ELECTRONIC HOUSE CALL - June 25, 2004

Happy Summer! I have been enjoying a few days at home before heading to Louisville next week to huddle with Big Dave Ostrander and Pizza Today magazine for a strategy session on our Pizza Insight program. If you are in the pizza business and you don't know about Pizza Insight, you owe it to yourself to check it out. Just click here.

Increase Your Occupancy, Part 1
One quick way to increase occupancy is to increase your party size. At any given time, most operations have a four-top with only two guests seated at it. If you can provide an incentive for those two guests to bring their friends, a two-top suddenly becomes a four-top and your occupancy on that table goes from 50% to 100%.

You must understand that the "Friends and Family Channel" is not censored. If you tell me what a great place you have, that is a commercial message and I am likely to tune it out. But if a friend tells me about you, I will listen because my friend does not have an agenda. This means that when your regulars invite their friends to join them for dinner, the new folks will come without even questioning it.

So the question to ask yourself (and your staff) is what sort of incentives can you offer your regular guests to invite their friends to join them for dinner at your place?

Do the Work
Margene and I were out to dinner a few nights ago at a small local restaurant. I ordered a Cobb Salad which arrived without the avocado or diced hard-cooked eggs that the recipe (and the menu) called for. When I called the waitress over to point this out, she took one look at the salad and immediately knew the problem before I even mentioned it. So far, so good.

I requested that the replacement salad omit the sliced black olives which were listed on the menu but which really did not belong on the salad to begin with. She was most apologetic and took the salad back to the kitchen. When she brought it back, she said that all they had done was add the eggs and the avocado, but did not re-make the salad. The black olives that I did not want were still there. What's wrong with this picture?

Two questions pop into my mind immediately. The first is that if she knew the salad was wrong when I called her over, why didn't she see that when she picked it up and correct the problem before it even got to the guest? At the same time, how did the kitchen miss two principle ingredients in a salad?

My second question is that a) since they screwed up and b) since the inconvenienced guest (me) wanted a modification in the salad, why would they ignore that and take the easiest route? They may have saved a few minutes of their time but the shortcut could easily have cost them my business ... forever -- not a good trade-off.

Light the Torch
The Summer Olympics in Athens run from August 13-29. It will be all over the media, of course ... the question is what are you planning to do to cash in on all the media dollars that other are going to spend?

Aussie marketing guru Max Hitchins calls this "slipstream marketing" ... and it really makes sense. If you can tie your event to something that others are spending big bucks to promote, your market thinks of you every time someone else reminds them of the event.

If the games draw a large television audience, your guests will be sitting at home in front of the TV rather than filling your dining room. Is this an opportunity for Olympic take-out? Can you add a big screen TV and offer an incentive for people to watch the game at your place? Perhaps dinner is half price every time the home team wins a medal, but use your imagination. (Hint: the quickest and cheapest way to create a really huge TV image is with an LCD projector and a movie screen.)

Let me know what you are planning to do to promote business during the Olympics. I will pass the best ideas along in future issues of the EHC.

The Perpetual Question
What did you learn from your staff today?

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