Introduction:

There’s one thing you can do in your restaurant right now that will drive business more than any other strategy. But there’s a catch…this is not a whiz-bang strategy or something that happens overnight. It’s going to take some work and it’s a mind shift. I’ve talked about how there’s a formula for success in the restaurant business, and there are formulas for failure, struggle, stress or overwhelm.

Unfortunately a lot of us try to build our own formulas instead of finding a formula that has been proven to work and following it. I hear this all the time, “I’m going to do a restaurant like Chipotle.” Granted, Chipotle had a formula for success for a while; however, doing a restaurant like Chipotle and following their success formulas are two totally different things.

Exceed their expectations:

The #1 priority that needs to be in any successful business or restaurant formula: you must exceed your guests expectations.

You might be saying to yourself that this is so obvious and something you already know. But, do you really know this and are you practicing it? Exceeding a customer’s expectation is very different than meeting a customer’s expectation.

Exceeding their expectation is giving them more than they expected.

If your restaurant is struggling in any way, even if you’re doing well but aren’t at the level of success that you know you deserve, it’s because you are not exceeding your guests expectations. If you are serving a frozen burger with a frozen bun and frozen french fries, you’re probably not exceeding your customers expectations. You’re just relying on price to keep your customers happy.

The restaurants that can raise their prices, yet still have floods of people, are the ones that are exceeding their customers expectations. Do me a favor and call 20 of your friends, 10 of your customers, or go to 10 different tables right now and ask the question “Did we exceed your expectations?” You are going to get some incredible answers, and it might be a little painful or it might not be painful but we can learn from that.

When you just ask, “how is everything?”, they might answer “everything’s fine” so you  leave them alone and they can keep eating. But if you ask instead, “did we (or the steak, etc.) exceed your expectations?”, you’ll get answers like, “The steak was really good, but I was kind of expecting it to be seasoned better or cooked a little better.” Or  you could hear, “I was kind of expecting at this price it would be a better quality.”

Chances are that if your guest is expecting a better quality, they’re not going to say anything or complain. They’re just not going to come back. But, when you exceed your guests expectations, it will drive a ton of business to your restaurant. Hope you enjoyed this week’s tip my name and I look forward to bringing you another one next week!