Updated: Jun 19, 2020
Working at a restaurant is meaningless!
Let's face it, that's the hard truth. We work long hours preparing the food for our customers. Like we spend days making the dough, we shred cheese, slice vegetables, roast meat, etc.
Whatever you serve in your restaurant, you put days of work to get that ready. We do something that when a customer orders, hopefully within 25-20 minutes, we can provide them that food.
And you know, in reality, that food in a few hours is going to end up in the toilet and get flushed.
This industry is very tough. Working in a restaurant in itself, and running a restaurant is meaningless.
Sometimes we are stuck in the cycle of interviewing people, hiring them, training them, coaching them, terminating them, or they quit.
Doing these things every single week can be exhausting.
October 26 is a MAKE A DIFFERENCE DAY!
Today we are talking about how we, as restaurant professionals, can make a difference in the lives of our customers, our people, and our community.
This is something that I learned from watching Walmart's Shareholder Meeting (you can look this up on YouTube).
Public companies like Walmart, Amazon, Facebook, and more have quarterly shareholder report that they send out. Pizza Hut, Domino's, and Papa John's also include that.
They strongly recommend you look into those numbers. As mandated by law, they do have to report in public their sales.
They announce what they've been doing, and where the direction of the company is going for their shareholders.
This Walmart's Shareholder Meeting is quite different. They had a massive stage with bands, performers, and invited famous people to talk like Hollywood actress Jennifer Garner.
They had brought their folks from different parts of the world where Walmart is operating. Their CEO and other officials would come on stage, and there were music and dance. It was all about more of celebration.
They share the progress of the company, the differences they made for the meals they serve. Altogether the things they've been doing, they were celebrating it during this Shareholder Meeting.
Watching this made me realized some things that we can apply to our restaurants.
I would like to share what I learned from that, and what we've started implementing for our restaurant every single month that helped us to:
Build our brand and reputation in the community.
Be well known by the people and respected, which leads to people being gracious when we do mess things up.
Give meaning to the work that they do daily for them to know what they make possible.
Since then, we have been creating what we call a MONTHLY CUSTOMER IMPACT REPORT.
This is directly reporting about the impacts that we had as a restaurant in our community. We show this to the public through different platforms such as our social media, website, email newsletter, Facebook notes, Google post, etc.
We are proud of our restaurant's accomplishments and contributions to our community.
We are grateful for how each of our team members contributes to everything we do for the community. So we also present this report to our team internally using our own scheduling platform.
By being part of our company, we make it possible to make a difference in our community. I want everybody in our company to understand that as one team, we can collectively make a huge difference.
One way is just to tell them, and the other one is to share footage and tell stories.
As you know, telling facts in stories sell.
What do we put in our Monthly Impact Report?
Hopefully, if you see that it's going to help your team feel that the work becomes more meaningful, you can connect to your customers better by:
1. Sharing footage of every event you attend
Sharing footage, such as photos and videos of different events that you have hosted.
We have been donating gift cards or food, and we take photos anywhere we go.
We have that vision to share those at the end of every month. So we get the team on board.
An on-the-ground local strategy is very critical. No matter how good you are online, text message marketing, email marketing, Facebook ads, etc. It is still necessary that we physically interact with people.
Meeting them face to face, shaking their hands, passing out food, we are building goodwill.
We take food to our local fire station because we love them. We go to our local police station and bring them our food because we appreciate them protecting us. We support our local churches, we give free food to their youth group gatherings.
This is what we have been doing for five years in our restaurant.
In the last six months, we have decided to capture photos and videos of these events. Anywhere we go with our food, we take photos and videos.
2. Hosting various functions in the store and telling stories
We host several events in our restaurant, such as birthdays, anniversaries, gradua