Great Taste Magazine

by Todd Lejnieks July/Aug 2008 Issue

In 1984, Jay Conrad Levinson coined the term “Guerrilla Marketing” to describe a newly emerging and unconventional strategy of bringing customers to buy more of your product or services. The foundation of this idea was to use your own imagination instead of large, expensive advertising campaigns.

Some of the key principles of Levinson’s book, Startup Guide to Guerrilla Marketing: A Simple Battle Plan for First-Time Marketers:

• Guerrilla Marketing is geared for small businesses and entrepreneurs.
• Time, energy and imagination should be the primary investments, rather than  large sums of money.
• Focus on cooperating with other businesses, instead of competing.
• Use current technologies to enhance your efforts.
• Create a standard of excellence with a focus. Don’t over diversify or lose your focus. Read more »

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. Read more »

by Todd Lejnieks Winter 2007 Issue

For a long time, Applebee’s had the literal corner on the market in Antioch, California. It owned the only full service, casual dining establishment, serving a population of around 75,000. It was one of the busiest units in the 1000+ chain. There were other locally-owned diners, steakhouses and a pretty popular burger joint down by the delta but for a casual atmosphere, decent service and a consistent meal, Applebee’s was the only game in town, for years.

Enter Shawn Burns. Carrying a Master Brewer Certificate from UC Davis, about two weeks experience as a server at Olive Garden, an SBA loan, a shoebox full of cash from his friends and family, and a dream, he opened “Schooner’s Grille & Brewery” in April 2001, two weeks before Mother’s Day.

The two weeks leading up to Mother’s Day, there was a two hour wait in his lobby from opening to closing, every day of the week. Line cooks, servers, managers with years of experience, who Shawn had the luxury of hand-picking because he was the best game in town, stood in shock, ran out on shifts and no-call, no-showed. They literally couldn’t handle the business. US Foodservice loaned them a truck, which was parked out back and kept running, 24/7, to serve as an extra walk-in, as Schooner’s could not fit enough food product into the walk-in for even one day of service.

Shawn says, “Grown men were crying. We couldn’t believe it. I started hating the sound of the kitchen printer. It just wouldn’t stop. People always tell me, ‘What a great problem to have’! But it wasn’t. We just weren’t ready and we couldn’t handle it. It was a war and we were getting our asses kicked!” Read more »