In the first video last week, I shared with you 1, 2, and 3. The first three mistakes that I see restaurant owners all over the world making. If you haven’t watched Part 1 yet, please click here.

4. Restaurant Owners Focus Too Much on Attracting New Customers Instead Of the Delighting Them.

Marketing is crucially important but you have limited time and resources. We don’t all have huge budgets. We can’t spend all of our time and money marketing we have to spend a lot of that doing the work in our business. Independent restaurant owners are busy, I get it.

But here’s the thing…It’s really hard to get new potential customers to change their current habits. No matter how much time money and effort you spend on marketing. It’s really hard to get potential customers to change their habit.

I’m not saying you stop doing that. You need to keep doing that, but that cannot be your only source. That cannot be where you spend most of your time in trying to get new customers. You know there’s a great quote from one of my favorite business coaches, his name is Keith Cunningham and he says: “If every customer you ever had, was still a customer. You would not have time to worry about marketing.”

You are spending too much time attracting new customers, instead of delighting your current ones.

“Go out of your way to delight your current customers.”

They’re your referral source. They’ll come back more often. It’s easier to get them to spend more money. There’s all kinds of marketing that you can do and efforts you can make by operating a better restaurant. So what I always say is spend more time focusing on your operations then on your marketing when you’re in the growth phase of your restaurant—which sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true!

5. Restaurant Owners Try to Manage People Instead of Systems.

People are not manageable. I get a lot of flack for that whenever I say it, especially when I say it on stage in front of a big group of people because we’ve all been trained in different management techniques.

“I don’t believe people are manageable. I believe that people are too varied with their needs, wants and desires to manage them.”

So what I believe in is that we manage systems not people. Systems are manageable. A system is black and white. It’s either done right or it’s not done right. It’s either done on time or it’s not done on time. Then we develop our talent—and I call them talent. I don’t refer to my staff as staff or employees, I refer to them as talent because that’s what they are. If you don’t have a talented staff, you’re going to struggle.

I hear from restaurant owners and my clients all the time that they said, “There is no good staff out there. I can’t find any good employees. It’s because they’re looking for the most talented people to fill that position. If you have the system set up properly in your restaurant. You can find average talent and develop them, but good people. What I mean by that are you hire on the soft skills. You hire the smile, and then you develop the talent.

6. Restaurant Owners Never Build a Real Team.

By team, I don’t just mean the employees in your business? I mean an entire team. Owning any business cannot be done alone. I don’t care what kind of business it is whether it’s a restaurant, a doctor’s office, a law practice or real estate investment firm.

Owning a business cannot be done alone. You need an entire team of people to help you out, not just employees but vendors and other kinds of support to help you do this. So Stop thinking about your team has just your employees and start looking at your vendors as part of your team. Start looking at lawyers, at accountants and at bookkeepers as part of your team and really build that team.

I like to tell restaurants to create an advisory board that meets once a month that could be with influencers in the community, accountants, lawyers, a few of your customers… Have them all into the restaurant for dinner and talk about what kind of marketing you’re doing, what direction you’re going, what you’re thinking about doing and have them help advise you. Have them help you build your team. But most importantly when it comes to building a team.

“Treat your staff and your vendors as well as you do your customers.”

Now some of you need to work on treating your customers a little better, and really need to work on treating your staff and your vendors better 🙂

The guy who’s delivering your food; the guy who you order your food from; your bookkeepers and your accountants. You must treat them incredibly well with the highest levels of respect, love, encouragement and really make them part of your team they could be one of your biggest referral sources and they’re not going to refer people to you because the way that you treat them.

My refrigerator repairman knew everybody in the community. I took such good care of him, he was such a part of my team not only because I needed him to repair my equipment, but he was always coming into the restaurants for dinner. He was always bringing people into the restaurant for dinner. He was part of my team, and he’s part of my team now when I go into other restaurants? He comes with me to help look at their equipment.