Restaurant Marketing: How To beat 3rd Party Delivery Fees (And More Marketing Tips) (Ep 139)
Great restaurant marketing chat in this episode as David "Rev" Ciancio of Branded Strategic Hospitality joins Jaime Oikle from RunningRestaurants.com. We hit on first party takeout and delivery ordering vs. 3rd party. database building, email and social frequency and we also walk through a bunch of successful case studies that David's worked with. You don't want to miss this...check it out... Find out more at https://www.restaurantsgrow.com/flagship-framework343hzcs-04 & https://www.runningrestaurants.com.
---
Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
Restaurant Marketing: How To beat 3rd Party Delivery Fees (And More Marketing Tips)
Coming up on this episode, I interview Rev Ciancio of Branded Strategic Hospitality. We have a great talk about marketing. We hit on first-party takeout and delivery ordering versus third-party good stuff, database building, email, and social frequency. We also walked through a bunch of successful case studies that he’d worked on. You do not want to miss this. Check it out.
---
We got a great episode featuring David “Rev” Ciancio of Branded Strategic Hospitality. David does a whole bunch of stuff, so we’re going to talk about a whole bunch of stuff, but the focus is going to be restaurant marketing, which I’m looking forward to. It’s one of the things I love the most to talk about. Why don’t I ask you this question and we’ll dig into this piece? We’ll go to some examples later and talk about your background. If you only had 60 seconds to grab the attention of a restaurant or in this marketplace with what’s going on, what quick tips would you share?
I would tell them two things. Number one, you need to break the choke hold of the third party delivery apps. You got to get your customers ordering from you directly for the obvious reason of paying high commissions sucks. Also, you need to get control of your customers journey and this leads in the second one is you have to be building a database of your customers and be regularly communicating with them. I know you’ve had Matt Plapp. Matt Plapp would tell you the same thing, but you need to have multi-channel communication. It can’t just be email, Instagram or whatever you’re using. You have to be hitting customers everywhere they interact with your brand. Was that 60 seconds? Do we get there?
Career And Music Background
I think you might have snuck in there. I call that stuff 100% and we’re going to unpack some of that stuff. I just want to focus to understand some high-level stuff. That is good high stuff that if you feel like you’re not doing delivery right. We’re going to talk about a lot of that. If you don’t have a database, we’re going to talk about that. We’re going to go on scripted here and chat about stuff, but background for you. You’ve been in the restaurant business yourself or an owner. Tell me about that.
I’m a former New York City bar owner. We were pretty bad at operations, if I’m being honest, but we’re good at marketing. In fact, what happened even while I still owned the place is other operators would call me and be like, “How did you get so many followers on Facebook? How can you have so many five-star Yelp reviews? How did you guys build such a great email database?” I just had an act for it. I came from the music business and I treated the bar like it was releasing a new album.
I learned a whole lot about marketing and I learned something important. They don’t call them restaurant marketers. They call them restaurant operators because they’re not good at marketing. I learned that my skillset was I’m good at restaurant marketing, so why don’t I just go do that and help as many restaurants as I can.
A couple of things there. When you operate a restaurant, you said you were a bad operator. Did that mean you’re margin sucked and you were selling so much damn alcohol that it still worked out anyways? Did it come down to that? Finally, did you learn some lessons about the operations side? What happened?
I have choked. The truth is that the reason we lost that business was that we had a bad partnership. A quick background. We owned a two-story bar. There was a ground lever bar and a basement bar. My two buddies and I operated the basement bar, and three other guys had the ground floor bar. As far as New York City is concerned, it’s one SLA license. As far as the landlord was concerned, it’s one lease. We separated the business into two floors.
