In an industry where thousands of restaurants and bars compete for attention, one question sits at the center of every successful operation: What makes your place an interesting place to go to? It is the most important question in hospitality—separating memorable concepts from forgettable ones, and profitable destinations from “just another place to eat.” Many restaurants open their doors, serve food, and hope guests will notice. But hope is not a strategy. Branding is. Branding is not a logo, a color scheme, or just a slogan. It is the total impression your restaurant makes on guests—the picture they carry in their minds, the emotional story they tell after visiting, and the sensory memory that brings them back. Effective branding establishes expectations before a guest ever walks through the door and shapes how they interpret every detail of their dining experience. It gives meaning to your menu, personality to your service, and direction to your decisions. Branding: The Identity Behind the Experience Hospitality leaders like Danny Meyer remind operators to “write their own story before someone else writes it for them.” Guests today want a restaurant with a clear point of view—a defined identity that tells them what you stand for and why your business exists. Branding is the way that identity is communicated. Branding answers four essential questions. And, for a real-life example, I’ll answer them for the original concept of Fish Camp on Lake Eustis in Tavares, FL: - What do we stand for? Raising up the community, revealing unique offerings from local farms, food and beverage businesses. My wife and I love road tripping in Florida, but were always disappointed after passing farms and seafood stands, when we were served pre-breaded Sysco shrimp out of a box at the nearby restaurant. Our priority was bringing the best a culinary road trip had to offer – focusing on vendors within a 2 ½ hour drive.  - What do we offer that others do not? “What the others do not” equals the “problem” that any business plan hopes to solve. And, for Fish Camp, the problem was a lack of local shine on the menus in the area. We literally created a restaurant we’d love to go to, and you need to do the same. 

The top tier of Critical Success Factors in restaurants and bars is inventory. If you're too busy to track your food and liquor, stop something you're doing, cancel something. Make time. In my consulting era, I kept seeing the same dilemma. An owner calls me in to help him find where they are losing money, and it was always the same; no P+L, no inventory. The first steps on setting up a business or turning it around are those two do-or-die tasks. Inventories need to set up to complement your POS system. You are counting portions of fish, steak, Patron Silver, Bud Light, et al. **** I can help you create a spreadsheet that breaks down the bottles to portion sizes and pounds of meat to ounces so you can discern exactly how many portions you used, and square them with your actual portions sold. **** Ways to measure. While the method of eyeballing a bottle to determine to the tenth or to .05 of the bottle is effective, I prefer the old liquor scale. With that, we tracked things like a bartender who was pouring 2 house margaritas with Don Julio Anejo for her friend instead of well Tequila. While it may seem exhausting to weigh all your bottles, keep in mind, you can mark the level of the slow moving bottles with a Sharpie pen to free yourself from counting the Green Chartreuse every week. Since you've copied and pasted the last inventory in the new spreadsheet, you just leave those bottle counts the same. If you have 100+ brands, one third to a half of them won't be poured in any given week. Food is trickier, and we always focus on auditing the proteins. I have spreadsheets to get you started on any of those, if you wish. I still am a huge camera fan, as I had 29 cameras filming every corner of my restaurant when I sold it. They catch the actual theft in action; over-pouring at the bar, the dishwasher hiding a bag of beef in the garbage can - cameras can help cancel all those tricks...if they know you're watching the cameras. I'll cover the many uses of cameras for restaurants in one of the next posts. But inventory is perpetual. And you must know what you are buying every week is getting sold.

Once there was only ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers) that boasted being the largest litigator shaking down restaurants and bars for playing copyrighted music, live, recorded, or broadcast. Then BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.) came along to double the pain, then, in the last decade, SESAC (Society of European Stage Authors and Composers) added their fees. There is a FOURTH group that just showed up called AllTrack. So, you have four music license chasers that could each take $600 - $2,000 per year from your bottom line and there's no plans in the works to change that reality. While we can't help you get rid of these, there are ways to soften the blow. 1. Evaluate the value of live music to your establishment. Is entertainment/live music a key part of your brand? My restaurant is waterfront and boaters love to come by at least once a week in the afternoon to hear music and day-drink. Likewise, our competitors all have live music. You'll want to measure the benefit if that's the case for your store. Come up with a benchmark of average additional beverage and food sales that is owed in part to the live music. The best way to do this is to observe and tally guests' spend who are paying attention to the music and those who came to see the music, and estimate the sales on one day for your hottest performer and on one day for your performer who has the least number of followers. The average between those two is your number. Run a quick P+L for music; e.g. Total average sales less 45% for food & beverage costs, and labor (Note: Normally would be 55% COGS but we're accounting for the higher bar percentage of gross during live shows). Then subtract your average entertainer fee, usually around $200 in 2025. Thus, if you find music brings an average of $1,200, less $200 for the talent, less $540 for COGS, less $50 for the music licenses, music gives you potentially an extra $410 or 34% net profit to pay the bottom half of the P+L. In short, your first step is to use these calculations to evaluate whether you want to have live music at all. 

Once upon a time, restaurant ownership was a happy-go-lucky kind of trade. I opened my first restaurant on $30,000. Going into the first weekend after opening, we had $2.99 in our bank account. Thanks to a mailer we sent out, we had a great weekend. That restaurant, Tequila Sunrise Mexican Grill, in Oakland Park, Florida, turns 30 this month. However, we restaurant owners have seen unflinching inflation, soaring rents, and labor costs making restaurant ownership like a game of Pin-The-Tail-On-the-Donkey that owners, the donkeys, can’t win. What owners desperately need is a community of experienced restaurant pros that can answer questions to help them make decisions that will keep more money in their bank accounts. We’ll tackle everything; food and beverage costs, labor costs, menu costing & planning, how to save on taxes and those scandalous “music licensing fees”, pretty much all things on your P&L and marketing platters. If you’re in the restaurant industry, introduce yourself. We’d like to know your experience and a little about where you’re from. I’m in Central Florida and most recently founded the Fish Camp on Lake Eustis 9 years ago, starting with no money and selling it last year as the #1 Restaurant in Tavares on TripAdvisor. Let’s put our best ideas together to Make Owning Restaurants Fun Again.