Hospitality Doctor
Max Hitchins
Your #1 marketing tool
In an article about Mothers Day, written by my good friend Bill Marvin, the American Restaurant Doctor, (RestaurantDoctor.com) he wrote the best ways to avoid mistakes reoccurring is to have regular debriefings with your team. Bill believes, after all promotions, you should have a staff debrief asking these questions: • What do you think worked particularly well? • What didn’t go as smoothly as you hoped? • Where were we good when we could have been great? • What problems arose and how were they handled? • What resources do you wish you’d had, but didn’t? • What made your job tougher in this Mothers Day promotion? • What menu items were big hits? Which ones were just OK? • If this were your place, what would you do differently next year? • What could we do to extend this Mothers Day event beyond just one Sunday? The purpose of the debriefing sessions is NOT to point fingers or assign blame. Rather, it’s to open a dialogue as a means to collect data, solicit suggestions, LISTEN, and make notes to help next year’s event be less stressful and more profitable for everyone. Finally, I am in the process of collating an on-line book of the many marketing ideas we used in our Sydney Pub. As well, I will be including Hospitality ideas I have collected from the world. If you would me to contact you to advise when this book is available, contact me on the details below.
Her name was Eileen. For 30 years she had been working at the hotel we had recently taken over in Sydney. The hotel had a ground floor bar and a first floor bar. (They used to say “Customers won’t go upstairs to a bar.”) The first floor bar was known as Eileen’s Bar. Our first week’s total sales for this first floor bar, under our ownership, were $2450. In our first month I recall talking to Eileen about a marketing idea I believed would certainly create sales. She looked me straight in the eyes and said “It won’t work here!” And she was right. It didn’t work! “How could that happen?” I thought. I knew it had been a raging success in many bars in cities in several countries. Then I realised my mistake. I had committed to cardinal sin of ignoring staff as our #1 marketing tool. I was using a ‘top down’ management format… I was ‘telling her’ what would/should work instead of asking. I never made the same mistake again! From then on whenever I introduced an idea to Eileen, I couched it in these terms “I saw an interesting idea, Eileen, in a pub/bar/restaurant at ??? It seemed to be hugely successful. Do you think you could make this idea work up here in your bar?” Then I explained the idea to her and… guess what! From that day forward every marketing idea we introduced to Eileen’s bar worked and worked and worked. Indeed, when we sold out 10 years later, the weekly turnover in Eileen’s Bar (with Eileen still there) had increased to $30,000 per week. My Dad used to say “Learn from your mistakes. Even better, lean from other peoples mistakes. It’s less expensive!”
Max Hitchins - The Hospitality Doctor w: HospitalityDoctor.com.au e: max@hitchins.com.au t: 0419 53 63 63
49 Tasmanian Hospitality Review June/July Edition
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