The guys upstairs ran the business so horribly. They got $200,000 in debt and didn’t tell us until they were desperate. Now, because we had 1 lease and 1 license, essentially it becomes our problem. When they threw their hands up and said, “We don’t know what to do,” we were stuck. We spent another year with the guys downstairs trying to dig them out of the $200,000 to no avail. We essentially sold the business at a loss and I still owe money on it, which freaking sucks, but we were pretty good. We were about to make money at the Rathskeller, the downstairs bar, but we had a bad partnership. The guys upstairs were so bad that it screwed the pooch.
That’s a bummer story.
I’m not the only person who has that story in this business.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m thinking that people reading are going, “That sounds a little bit familiar, partnership that didn’t work out and losing money and so forth.” Real quick question before we get into the marketing stuff. I’m curious on the music side. You said background music. Did you play? Did you have a band? Did you promote stuff?
Those who don’t play manage and that’s what I did. I was an artist manager and an agency owner for about eleven years. I did own a bass guitar. One day, I got rid of it because I realized I didn’t know what to do with it, but I was an artist manager.
Food Delivery
You could probably still look cool holding it, at least. Let’s get into marketing. You hang your hat and talk a lot about the third-party stuff. Let’s start there. We’re sitting in May 2020. People have learned a lot about takeout delivery. Before, they were like, “I don’t need to do it.” Everyone decided they needed to do take out and delivery. They quickly got on apps. They did this. They made money and lost money. They had to learn.
Now, we’ve learned enough to know that there are certain things that you should do and certain things you shouldn’t do. You know a lot more about this stuff than me. I’ll let you go and I’ll probably have questions along the way. What do folks need to know to get delivery in their control where it’s profitable and so forth?
I’ll tell you how I learned it. Prior to the pandemic, as you said, some people are like, “I don’t care. It’s a pain. I don’t like it. Whatever.” We didn’t quite have the pain. The pandemic hit, and now we live in this totally off-premise universe and pick up his everything. We were forced to use these third parties and start doing delivery.
What happens? We started doing a high value with something that cost you a lot. You’re like, “I got to reduce the cost.” The third party basically owns the customer journey meaning they have all the contact data. You can’t remarket to that customer. There’s no way for you to drive a second trip. This is the restaurant business. It is all about return trips. It’s not like siding that you buy for your house once, or you may decide to get car insurance every ten years. With restaurant, you want to drive frequency.
Anyway, in February of 2020, as the CMO for a software company, I got let go. Basically, they were owned by TripAdvisor and TripAdvisor was feeling the pain of the pandemic before we were on the shores of America. It’s a global travel company. My boss had to let go 60% of the staff that day and I got let go. As I was at my desk, packing my bag, I was starting to have the freak out like, “What am I going to do? I got mortgage and wife and healthcare.”
I called a buddy of mine name Robert who owns a bunch of restaurants in New York City. I was like, “I just got let goed. Are you looking for any help?” He was like, “Yes, can you be here in an hour?” I cleaned out my groceries from the corporate fridge and literally took my groceries to his office. Anyway, at the time, 20% of his orders were coming through first party meaning they were coming through his website and 80% were coming through GrubHub.
It’s a lot of commission to pay. He’s like, “Figure this out for me. Help me get more,” and some other marketing stuff. The pandemic hit two weeks later and he was like, “I’m bleeding. Please help me.” It was at that moment that I made it my mission to help him get more first-party orders and through a ton of trial and error like let’s try this. Let’s try that. Let’s try to spend this money. Let’s try Yelp ad. Let’s try this thing. Let’s try this message and calling literally everybody I know in the business like, “What are you doing?”
We success model. It took us 3 or 4 or 5 months, but we figured out a way. We stumbled our way into figuring out how to take him from 20% first party to 40%. He literally doubled the amounts of orders that come directly to him. What we were able to do then is increase retention. Once we got people to come switched to convert from GrubHub to ordering direct.
We can increase their order frequency. We don’t care about GrubHub because we know two things are going to happen. Number one, you’re going to order from GrubHub one time, then you’re going to order from his restaurant and then we’re going to get you order again. The second piece is we’re going to get to you to order more frequently. Now we love GrubHub. We think they are amazing because it’s a source of acquisition and we look at it as a cost.
