Great Taste Magazine

by Todd Lejnieks Jan/Feb 2008 Issue

In the last issue (see below in the articles from Todd category), I wrote about my new job as General Manager of Schooner’s Grille & Brewery in Antioch, California; a commuter-community where many who work in the Bay Area live in the fast-growing, but overdeveloped cities of the Sacramento Delta. Corporate restaurant companies have sniffed out all of the new markets developing and are quickly moving in, armed with their marketing budgets and population-density studies.Working for a single owner was new to me. I had been a Regional Manager for Chevy’s in the 90s, have also worked for Buca di Beppo, and other chains and have seen the dining dollar being diluted by executive decisions to saturate. Shawn Burns, Schooner’s founder and owner brought me on board to help fight the competition.

How to start?

Step 1 - Identify our strengths and build on them.

We sat down and brainstormed, then asked our staff, customers and then our competitors- the ones we knew would give us honest feedback or at least useful feedback.

Here is the list we came up with and our plan to build on those strengths:

1. Schooner’s has a tremendous loyalty among its regular customers.

Our POS system had a “Customer Loyalty” Component. We developed a “Loyalty Rewards” program which rewarded frequent visitors by tracking the dollars spent and awarding our “Loyalty Card” holders with a $10 coupon for every $100 spent. To sign up for the card, all one had to do was fill out and sign a form with first name, last name, email and birthday. We used the email list to generate over one thousand contacts in the first 3 months, which we could market to directly with event announcements, promotions, specials, coupons and general news about the restaurant. In the second year of the program, we plan on sending a birthday invitation to everyone who gave us their birthday, to come in for a free birthday meal. The program proved extremely popular, and over a period of six months we doubled our database and now have close to two thousand enrolled.

2. Schooner’s has a loyal and professional staff and an extremely low turnover rate among its managers and hourly workers.

We noticed a lot of customers told us that they “come in because of Jeanine”, or, “We love Pauline!”, or “If Marilyn ever leaves, we’re not going to come in anymore.” Truly, a lot of our customer base was fiercely loyal to individual staff members. In order to grow on this base, we started a “Server Business Card” program. Each server who wanted to play, printed their names on a stack of blank business cards (some even took the initiative to create printed labels to make them look more professional). We encouraged the servers to pass them out to whomever they saw fit in the community-the grocery clerk, a helpful video store attendant, or even a friend. The only rule was that they could only give it to someone who had never been to Schooner’s before. Anyone who came in with a Server Business Card was entitled to a 15% discount, plus if they asked to sit in the section of the server that brought them in, we bought their dessert, as an unexpected extra. Each card that was returned was put into a bowl and at the end of each month, we drew one card and gave $100 cash to the server whose card we drew. This program brought in new guests, created loyalty to one of our servers and got our staff talking about our restaurant to people who otherwise may not have heard of us.

3. Award-winning Beer

Chances are slim that every restaurant owner or manager reading this article has beer brewed on premise that has won medals at the Great American Beer Festival, or the World Cup or State Fair like Schooner’s owner and Master Brewer Shawn Burns and Head Brewer Craig Cauwels have. But every restaurant has its niche, something that it does really well (if not, then by all means start working on that one right away!). At Schooner’s, our particular specialty of note just happens to be beer…and man is it good! Microbrew aficionados from around the world have heard of our name. And even though our restaurant might be located in the far east reaches of the East Bay, word gets around that we have a Pale Ale that rivals any, an Oatmeal Stout that can go “mano a mano” against Guiness Stout and an IPA that would soothe the soul of even the most ardent Hophead. Our mission, get everyone to taste the beer! We mention our awards every chance we get, of course-on menus, table tents, email newsletters, advertisements, etc. But we also do our best to offer our beers on taps in other restaurants. In effect, this gets them to pay for our advertising! We also get involved in as many festivals, pourings and contests as we can. Many of them are break-even propositions but some actually do even generate an income, while serving a larger purpose of proselytizing our best product outside our four walls. The point of this is, if you have a great product, don’t keep it a secret! And don’t think you can only sell it or market it inside your four walls. Take your pizza to the strip mall down the street and pass out free samples. Get your cookies out to all the banks and offices in your neighborhood. If you’ve got it, flaunt it, whenever and wherever you can.

4. We are independent enough to listen!

We actually listen to our customers and make changes based on their recommendations. We don’t need permission from “Corporate”. This is an important lesson, even for a manager in a corporately-run chain. There are real people, from your community, who have particular likes and dislikes. You can’t please everyone all of the time but do take the time to listen. Some of the ideas we got from our guests and staff included having a Wine Pairing Dinner (which we thought we couldn’t do because we were, after all a “Brewery”), offering a “Teacher’s Appreciation Day” (doubling our usual Thursday business), and entering into a catering partnership with a local wedding location (because the mother of the bride is a regular customer and insisted on Schooner’s doing the catering, even though the owner of the location hadn’t heard of us before). The point of all this is that it is sad to see a restaurant, whether corporate or independent get locked into a “cookie cutter” approach to everything, using words like “We never…” or “That’s not our thing.”. Sure, you might not be able to build a brewery in your kitchen but why not step out on a limb once in a while and try something one of your customers or staff comes up with? How do you think the “Frappacino” was invented?

Identifying our strengths and building on them allowed us to take what was already working and either improve it or try to capitalize on it. It helped us to turn around a two-year decline in sales by focusing on the positive and sharing the good stuff with our customers and staff. It sounds simple but it’s really true, if you believe in something, it has a good chance of being successful.

Naturally, there is more to it. In my next article, I will share some of the “Guerilla Marketing” efforts we tried and write about those that worked, and a couple that didn’t work so well.