Hey everybody my name is Ryan Gromfin, I’m an author, speaker, chef, restaurant owner and I’m the founder of TheRestaurantBoss.com as well as RestaurantProfitandPerformance.com. And again I want to teach you how to celebrate those small victories, and why they’re so important to your restaurant business.

You know, most small businesses are so concerned about dollars. About those big huge wins – if they run a marketing campaign and it doesn’t bring in forty, fifty thousand dollars, or if it doesn’t double their sales they think that it’s a complete failure.

But if we look at most large businesses year-over-year growth they’re looking at 3, 4, 5, sometimes 6, and 8% in growth year-over-year… Those seem like small numbers in your business, but not everything is going to be a home run. And if we focus on the percentages, when we measure the success of a marketing campaign, or when we’re trying to cut costs or increase revenues, those percentages can actually be huge! And they can be hugely successful events for your restaurant, for your business. But if we only are focused on the dollars and always hitting something out of the park, having this huge win? We’re going to sometimes look past the success.

I have a couple of examples that I want to share with you that I think you’re going to help bring this home.

The first example is when professional gamblers—you know, in Las Vegas, sit down to a table. People who make a living, who earn their living playing blackjack or poker, whatever it is, they’re not always looking to double their money.

You know when I go to Vegas I sit down with a couple hundred dollars and I get risky and I get aggressive. When I don’t double my money I might as well have lost at all… because if I sit down with two or three hundred dollars and make 10% let’s say, so I win $20, to me that’s a loss.

I’m not thinking about it the right way. I’m thinking … what’s the big deal? I made $20? But to professional gamblers that’s how they make a living. So if they sit down at a table with a thousand dollars. If they’re up a hundred dollars, they walk away. They just got a 10% return on their investment. If they push it and try to get a hundred percent or 50% returns? They could potentially lose everything.

So it’s the same thing. With big businesses they’re always looking at percentages not dollars and I encourage you in your smaller restaurant business to look at percentages, and to measure the success of something based on the percentage that its brought to you or that it saved you rather than just the huge dollars at the end of the week, or the month, or the year.

The other example that I want to share with you is a client of mine that has a small pizza restaurant and we developed a loyalty program. He was trying to get more business in at the lunch hour so we developed a really cool loyalty program for lunch only. He passed out 250 of these loyalty cards to his neighbors, to the other businesses in the area. Well a couple months later I followed up with him and I asked how it went and he said, “Eh, it went ok…of the 250 cards we passed out 8 people redeemed the entire card. And most people only came in 2, 3, 4 times with the card.”

I wrote back, “Are you kidding me? That’s a huge success! That means you got eight people who visited 12 times to complete their card. And then a vast majority of the people only came in 2 or 3 times? That’s literally hundreds and hundreds of visits to your restaurant for lunch that you didn’t have before.”

He emailed back, “Oh yeah I guess you’re right.”

And here I am thinking oh my god, we just put together this massive marketing campaign that cost him almost no money, that cost him almost no effort, that was incredibly simple to do. It returned him huge results but he couldn’t see that as a win. So he stopped doing it, he didn’t continue on with it.

So whenever you’re putting together a campaign, or whenever you’re measuring something I encourage you to write down ahead of time what your goal is. What’s the percentage goal? What’s the dollar goal? Is what you’re measuring really what’s important? In his case he just looked at eight out of 250 returns. That wasn’t what was important. It was how many visits that he got, versus how many dollars that he spent. Now, I wasn’t able to get that information from him. He wasn’t tracking it… but I guarantee you that return was massive!

So in your small restaurant business I encourage you to always be measuring everything. But most importantly celebrate the small victories! Sometimes we’re making these huge massive strides in our business but because it doesn’t feel huge, because the dollars are huge, we give up on it. We move on to the next thing.

Remember dig into your restaurant. Focus on the small stuff. The big successes will come at the end. I live by this expression of Get rich slowly. We’re all looking for that huge home run but most business owner’s most successful businesses grow very, very slowly. And we only hear about the massive growth at the end…because it’s been this slow ramp-up for that massive growth.

I hope you enjoyed today’s video, and I look forward to seeing you again next week.