You just talked about something that tons of restaurant owners have gone through that same mental thought process. Nobody likes doing something where when the box leaves the building. They’re like, “There goes another four dollars to that I lost by serving a customer,” because some of these commissions are crazy that you have to deal with. If you do look at it from the story you just told, the acquisition side. Now, they’re my customer. Walk me through the difference in that first-party order profit-wise. Say they order the same darn thing for the sake of argument, versus the same darn thing versus the app. How much of a difference is there for the bottom line?
As you know me a little bit more, if you ever attend my webinars or my trainings, I talked about how bad I am at math because I’m bad at math. We did figure this out, and essentially, it was for a Manhattan Restaurant. Your average order is like $37. If you’re paying 30% commission, that’s $11 dollars. If somebody does the $37 offer and $11 goes to GrubHub. You recover that on the next one. You’ve got $11 back in your pocket. Your cost of acquisition there was $11, but because you didn’t have to pay it. It’s almost a net. It’s a net-net.
If they order a second time, you’re in super profitability. You’ve got to look at LTV. If I get you to order from GrubHub once and I pay $11 for that. I get you to order directly next time. I didn’t have to sacrifice the $11, so I’m net equal. I order one more time, I’m positive $11 plus whatever my margin is. That $11 is just the recovered fees. Does that make sense?
A little bit. The one thing I’m thinking about is there are fees to using a third party. There’s obviously some inherent costs in having a first party solution because you have somebody’s software in a service thing that costs. I’m just making up a number, of $59 a month plus X dollars in order much smaller I’m sure, but how do you factor those costs into the equation? Are they insignificant in comparison?
It’s certainly not an apples-apples equation. It’s important but everything’s a cost. I had to buy a shirt to be on a Zoom call. It’s part of operation.
Thank you for doing that, by the way.
You’re very welcome. It’s part of the problem. Word is operators look at the cost the wrong way. Having online ordering, some people just call it an Olo, should be seen as an operational cost or an operational investment like I have to do this. It’s like you can’t own a pizza shop without having a pizza oven. We can’t order a restaurant in 2021 and Beyond without online ordering. You certainly can’t own a restaurant moving on if you don’t have the customer data and without doing marketing and advertising.
You cannot own a restaurant if you do not have customer data or without doing a marketing campaign.
You just have to look at these things in an investment like I can’t watch dishes if I don’t have a sink. I can’t take orders if I don’t have an online ordering platform. Do you need to look at a cost? Yes, because there’s different solutions you could choose. You need a solution that works with your cost structure. For sure, something like a lunch box or an Olo is way more expensive than a chow now or a toast. Pick the solution that works with your pricing model, but you have to have one.
Boot Camp And Webinar
Question for you because there’s a litany of tools out there. There was before and now there is now because it’s doing very well and there’s getting seed capital and Angel capital and all that fun stuff. That’s expanding. In fact, I was looking at one of your articles talking about the darn third parties who are speaking of financing money. They were raising so much money and were willing to lose it to get market share, hurting the restaurants and stuff. We won’t get into that, but that is a fascinating aspect to look at.
Let’s stay here for a little bit more and then we’ll move to something else. First party and third party, you learned it at your buddy’s restaurant and figured it out. I know we haven’t talked about it too much, but I know you help other restaurants. Whether it’s a boot camp or you have a program. How much learning does it take to get good at this?
I learned it with my buddy Rob, but then I tried it out with 5 or 6 other restaurants. Jaime, it worked for everybody like it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter the size of the restaurant. It didn’t matter whether the service type was fine dining, on-premise or off-premise, QSR, or pizza or coffee. It works for everybody. I turned it into an online course where I was like, “If you have that information, you have to share it.” If you can help people out, you got to help them.”
