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STORYTIME (4) - WOW Moments Are Almost ALWAYS Manufactured
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#567 - STORYTIME (4) - WOW Moments Are Almost ALWAYS Manufactured ***** Tickets are available now for the Restaurant Profitability Summit! This is our biggest event of the year, but attendance is capped at 200 people. Get your tickets now. LEARN MORE: https://go.restaurant-strategy.com/summit-2026 ***** This week's episode is brought to you by: MARGIN EDGEVISIT: https://www.marginedge.com/lp/chip This week's episode is brought to you by: RIGHTWORKVISIT: https://right.work/chip ***** Human beings are storytellers. It's how we make sense of the world around us, give meaning to the things we experience. Today I want to talk about how we CREATE moments that get people talking. ***** If you want to snag a copy of Chip's book, The Restaurant Marketing Mindset: https://www.therestaurantmarketingmindset.com/ If you're ready to learn more about the P3 Mastermind: https://www.restaurantstrategypodcast.com/p3-mastermind-program If you want a free 30-day trial of our Restaurant Foundations ...
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What is the most powerful marketing tool available to us? It's word of mouth. I know that, you know that we're not talking about anything new, but let's talk about how to make more word of mouth happen. It happens through the stories that we tell and through the stories we give our guests to tell. We have to make it easy, frictionless, obvious for them to talk about us. That's why I'm sharing the 20 stories that I share all the time. The 20 best stories I know from clients of mine, P3 members, and also restaurants I've been to, experiences I've had. Another story on today's episode of Restaurant Strategy. There's an old saying that goes something like this. You'll only find three kinds of people in the world. Those who see, those who will never see, and those who can see when shown. This is Restaurant Strategy, a podcast with answers for anyone who's looking. Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in. My name is Chip Close. This is the Restaurant Strategy podcast. Two episodes every week to help you level up and build a more profitable restaurant. I write books, I give talks, I run a coaching program. It's called the P3 mastermind. It's executive coaching for restaurant owners that are looking to dial in profits and grow. But guess what? I also host my big live event every October. Once a year, we gather a whole bunch of restaurant owners in one building all together for three days. October 18th, 19th and 20th, the restaurant profitability Summit happens in Minneapolis. It is capped at 200 tickets. To date, as I'm recording this, we've sold a little bit more than half of them, but you can still be in that room. It is tactical how to paint by numbers. A series of playbooks we sell. We tell people on the very first day you're going to walk away with 30 proven playbooks that will help you manage your expenses better and grow revenue more consistently. That's what the event is all about. For the first time ever, we have a headliner. Gavin Casen is going to be there giving a keynote on late Monday afternoon. He's actually sitting down with me to have a conversation about how he grew his restaurants. If you don't know Gavin, he's a two time James Beard Award winner, three different restaurants in Minneapolis. He's grown his company, he's contracted his company. He knows what it takes to run a successful, profitable restaurant. And he's going to be talking to us very candidly about what he believes and what works in the year 2026 and beyond. All the links are in the show. Notes if you want to go get your tickets, we have general admission or VIP tickets. Very few VIP tickets left. So if you want to be at dinner with me, the welcome dinner on Sunday night, now is the time to get that. You also get front row seats at the event. You also get catered lunch Mondays and Tuesday, Monday and Tuesday. So you get to have lunch with me and my team. Just extra time, extra facetime to ask more questions. The Restaurant Profitability Summit is one of the coolest biggest events we do all year. It's our chance to be live altogether. And that link to get your tickets is in the show Notes. What's the food cost for your third best selling entree? You don't know, but with Margin Edge you could know instantly. Margin Edge is a complete restaurant management software that we recommend to every single P3 member anyone looking to improve their profitability. With Margin Edge you just get to snap pictures of your invoices and you get real time data for every area of your business. You get to see plate costs in real time. You get a daily P and L. You know I love that your inventory count sheets are automatically updated. What happens is that Margin Edge saves you a ton of time and it lets you make better informed decisions. I got a client, Gather brewing. They were P3 member for a better part of a year. They started using Margin Edge last year and within one month, I'm telling you, 30 days, their food costs went from 38 to 28%. Massive savings that those 10 points dropped straight to the bottom line. Trust me, there's a reason I recommend Margin Edge to so many my clients, so many listeners, so many P3 mastermind members. It's because it works. I know it works. If