when you go to Wales as an English person, it's full of pleasant surprises. Always, always. And just Welsh people are just nicer. You know, Celtic, Fringish people are just a bit nicer. So it naturally under-promises and over-deliverses. Exactly that. Which is exactly what we always try to do. Exactly what you're trying to do. So what's really interesting, I was talking to Will Godara about this, and he said that companies have these things called loyalty programs, but they're not.

4:29They're transactional. If you do this, we will give you that. And the whole point of real loyalty is it's the discretionary act of generosity. And an unexpected. And unexpected. Yeah, which is the real killer. Yes, yes, people. We're trying to make Hungary into the most valuable food and drink business podcast on planet Earth. but I really need your help. I want to make this podcast so valuable for you to help you grow your business faster, stronger, better, have way more fun. We've got a super short customer feedback, sorry, consumer survey, audience survey thing on Google Forms. There's a link at the top of the show notes.

5:01If you could fill that out, it would be so helpful. We make this podcast way better for you.