I was like, “I’m going to turn this into a thing where for a couple hundred bucks, I’m going to show you the whole thing.” It’s priced so that you could basically make your money back in twenty orders. If you convert twenty people, that’s like one day’s worth of orders in a restaurant that you pay for the learning. You ask how quickly you can learn it. The boot camp is designed to be 6 weeks, 45 days. Some people will see return in the first week alone.
The reason it’s six weeks and it’s not one hour is that there’s a lot. There’s a lot to learn, but I break it down into little 5-minute lessons or 7-minute lessons. You’re a restaurant operator. You’re like, “I got a half hour.” Jump in the boot camp. Take 2 or 3 of the lessons. There’s a private Facebook group. You can ask me questions later. You go your own pace, but six weeks and you can see 100% lift in first party orders. It’s insane.
We’ll might circle back to it, but if we don’t, where do people go to find out info on that one?
It’s not publicly available. That’s the fun part.
I didn’t know that.
You can’t just go buy it. I do like a weekly webinar where I basically teach for free. I teach you all the strategies like here are the things you need to know. At the end of the webinar, if you’re like, “I want to do this.” I give you what the link is to go sign up and be a member of it, but the webinar is free.
Tell them where to find the webinar.
It’s RestaurantsGrow.com/stopthirdparty. If the links broken, find me on any social media network.
This dude is out there. He’s easy to find. You’ll find them out there.
I like to tell people I kill a lot of cyber trees with my internet footprints.
Content Creation
I know. We chatted and I pulled his information. He’s live on this platform and that platform, doing that stuff and talking with people. You’re definitely out there. Tell me about that aspect. I know you create content yourself and interview folks. What are you trying to do when you go live? Are you just sharing stories or looking for tips? What’s that?
I’m a bit of a nerd if you couldn’t tell by a pineapple Hawaiian shirt, but and a Blink-182 poster but I like to learn. I figured there’s so many people out there that have better knowledge that I do. The only way to get it is to ask questions. I did a LinkedIn live with Liz Bazner from A&W Restaurant. I’m hoping she’s got information. Everybody can learn but I’m trying to learn because I’m trying to be the guy that has information that can help you.
There are so many people out there who have better knowledge than you do. The only thing you need to do is ask questions.
Going live or even talking to you, like, “What do you know that I don’t know? What other information can I gather that’s going to help either a current or future client of mine to be more successful?” My motivation in this is probably not different than yours. I like restaurants. I like going out to eat. I’m a guest. If I can go out there and elevate the experience that a restaurant delivers to their guests, then we’re all going to have a better restaurant experience. Doesn’t that sound awesome?
For me, I’m in much the same boat, listening, sharing, and trying to get folks the tips they can use to keep doing what they’re doing. As we’re learning through this, as we know, we’ve been doing it for many years. It’s the hardest business on the planet, period. End of story. We don’t have to talk about any longer. It’s ridiculously hard to run a profitable restaurant. It’s amazing that many people even try to do it. They sign up for it like, “Let me go do that.”
It’s a low barrier for entry for business. Any Tom, Dick or Harry can go start a pizza shop. It’s not hard. I feel bad for restauranteurs who get taken advantage of who are in that scenario. They are like, “I make the best chili in town. Everybody says I should start a restaurant,” and they do and don’t have the education or the chops to do it. The landlord takes their money. I hate that.
Garlic Knots
There are so many things that are not going to work out. Let’s play with this a little bit. I’ll jump out to a couple of links that you shared with me.
For those of you reading, Jaime’s like, “What do you want to talk about?” I said, “I have a vast array of things that I’m excited about. Why don’t I send you a couple of case studies or stories of things that my customers have done. Maybe inspire somebody else to do something, too.”
You sent me a couple of links. One is a post on LinkedIn. You’re talking about the garlic knots contest one. Walk us through a little bit.
