July 12, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
56:02
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| My worry is this. | ||
| If I had, and I've said this on Bar Rescue, if there's 60 motorcycles in front of a bar, there's a bunch of people that won't go to that bar. | ||
| Right? | ||
| If there's a bunch of people dressed in gang colors in front of a bar, there's people who won't go in that bar. | ||
| Today, if there's a bunch of people in front of a bar that look irresponsible as it relates to COVID, there are customers that won't go in that bar. | ||
| It's no different. | ||
|
unidentified
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[MUSIC PLAYING] | |
| This is the Rubin Report, and I'm Dave Rubin. | ||
| Reminder, everybody, to subscribe to our YouTube channel and tap that notification bell so you see our new videos in your feed. | ||
| And joining me today is the host and executive producer of Bar Rescue, the chairman and CEO of Taffer Dynamics, and creator of NFL Sunday. | ||
| I didn't know that one. | ||
| John Taffer, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Good to be here, Dave. | ||
| I am really glad to be talking to you today because as you know, we're kicking off a small business week here, and I'm gonna be talking to business owners all over the country, and I think at least one in Canada, about how to reopen, how to get businesses going again, how to get the economy going again, and everything else. | ||
| And I thought you'd be a fun guy to kick this off with. | ||
| So first off, I can see you're sitting in front of a bar right there. | ||
| Where are you? | ||
| What's going on in your world at the moment before we get into business? | ||
| Well, this is my I'm in my home bar in my home in Las Vegas. | ||
| So this this is which I've turned into a studio lately. | ||
| So we have our company is based here in Vegas. | ||
| I've lived here in Vegas for about eight years and we moved all of our equipment here to my house. | ||
| So I've been working from home. | ||
| I think I'm on my 93rd day at home since we closed down production. | ||
| I'll go out on occasion. | ||
| I've done one or two remotes for some news channels. | ||
| I did a couple of Fox pieces. | ||
| I did an MSNBC piece where we went out on a strip and did it. | ||
| But I've maintained serious distances and I'm one of the more cautious ones in our society, I think. | ||
| Yeah, so I was reading a bit about that. | ||
| So you are definitely on the more cautious side of it, but I suspect as a guy like you, who you like getting out there and going across the country and talking to people and, you know, sometimes yelling at people and getting pretty emotional with people, you must kind of miss that, that human interaction thing, right? | ||
| Oh, big time. | ||
| A matter of fact, Dave, and I haven't told anyone this, so I'll tell you this today. | ||
| I have a 45 foot tour bus. | ||
| And I'm leaving next Tuesday to go across the country in my bus. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| And I'm doing it just to get out there. | ||
| I can see some family along the way, but it's a safe way to travel these days. | ||
| So I'll be out there and traveling around the country for the next three to five weeks. | ||
| So how did the whole shutdown affect production for Bar Rescue? | ||
| Were you guys producing right now or were you in a break or are you coming back soon? | ||
| Where are you at? | ||
| No, we were actually producing and right in the middle of our last episode, we had eight more to do for the season. | ||
| We were doing, I think, 28 for this season. | ||
| And the first of the last episode, we started to sense things were going on. | ||
| We changed our production style. | ||
| I was separated from customers. | ||
| We changed camera angles and stuff to try to make it all work. | ||
| And at the end of that episode, we were given a choice. | ||
| to buy the network to either proceed or not. | ||
| And we chose to proceed for another week. | ||
| But then about three hours later, we got the call from the network that everything was being closed down. | ||
| And that was about 93 days ago. | ||
| So we shut that down, we had eight more left on the schedule, and everybody scattered and went home. | ||
| So I don't know what you'll make of this, but I have only watched two reality shows in my entire life. | ||
| I watched The Apprentice with Trump, and I watched Bar Rescue with you. | ||
