Author Archive

What Is The Employee Experience?

Q: Who creates and delivers every single guest experience? A; The Front-line employee. Understanding this means the imperative is to create a meaningful and differentiated experience for the employee first. so that they will create a meaningful and differentiated experience for your guests. Traditional roles, responsibilities and resources are no longer enough in a world [...]

Core Values Don’t Change

This is a list (in no particular order) of our core beliefs for building great businesses out of good businesss. We predicate all of our operational philosophies and client outcomes on these beliefs. The Guest Experience is the most important (only) product you offer. Attracting “A” level talent is a function of great operations. Recruiting [...]

Notes On Loyalty Programs

Loyalty is probably the most abused word in the marketing lexicon and is usually defined using a retail context. How? It’s use has been warped, twisted and misappropriated to mean nothing more than a discount that rewards a guest for dining with you or to dine with you at some future time (frequency). So much so that [...]

How Is Your Take-Out Program?

Takeout sales are projected to grow at three times the rate of on-premise dining and at seven times the rate of the rest of the total food industry, according to the National Restaurant Association. To compete for a strong share of the takeout market, businesses must understand how to adapt their current products and systems [...]

Pricing Is A Key Component To Sustainable Success

Pricing means different things in different industries, and every company has different needs. We draw from an extensive toolkit to develop a tailored solution that works for your environment and your people, and we work with you to design solutions that allow your organization to develop the skills to repeat the process into the future. [...]

The Difference Between Coaching & Mentoring

Quite often, it is possible to hear the terms ‘coaching’ and ‘mentoring’ used interchangeably in a personal and organisational development context. Wherever these are used, the success of these development approaches is dependent upon many factors, not least the organisational culture, the skills of the individual mentor or coach, and the emphasis that is placed [...]

QFO: What can a newly opened, up-scale restaurant do to set itself apart in a location that contains multiple other competing restaurants?

Probably nothing. If you opened without any differentiation, you won’t be able to design it now. You have the wrong thinking and the wrong leadership. Your brand is now set in the minds of Guests. Think about Newton: The First Law of Motion states, “A body at rest will remain at rest, and a body [...]

How would you define excellent customer service?

I don’t. The Guest does. Or the Customer does. That’s the entire point. YOU don’t define how well you treat me. I do. The customer. Because it’s MY needs, wants and desires that I’m interested in having satisfied. Business people think they need to define what excellent CS/CX is, which leads to transactional thinking and [...]

QOD: Your Frequency

“There are 7 billion people in the world. Not all of them will appreciate your brand of jazz. Your mission is not to convince anybody to like you, respect you or see the world the way you do. Your mission is to find people who resonate at your frequency.” ~ Liz Ryan

The Top 10 Components To A Successful Hospitality Marketing Plan

1. Execution. You have to walk the talk. Every part of the guest experience has to be executed or no amount of external marketing will help your business grow. 2. Effective positioning. Who are you to your guests? Are you offering any differentiated value or are you just another commodity business in your market? 3. [...]

Coaching Methodologies

Depending on objectives and the organization’s environment, I employ a variety of Coaching methods to help those I Coach elevate their performance. These include, but aren’t limited, to: Strategic Planning. Work with the leader in “planning the plan”, and facilitating team involvement in its development and execution. Shadowing. Accompany the leader on their rounds and observe their [...]

Moving Beyond Robotic Service

Service is table stakes (pun intended). Everyone provides service: everyone has their 12 steps of service that include all the transactional lists most people (restaurant managers included) come up with to answer the question: “what does good service look like.” This is the wrong question.

Coaching Is Essential To Maximizing Individual & Business Success

Coaching is a development process that significantly enhances the economic achievement of individuals. It concentrates on helping people – especially entrepreneurs – substantially grow their businesses.

Lost Opportunity Cost

Most operators consider the cost-benefit between two (or more) choices they want to consider. The problem lies in how they chose the options being considered and whether or not there were better alternatives.

“How Do You Build Volume?”

An age old question in Hospitality is still, “How do you build volume?”

QFO: What are the biggest challenges an independent restaurant faces in its first 5 years of business?

The timeline is irrelevant. But the list of challenges is the same as it’s always been…

The Problem With Transactional Thinking

Bain & Co. recently pushed this out.

QFO: Why do hostesses at restaurants make small talk as they seat you?

Be Unreasonable

This meme was posted on LinkedIn earlier and the subsequent commentary by the author included this: “It’s either right or wrong. It’s either done the correct way or no way at all.”

QFO: What is the first step that I should take before I build my own restaurant?

QFO: What is the first step that I should take before I build my own restaurant? Answer: Build your team.

Not Sure Where To Start?

Take The Operator’s Assessment. 15 minutes. It will tell you more about where your operation actually stands than most operators learn in a year. Come to the call with your results and we’ll have a much sharper conversation from the first minute.

[Take The Operator’s Assessment →]

If you know something is wrong and you are ready to find out what it actually is — call me. If you are at an inflection point and need someone who has already navigated it — call me. If you are not sure what you need yet, that is exactly what the free consultation is for. Tell me what is going on. I will tell you what I see and what I think it means. No pitch, no obligation, completely confidential.

The conversation costs you nothing. Not acting on what you learn will.

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Phone or Text: +1 972-207-6368

[Email me: Jeffrey@JeffreySummers.com]

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