This is great. The headline is how to create a 352% increase in sales for a high-profit margin order add-on. What restaurant doesn’t want that? If you normally order a pizza, wings, soda and a salad. It’s like, “Let’s get you to order one more item.” That’s where my client was, Alan, who owns a cool pizzeria in San Antonio. He came to me. He said, “Rev, I got these cheesy garlic knots. They’re $8. People love them. If I could sell more these, my average order would go up.”
I think his average order is $31. He said, “If this will bring it to $35. That would mean so much to my business and it’s an item people love. How do we get more people to buy these cheesy garlic knots?” The obvious answer is we have to promote them, but we did something cool. April is National Garlic Month and I said, “Why don’t we do this? Why don’t we choose that as the month to promote them? We can use it as a theme. #Holiday.” It’s a reason to post on social media, and he said, “Cool. What do you want to do?” I said, “Why don’t we do that? Let’s drop the price. We have an introductory price. I don’t like discounts.” That’s why we got an introductory price.
We let people know that they’re only $5 for this month and they’re going to go up. Instead of saying, “These are $5,” we said, “We’re giving you a break. You’re going to pay more later.” It’s not messaged as a discount. We promoted it with weekly email blasts and multiple social media posts. That alone would raise your average order value, but we don’t do things the simple, easy way here. I said to him, “Let’s end the month with a cheesy garlic knot eating contest.” Every time we message about them, we’ll tell people, “Cheesy garlic knots are $5 for the month for National garlic month. On the 28th, sign up here if you think you can eat a tray of garlic knots faster than anybody else and we’re going to have a contest live on Facebook.”
We had a double call to action, which was sign up for this thing and order the knots. He had 23 customers, believe it or not, that said, “I can eat a tray of cheesy garlic knots faster than anybody else.” We picked five and we went live on Facebook. You’ll see a screenshot of it, but we went live on Facebook for ten minutes and hosted a cheesy garlic knot-eating contest. It reached 11,000 people in his town. Think about that.
I don’t know who’s reading this or where your restaurant is, but if you could reach 11,000 people with a Facebook post that you didn’t pay for. Would you or would you not be excited? We had 11,000 people reached. We had 1,100 engagements. People are saying, “That’s cool.” “That’s awesome.” “That’s whatever.” The bottom line here is, if we looked at March versus April, with the 352% increase in the sales of that item. This cost us nothing.
We didn’t buy any ads. We didn’t have to go out of our way. We gave people a couple of T-shirts and promoted a couple things online. Alan calls me, and by the way, I tagged Matt Plapp because Matt Plapp helped us build that customer database. Alan texted me and said, “We’re doing an eating contest every month.” He wants to do a pizza eating contest for Father’s Day. I was like, “I’m willing to go a bad at this again. Let’s try it.”
Careful around July. Don’t do hot dogs. That Joey Chestnut guy will come in and just wreck everybody.
By the way, I was a judge for that contest. That was a bucket list item for me. It was to judge Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest and I did. It was sick. It was so much fun. Anyway, that’s patterned interrupt. The point here is how many pizza places are in your town or how many restaurant competitors are near your restaurant? Every single one of them could be like, “It’s National French Fry Day. Eat our french fries.” You’re not differentiating yourself. You’re not making something special.
There are other pizza places in San Antonio where Alan’s restaurant is, but none of them went to this extent to promote National Garlic Month. Nobody. He made himself stand out by doing something unique and it wasn’t that hard. It didn’t take us that much time and the results were ridiculous. You have a restaurant, be entertaining.
I like examples like this because nobody can point to this and say, “I can’t do that.” There’s nothing there’s nothing in that sequence that you couldn’t do. It takes a little bit of work and a little bit of creativity. You can pull that off.
It was four social media posts and five email blasts. That was it. That was all the marketing effort that went into this.
Let’s talk about burgers. Go for it.
