You don't need more guests!
Unpopular opinion: You have all the guests you need.
Any college freshman can spit back the quote they learn on their very first day of Consumer Marketing 101: "It's cheaper to keep a customer than to go find a new one." And yet everywhere you look, you'll see restaurants tripping over themselves to get new diners in the front door.
But I believe that most restaurants have all the guests they could ever possibly want.
The biggest issue is we take those diners for granted. We feel like we did all the hard work to get them in, and think, "Great! That worked... let me go out and find some more just like them." But you don't need to acquire new customers!!!
I believe restaurants will fix all of their problems if they simply get better at convincing their existing guests to come back more frequently.
As those college freshmen will remind you: "It's cheaper to keep a customer than to go find a new one."
And why is that?
Mostly because advertising ain't cheap. It takes real resources to make it happen: both time and money. But I always wonder, couldn't we better allocate those resources?
Let's say you have a restaurant that does about 100 covers every night for dinner. Each table dines with you roughly 4 times a year. (Because there are lots of great dining options these days, right?) But it would be so much easier to just convince the people who are already there -- and already love you -- to come back sometime in the next 2 weeks.
If you could convince 10% of tonight's diners (about 10 people) to come back in the next 2 weeks, that would take your weekly covered from about 700 to about 740. Every week. And these efforts compound!!!
If the average guest spends about $55, and you serve 700 covers each week, that's about $38,500 in weekly topline revenue. But increase that to 740 and it becomes $40,700. That's an additional $2,000 in weekly revenue.
You know where I'm going with this, right?
Extrapolate that out across the entire year and you've taken a $2M restaurant and grown it by 5%. (Without the compounding, BTW.)
And all it takes is being focused on the customers who are actually sitting in your dining room.
Chip Klose – MBA, Helping independent restaurant owners hit consistent, predictable 20% profit, Restaurant Coach, Author, and Keynote Speaker with 25 years of industry experience.
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