| So I'm not sure what that means about the company that you keep, but there is something about Bar Rescue that it just, it... | ||
| Checks off all the boxes for me because it's very human. | ||
| It's dealing with struggle. | ||
| It's dealing with finances. | ||
| It's dealing with often with family interactions, personal interactions, business, the whole thing. | ||
| Where did the idea for the show originally come from? | ||
| I mean, I know you've been in that world forever, but really the genesis of the show. | ||
| Well, I've been, as you said, I've been, I've been in the industry for a long, long time. | ||
| And I had the most popular seminars in the industry before I was on TV. | ||
| And I gave a speech in Vegas. | ||
| At Caesar's Palace. | ||
| And at the end of the speech, somebody came up to me, Dave, and said, you should be on TV. | ||
| So I wrote up this thing that was originally called On the Rocks. | ||
| And it was a little like Mission Impossible. | ||
| It started with me with files. | ||
| And I'd pull out the mixologist. | ||
| And then I'd pull out the chef. | ||
| Sort of like Mission Impossible started. | ||
| And then I'd go in and do these rescues. | ||
| And I knew I had an advantage because I wasn't the chef. | ||
| So I didn't migrate to the kitchen. | ||
| I went everywhere, right? | ||
| So I focus much more on other areas of the business than a chef did. | ||
| I wrote this up, and I had done business with Paramount before in a restaurant space as a licensee. | ||
| So I went back to my friends who ran Paramount Television. | ||
| With my write-up, I was real excited, Dave, and they looked at me, they said, John, you'll never be on television. | ||
| You're too old. | ||
| You're not good looking enough. | ||
| It'll never happen. | ||
| So I went and I shot my own sizzle wheel the next week with some friends in Redondo Beach at a friend's bar and sent that sizzle wheel to four production companies who I had no relationship with. | ||
| Just emailed it to their development people. | ||
| And I got four offers within three weeks. | ||
| So I then navigated through those offers and I wasn't in a television business, so I didn't understand run clauses. | ||
| And all the likeness right clauses and all the things that are particular to an entertainment contract. | ||
| So I got myself an entertainment manager and an entertainment lawyer. | ||
| And we put the deal together, and in less than a year from when that person told me I'd never be on TV, the show premiered. | ||
| We're now 196 episodes in, we're four episodes from 200, which is a big record in my industry. | ||
| Show is generated now, I think it's close to $800 million worth of revenue, and it's one of the most successful reality shows of all time. | ||
| And it just shows, don't give up, Dave. | ||
| When somebody else says no, maybe the yes should be stronger in your own mind. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's such a consistent message in the show, but I'm here in LA. | ||
| For people that don't know how this biz works, the idea that you sent four blank pitches, not that were asked for or came from an agency, and got four responses back, I mean, that's gotta be unheard of. | ||
| I assure you, I've sent enough pitches to these people to know that that's pretty good. | ||
| Well, I guess sometimes it's timing, Dave, but I guess I didn't realize it at the time, but 186 episodes into this, I guess I'm pretty good at it. | ||
| And, you know, my secret has been to resist production from the get-go. | ||
| And I'm different than a lot of reality TV stars. | ||
| And Trump, I think, was this way on Celebrity Apprentice. | ||
| He already had his money. | ||
| I already had my success. | ||
| So I wasn't going to sell my soul to be on television. | ||
| It was going to be real or I wasn't going to do it. | ||
| So, the behind-the-scenes in Bar Rescue is almost nil. | ||
| I get no briefing. | ||
| I don't watch any videos. | ||
| I don't go to the places in advance. | ||
| I've never met the people before. | ||
| I get about a 60-second briefing right before I get into the SUV. | ||
| And everything else, I learn it when you do. | ||
| And I think that's why the show is successful, because you'll know fake in a second, Dave. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, one of the things I've heard you say is that fixing bars is easy. | ||
| Fixing people is hard. | ||