This one’s awesome. Again, the headline, how would you like to earn an extra $700 in six months for your restaurant for doing six minutes of work? There’s a thing called a Google post. If you go to your Google My Business listing for your restaurant, you can put little announcements on the bottom like you would write a tweet or an Instagram post. You can post it there, but the thing is, they’re clickable. You can write this little post that says, “Our special for the month is these cheesy garlic knots or whatever.”
First-Time Order Code
Here’s what we did. 5 Napkin Burger for locations in New York City. The super smart people behind this brand. Super smart and passionate about food and customers. They’re amazing. What we did was we took a first-time offer code. Somebody who’s never ordered online from the restaurant before, we created a unique code like Google code one. Whatever. Anybody that ended up on our Google My Business profile and clicked on one of those posts in there and said, “Never ordered from 5 Napkin before? Use this code for 15% off your first order.”
I don’t love discounts, but we told them you only get one time. It’s not discounted. It’s an acquisition play. Creating those Google my business post took us maybe even four minutes. It was two minutes to create the code and four minutes to put, “First time to order blah blah blah?” We put them up and then do you know what we do? Walk away. Set it and forget it. We leave those posts up and we don’t touch them. In the month of March, those posts that took us five minutes to create, generated $700. You’re like, “Rev, what about the discount?” We did the math. We made a $536 order profit on this. Still, $536 for five minutes of work. How do I get paid that hourly rate all the time? Super easy.
By the way, this looks like a pretty delicious burger.
That’s their pimento cheeseburger. They’re doing a different burger for each month of National Hamburger month and that’s the specialty for the third week. It’s delicious.
Let’s do 1 or 2 more real quick. I don’t know what sequence they’re in here. Does this look familiar to you? What do you got here?
This is another fun one. Restauranteurs are afraid to market. I have no idea why. If somebody follows you on social media or somebody gives you their email address for a database. You’re allowed to send them as much marketing as you want until they unsubscribe. They said, “I love your brand. Send me more information.” This is a cool one. Similar idea. They’re like, “What can we try? What can we do to drive revenue?” I said, “I have an idea.” I got this idea from Russell Brunson. I don’t know if you’re Russell. Russell told me that the restaurant did this and I said, “We’re going to try it.” We sent an email every single day for a week. Every single day. Do you know any restaurants that email you every day?
They don’t do it.
It took a ton of convincing. I said, “We got to try.” Here’s what it was. We sent an email Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Every day at 4:00. The subject was, what can we get you for dinner? The email, I kid you not, Jaime. It was the exact same email every single day. On the inside, it said, “Do you want to eat with us or do you want to pick it up on your way home?” There was a button to make a reservation and a button to order ahead. That’s it.
Monday was a picture of a burger. Tuesday was french fries. I don’t remember what they all were, but essentially, the only thing that changed was an image. How many images do you have for your restaurant already? We basically replicated it and we sent it every day for seven days. We drove $1.25 in revenue for every single subscriber. It was insane. You’re like, “I’m afraid to email my guests that much.” Do you know what our unsubscribe rate was for that week? Less than a percent, 0.74%.
Do you think we’re still emailing guests for this restaurant? You bet your ass. Pardon my apology. We email three times more frequently than we used to be before this because we know exactly how much. We can calculate the amount of revenue that we’re going to drive by sending an email now. If you knew that you were going to put $1 into a slot machine and get $6 back, how many dollars would you put in a slot machine? How often would you do it?
You would keep doing it as often as you could until somebody pulled you away from the machine.
Email your guess. I’ll give you another tip. None of these case studies will tell you this one. Most marketers or restaurant operators think, “I’m going to email you on Monday about my pizza shop because that’s the day I’m not busy. Let me get you to order a pizza.” Here’s the thing. Jaime, do you eat some Mondays?
If I did, it was random. Yes.
Most people don’t. By me asking you to buy a pizza on a day, you’re not buying a pizza. I’m asking you to switch a habit. That’s a big ask. Jaime, do you ever order a pizza on a Friday?
