We live in a world where the big boys dominate the playing field. This is something I’m not going to lie to you about. Especially in the foodservice industry, where big chain restaurants—McDonald’s, Burger King, etc.—get all the customers and a huge chunk of the market. Small business owners are left to feed on the [...]
In order to be successful you need to strike at the heart of the matter. As a restaurant owner, you need to think BIG. opening a restaurant in some rundown desert town won’t get you anywhere. You must aim for the populous cities—Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, etc.—but unfortunately that’s where the competition is [...]
It’s the first month of the new year and you’ve just opened your dream restaurant. Take note, your dream restaurant. So as much as possible you want everything to work out smoothly, from the in-house operations to advertising. I can help you on the latter. There are a few essential steps you can take, as [...]
The saying goes, Necessity is the mother of all inventions. So looking back, advertising came about when early businesses needed a voice. There was a time when we read brochures and pamphlets about the newest chocolate-flavored milk shake in Rudy’s countryside diner. Brightly colored flyers took our attention and offered discounts, coupons, special offers, etc. [...]
The concept of running a restaurant is simple: You serve the food, customers come to your restaurant, you get paid for the service. It’s a very simple yet effective way of doing business, and it’s been like that for so many years. But the invention of the Internet made one thing very clear to restaurant [...]
For restaurants, the battle for customers is no longer restricted to whoever serves the bigger meatball on top of their spaghetti platter. The war first and foremost takes place online. As a restaurant owner, you ought to be concerned about growing your list of emails as much as what’s the daily special for next Tuesday. [...]
Twitter. Tweet. Tweets. Tweeting. If you don’t know your way around the Internet, which I doubt if you’re reading this article, you might take those four words as the sound a bird makes or something. But any Internet-savvy person will tell you Twitter is a fun social networking website. To a restaurant operator, Twitter is [...]
A successful restaurant business lives on a balanced marketing approach. Make good use of everything, and everything will come back to you as profit. I think it’s about time I recap some of the most essential restaurant marketing solutions I’ve discussed in my previous articles. So here goes… Restaurant marketing solution #1: Plan ahead of [...]