you've been listening for a while, you know I talk about it. If you're interested in learning more or you want to see how Gather brewing went from 38 to 28%, they put together an incredible video video. Head over to margin edge.com chip again. Margin edge.com chip as always, you'll find that link in the show Notes. One of the themes we come back to on this show certainly is that profitability is not just one big move, but rather it's a series of better decisions made consistently. And one of the biggest places those decisions show up is in labor. Right Work helps restaurants stop treating labor as a guessing game. Their platform helps operators forecast demand, build smarter labor models, schedule more efficiently, and you get to see where labor is helping or hurting profitability. For restaurant strategy listeners, Right Work is offering free onboarding which includes a free labor model build out, plus you get three months free of right work usage. Go to right. That's right. Dot work chip. And yes, you'll find that link in the show notes. Okay, so, you know, I travel a lot personally. I travel a lot for business. I'm on the road, you know, somewhere between 15 and 18 times a year, mostly to visit clients, also to give talks, speeches, to be at trade shows, conferences, all of that. Last time I was in Vegas, this was a couple of years ago. Jose Andres has a couple of restaurants out there. And I was sitting at the bar at one of his restaurants, and I was having dinner. And I want to tell you something amazing that happens. A story that I tell all the time. In order to give some context to the story, I have to back up and I have to first talk about marketing and what I believe about marketing. I believe marketing is simpler than we would. That you. Most people would have us believe. I think it really comes down to three things. There's only three things we need to do to successfully market our restaurant. We have to get new people in the front door. So that's customer acquisition. I call it attraction. We have to get those people to come back. So repeat customers. And to increase the frequency of our visits so they become repeat and hopeful regular customers. That's retention. And then the last piece is growing. Word of mouth. We're talking a lot about word of mouth over the course of these 20 stories. Word of mouth for me really has to do with evangelism. One of the pieces of evangelism is we have to give people something to talk about. Nobody talks about good food and good service. How was it? Oh, it's pretty good. Yeah. Yeah, we love that place. Nobody's going to talk about that. You say, how was that place? Oh, it's. It's pretty good. But guess what they do, right? Oh, how was that restaurant? Oh, we had a great time. But guess what? You'll never believe. It's the thing that comes after. Yeah, I had a good meal. Yeah, I liked it. It's the thing that comes right after that that gets people to talk about it. And I don't think it happens by accident. I think those things are manufactured. That's why there's a big giant golf ball at Epcot down at Disney World. They didn't do it for any other reason except that nobody had seen anything like that before. And they said, I think people will take pictures of it. I think this is something unique. I think people will talk about it. And guess what people talk about it. The Eiffel Tower. Nobody had ever seen anything like that. People talk about it on and on and on. Cities do this. Sports ve. Do it right. The. The big green monster at Fenway. The very best, smartest people, places, companies, organizations do this. We can learn from them. I was at a Jose Andres restaurant in Las Vegas, and I sit down at the bar, I'm looking at the menu, and I thought, I'd like to start with a cocktail. They go, here's our cocktail list. I look over, and they have something that's called a floral cloud, and it's a riff on an aviation. Well, I love gin, and I love aviation cocktails. So I order that. I had no idea what I was getting into. I'd never actually been to a Jose Andres restaurant. The floral cloud is something that's on, I think, as I understand it all or most of his restaurants, cocktail menus. It's something that's signature. So the bartender came over, and she starts making a drink. And she says, oh, you might want to take out your camera and take a video of this. Everybody always loves to take a video. And I was like, oh, okay. So she makes the drink, she pours it in, and she goes and gets, like, a carafe and brings it over, and there's some liquid in it, but there's, like, a cloud in there. And she takes a bar spoon and is basically, like, spooning out the cloud on top. That's the garnish for the drink. And the cloud hovers over the top of the surface of the drink for, like, two minutes. And it's almost like dancing, right? And it's not disappearing like you'd imagine. It would just disappear like smoke. It doesn't. I don't know what it was. I'm sure somebody could tell me. But the point is, and here's the thing, it was amazing. You don't see anything like this. That number one, somebody created a drink that was going to be unique, that nobody had ever seen before. And number two, somebody coached, trained, taught the bartender to tell the guest me to take out the. To take out my camera, because I'm probably going to want to capture this. And I did. And it was amazing enough. And I was like, holy