Yes, sir.
How many pizza places are in your town?
A zillion or zillion and a half.
Wouldn’t it be smarter if I emailed you on the day you’re going to order a pizza and got you to order mine instead of somebody else’s? You should not be emailing people on Mondays trying to get them to order pizza. You should email them on a Friday or a Saturday. Make sure that when they do want a pizza, they pick you right and the same goes for opposite. If you’re a salad place, email me about salads on Monday. You want to basically go where the money is. Totally a boss move.
Social Media
I made two notes. One, it is to cost. Don’t feel bad if you do that. Don’t hold back. That’s fine. Two, I want to talk about social platforms because you referenced a few. I think I know the answer. You’re going to say, “Use them all. Use as many as you can.” Any learnings there that you want to share like, “Do this on Facebook. Twitter this or Instagram that. LinkedIn that. YouTube that.” Should people just be as many places as they can? What do you think?
You should be using the platforms that you have the ability to update with frequency or consistency. Its a better word. If you can update Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok, LinkedIn, Google My Business, Facebook, and Instagram every other day, every week, do all of those. If you only have the ability to update Instagram every other day, then do that. Pick the 1 or 2 or 3 that you know you can be consistent with and stick with those.
You do not need to be everywhere. Now, you do need to manage your presence everywhere. You do need to be managing your name address, phone number, house operation, menu, and photos everywhere, Google, Bing, Yahoo, Foursquare, TripAdvisor and blah blah. There are software that makes that super easy that you do have to do, but you do not need to be active on every social media account.
Email Blast
You talked about frequency with that aspect of the social platforms. Make sure you got a consistent pattern. You talked about frequency with email and people are resistant to email more than once a week. Sometimes, it’s once a month. “I can only do it once a month.” If you look at the big brands, I would pull up my email here. All the big brands are annoying because they do send me something every single day. I don’t mean restaurant brands. I mean retailers and stuff.
Heart-Shaped Pizza
That’s enough, but there are certain things like you’re scared. Yet, I don’t unsubscribe. It’s not pissing me off. I’m just waiting for the right time to take action. Don’t be shy. If they’re sick of you, they’ll unsubscribe and if they unsubscribe, it’s probably not the best fit long term. That’s one way to look at it. Let’s do one more and then we’ll start to head. I don’t know if you have a favorite.
We’re like restaurant marketing success roulette here. You’re like, “Let’s pick a bullet.”
This is like a heart-shaped pizza. Do you want to talk about that one? There’s something about January. What do you want to do?
Let’s go to the pizza one. This is a fun one. I put out an eBook called How to Sell a Ridiculous Amount of Heart-Shaped Pizza for Valentine’s Day. This is one of those things like lots of pizza shops sell heart-shaped pizza but how do you be the place that somebody chooses? I put out a book. If you do these ten things, you will sell a ridiculous amount of heart-shaped pizza. Now, we won’t go through all of them. You can just go get the eBook and read them.
There are examples of a couple of restaurants that were like, “Rev, we’re going to take your suggestion and we’re going to roll with them.” Cascarino's in Montgomery New Jersey, I’ve never been here, but they tripled the amount of pizzas they’d sold from the year before by using the ten things I said you should do. Ferazzoli is my local pizza spot. I love them. I talk about them all the time. They increased their sales by 145% year over year. By the way, the main story in the book is about Ferazzoli. That’s how I learned this.
We tested it out and it worked. It’s funny. Matt Ferazzoli called me in January and said, “Are we doing it again?” I said, “I’ll be over.” I was walking home from Ferazzoli and I was like, “I need to teach this to all restaurants.” I came home and sat down. I wrote that book in two hours. Quincy Massachusetts alumni, they did this. They literally jumped on this idea. They got my book February 12th and did what they could in two days. With no effort, they sold 30 pizzas. It was great. Sofia’s, this is the big winner here.