| Did you realize going into it, how much of it was just going to be dealing with like the psychology of people? | ||
| Because usually that seems to be what you're fixing. | ||
| You go in and fix the bar after, but you're really fixing the people first. | ||
| And that was sort of an evolution, honestly, because when I started this, I was a consultant and I was a very well-known consultant. | ||
| So I had very well-known clients, right? | ||
| So my clients are people like Marriott Corporation, and Holiday Inn Zinc, and Fridays, and companies like that. | ||
| So I never knew this level of failure even existed, Dave. | ||
| I never saw anything like this before in my life. | ||
| So when I said to the network, I want you guys to find me real failures. | ||
| I don't want this easy. | ||
| Let's make this real. | ||
| I never comprehended this. | ||
| I mean, to think that somebody who's 50 years old, they have a million dollars in debt, | ||
| living in their parents' basement with their child, losing $30,000 a month out of money, | ||
| no credit, and they're still going. | ||
| It's remarkable. | ||
| And most of these people have two to three weeks left, and then they're done anyway. | ||
| So it really is a last chance for them. | ||
| So I know I could do the whole hour on "Bar Rescue" | ||
| with you, but how much of the interactions, Like I get you're being real and you just learn from them. | ||
| Do you sense, it's always this thing where you see people suddenly doing these crazy things right before we started. | ||
| I said I was watching one yesterday doing cardio where this There's this woman who's an owner of a bar. | ||
| She's probably in her mid-50s. | ||
| She's got big boobs. | ||
| She has people doing shots off her rack. | ||
| Some of it seems like it's too crazy to be real, and yet I suspect it probably isn't. | ||
|
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No, it's completely real. | |
| Everything is completely real. | ||
| There are no actors, there's no scripts, there's no reshoots. | ||
| It is completely real. | ||
| And when I looked at her, and I hope I can say this on this podcast, When I looked at her and said, I can help your sagging business. | ||
| I don't know if I can help your sagging boobs. | ||
| I said that to her for a reason. | ||
| I wanted to embarrass her. | ||
| And you know, when I started Bar Rescue Dave was all about dirty bars and, you know, remodels and, you know, several episodes into it, I realized how flawed these owners were to be in those situations. | ||
| And if I didn't change them, I couldn't change anything. | ||
| And it was about 120 episodes in, believe it or not. | ||
| I was in Detroit, Michigan, with a female owner of a bar I think I named The Proving Grounds. | ||
| And I looked at her and I said, why are you failing? | ||
| And Dave, she looked at me in the eyes and said to me, I am failing because of the euro in Greece. | ||
| Now, this was in suburban Detroit, Michigan. | ||
| And at that moment, I realized that 120 times earlier, I had asked these business owners, why are they failing? | ||
| And never once, Dave, did anyone ever look at me and said, I'm failing because of me, John. | ||
| Not once. | ||
| So I realized, wait a minute. | ||
| If she goes home and blames the euro on her failure, she has no reason to change. | ||
| She'll look in the mirror in the morning and she'll say, that damn euro taking me down. | ||
| But if she looked in the mirror and said, I'm failing because of me, She wouldn't like that. | ||
| She would change. | ||
| That hit me a couple of years ago, or three years ago. | ||
| And I realized that excuses are the common denominator of failure. | ||
| And then I thought to myself a little farther, what is an excuse? | ||
| An excuse is the reconciliation of a mistake. | ||
| Either you did something you shouldn't have, you didn't do something you should have, or you screwed up, or you wouldn't need the excuse. | ||
| So an excuse is your way of making yourself feel good about your own failure. | ||
| It's the most paralyzing thing in business is an excuse. | ||
| So when I realized that I said to myself, wow, I think I found a common denominator of failure. | ||
| If I can get excuses out of people, I can take the things away from them that paralyzed them, that caused them to hesitate and pause. | ||
| So then I said, what are the biggest excuses that we deal with? | ||
| Well, fear is a big one. | ||
| I'm scared to do it. | ||
| I'm scared to do it. | ||