crap. And then I posted it online, and I texted it to my wife and a couple of friends who I knew would get a kick out of it. And I went, oh, my God. Number one, somebody made the thing, and number two, somebody trained it. So they prompted me to take a video of the thing to share the thing. So if I just told you the story, right, which now I understand just telling you the story, it only gets us halfway there right now. Maybe you go, oh, that's cool. I'll have to go check out a Jose Andres restaurant. But ours is a, you know, ours is a visual world nowadays that we take pictures and videos, and that's how we speak to each other. So when I took the video, I texted it to my wife, and then I posted it online. So all of my followers, all my, you know, people could. Could check it out, could see it. Like, you got to see this to believe it. And they know, right? This is what smart business, smart operators know. They know that we have to make it easy and obvious to share, right? So the obvious part was, man, this thing's incredible. You've never seen anything like this. The easy part was like, oh, here's the point where you want to start filming, right? The bartender telling me, my point being, and I can give you a thousand examples as, and I will give you a couple more examples over the next few weeks, is that somebody came up with it and then somebody trained someone else to. To lean into it. Number one, you need to have stuff like this on your menu. And you can make it gimmicky, and it can feel cheap or it can feel totally embedded into what you're doing. And it can feel so natural, like a natural extension of what you do, right? And who you are. And then you've got to train it. It's not enough, right? You can't not have it. But then it's also not enough to just have it. You got to have it, and you got to make sure that people know you have it, right? It's like tipping the. The guys at the car wash, right? If you slip a $10 bill into the thing, they don't know it's you. They don't know to love on the tires. But you're like, hey, guys, thank you. As you're holding up a $10 bill, and you make a big show of putting it in the box, right? They're watching. They're going, oh, man, that guy really took care of us. That is the point of what we're talking about. It's not enough to have it. You got to make sure they know that you have it. That's the point I want to make with today's story, is that I largely forget about the rest of the meal at that Hos Andreas restaurant. In fact, it's since closed and it's now a new restaurant. That space but that restaurant's closed. But what they did so, so well, right? The steak was fine, but it was extremely expensive. The wine list was extremely expensive. Everything was just sort of, eh. But that was like, oh, this is cool. It's a really well made cocktail. And it's worth talking about. It's worth talking about later. Your restaurant needs a lot of these to have a burger and fries. Who cares? There's plenty of places where I can get a burger and fries. How is your burger and fries different? How is your fish and chips different? How is yours ta. How are your tacos different? Whatever it is you serve, how are they different? Right? You need to create, right? The reason I tell these stories is because they lodge in my brain. And I've now told these so many times over and over again. Like I said a few episodes ago, my job is not to tell you what to do, right? I'm not telling you to have a drink with a cloud on it. I'm telling you have something, right? I'm telling you that it's valuable to have something that people will take pictures of and videos of and talk about later in text and post and talk about in their reviews. That's beneficial. If we want people to talk, then we have to make it easy for them to talk. We have to give them a story. That's what I'm sharing on these 20 episodes, right? So we do this arc. We do it every summer. I do something like this. This is a 20 episode arc where I'm sharing all of these stories. The stories I tell more than any other story. And it's meant to help shape your restaurant, build a more profitable restaurant. Get you talked about, get return visits, get people coming in and saying, hey, I heard about this thing. Hey, I saw this thing online. That's what this is about. That's what today's episode is about. As these 20 episodes are all about. Listen again. My name is Chip Close. I run this company. It's called Restaurant Strategy. So the podcast that is an extension of the company that I run. We are filling seats now to our big event, the Restaurant Profitability Summit. Happens once a year. It happens October 18, 19th, 20th, 2026 in Minneapolis. I would love for you to be there. General admission tickets. VIP tickets available. A full line of two full days of education. We throw a big party, open bar, food. You are gonna. Everybody gets access to that. The VIP then gets you also access to the welcome dinner on Sunday night. Also gets you catered lunch Monday and Tuesday. You get a swag bag, you get to sit and hang out in the front row. Lots of other things you get as being a VIP ticket holder, but just buying a ticket gets you in the room. And I promise you, it's worth it. There's a reason this thing sells out every single year. You can find that link in the show notes. Again, I appreciate you guys being here. Thank you very, very much. I will see you on the next one.