Sofia’s in San Antonio did every single thing I had in the book word for word. If it was in there, they did it, and I’m not trying to make myself look awesome. I was like, “I know these things work.” They sold 500% more heart-shaped pizza than the air before. At certain days, he had to turn off. He’s like, “I can’t move fast enough to do these.” Get that book.
Should they go to LinkedIn to grab this thing? Where do they get this?
DM me and I’ll send you the link. That’s the easiest way.
By the way, find them online. Get that book. In fact, the last thing I have here, you talked about. Is this a brand new book you’re trying to tell me?
Yes.
Is it brand-brand new?
National Hamburger Day
The link for that one is Bit.ly/pizzaVday and you can get that one. This one just came out. It’s the same idea, How to Sell a Ridiculous Amount of Burgers from National Hamburger Day, the guy that can generate an 18% lifting business. Honest to God, Jaime, it’s almost the exact same book. I did a find and replace of burger to pizza. I made a few adjustments for the holiday there, but with 5 Napkin.
We were in the middle of the pandemic. It’s May. It doesn’t look like restaurant dining rooms are open up. We’re like, “We’re like bleeding here. What are we going to do?” Robert came to me and said, “Rev, come up with something.” I was like, “May is National Hamburger Month. May 28th is National Hamburger Day. What can we do?”
This guy will walk you through a step-by-step guide that we used to have an 18% one day left in business. The thing is, I know it says burgers on the cover, but it’s a skeleton. It’s a bullet point. You could do this for National French Friday or Peach Melba Day if that’s a day. National fefer news day, if you sell pepper news. I just like that word. It’s a guide. It’s an eleven-step process. If you do all eleven things in that book, you will see a massive lift in your business around a hashtag holiday.
I’m looking at the graphic here that has the eleven steps. Is this thing an eBook? Is it just a download?
If you want to send me the $30, I will print one out and send it to you, but you can save yourself $30 and just go get it for free online.
There you go. Some people like to touch stuff. I like to touch books every once in a while. It’s fine.
I print them out for myself because I like to touch my own work.
Episode Wrap-up
It’s totally fine to do it. Let me jump out there as we wrap. We hit on a lot and we could talk for freaking two days about all the stuff because it’s fun to talk about. Is there anything you want to share as we wrap up? Whether it’s going out to a book or last tip. Something that you said, “Jaime, why the hell didn’t you bring that up?” What do you think?
This will resonate with you and probably a lot of your audience. My life motto is this, “Be awesome at two things and outsource everything else.” You cannot master everything, especially as a restaurant operator. You can’t be your bookkeeper, manage your employees, be the chef, and do marketing. You can’t do all of those things. It’s stupid. You will never be successful.
If there’s something that you know you need and can’t figure it out, you’re not going to do as good a job as you need. Get somebody to help you. There’s a lot of people out there. Even if you’re just going to go buy a course or ask for help. Don’t think you have all the answers and don’t think you can do all the work. You hired a dishwasher. You should hire a marketer. You hired a cook. You should hire a bookkeeper. Outsource to the people or bring people in that can help you do the things you’re never going to be good at.
Restaurant operators cannot be bookkeepers, managers, chefs, and marketers. If there is something you cannot do on your own or figure out, get somebody to help you out.
It’s a good point. I know, especially in the restaurant business where we are, trying to save a little money here and there. I was like, “I will do that. I’ll get to that,” and we don’t get to those things. They don’t get done and they don’t get done right. A lot of awesome tips there. This guy is online. You can find them everywhere, David “Rev” Ciancio. He is out there, Branded Strategic Hospitality, as well as a few other places. He’s on all the platforms. Grab the eBooks for sure. Good stuff. I appreciate you being here. For more great restaurant marketing, operations, service, people and tech tips, be sure to stay tuned to us here at RunningRestaurants.com. Thanks, David.
Thank you.