| But what we're scared of means that people have already done. | ||
| I'm not talking about standing on the edge of a cliff, obviously, Dan. | ||
| But, you know, in business and risk, I mean, these aren't new things, fear. | ||
| Other people have already done this. | ||
| Fear is B.S. | ||
| in my view. | ||
| And then I look at scarcity. | ||
| Well, I don't have the money. | ||
| Well, tell that to Stephen Jobs in his garage. | ||
| Scarcity. | ||
| And then I love to excuse circumstance. | ||
| Well, you know, it's a recession. | ||
| I can't make money was the big one years ago. | ||
| People got rich during the recession. | ||
| A lot of people did. | ||
| So during our pandemic, look at how hand sanitizer companies and mass companies and look at how these industries, somebody's making money during all of these things. | ||
| And then I looked at, you know, the other excuses, you know, and I came up and I realized that if I can take these excuses out of people's lives, I can stop what paralyzes them. | ||
| So, that all happened in that Detroit episode, and from that I wrote the book, Don't BS Yourself, Cut the Excuses That Are Holding You Back, which made it to the New York Times Best Seller list, and I'm very, very proud of that book, because when you finish it, excuses won't work for you anymore. | ||
| Now you're self-accountable. | ||
| Now when you look in the mirror in the morning, you will blame yourself, and you should. | ||
| Yeah, well, and that's what seems to be the consistent message throughout the show, is that the owner usually is making all sorts of excuses for all sorts of things, and if you can fix that guy or that girl, then the rest of the pieces do fall into place. | ||
| Do you guys ever do lookbacks where you're trying to figure out, well, who actually succeeded after this? | ||
| Or who the next day, after they got their brand new beautiful bar, just screwed up the whole thing? | ||
| Because I'm sure that happens too. | ||
| Yeah, there's a website called Bar Rescue Updates. | ||
| It's an independent website. | ||
| We have nothing to do with it. | ||
| It tracks the success of Bar Rescue. | ||
| And of course, now everybody's closed, but pre-pandemic, we were tracking at about 68 to 70% success factor. | ||
| Now, I don't know what their definition of success was, Dave, if it's open three years later or two years, I don't know. | ||
| But I know that they had us tracking at about 68%. | ||
| There was also a newspaper article that rated the two other restaurant conversion shows, and I won't mention the shows or the hosts, But there's three of us that tend to claim this space. | ||
| My show ran about a 68% success factor. | ||
| The other two are in the 20s. | ||
| So I'm very, I'm very pleased with what we do. | ||
| I go at it as a consultant and the cameras are along for the trip. | ||
| I don't go at it as a TV host and a consulting is along for the trip. | ||
| And I think that's why we're successful. | ||
| All right, cool. | ||
| So as I said, I love the show, so I could talk about it for an hour, but I do want to talk- Oh, to answer your question! | ||
| I didn't answer your question. | ||
| Yes, we did 20 Back to the Bar episodes also. | ||
| We went back and looked at them, and I think those are on the Paramount website, and those were sort of fun, too. | ||
| Okay, I'm gonna have to check those out. | ||
| So you mentioned a little bit about your career before all this and consulting and all that. | ||
| When I was doing a little research this morning, I saw that you used to work at the Troubadour in West Hollywood. | ||
| I used to live about a block from there. | ||
| I've been to a bunch of different events over there. | ||
| Can you tell me a little bit about how you got into food service, the early beginnings of your career? | ||
| Where your sort of ethos around personal responsibility and the rest of it came from? | ||
| Well, when I was young, I was a very serious musician. | ||
| I took drum lessons for nine years. | ||
| It was very good. | ||
| I still have a drum set upstairs in my office. | ||
| I was very good. | ||
| And so I wanted to be a musician. | ||
| But my family and there's another side of me that wanted to be going to business. | ||
| So to make a long story short, I went to University of Denver and majored in political science and minored in cultural anthropology, which I love the study of primates and what makes us think and understanding our primal behaviors and such. | ||
| And I started attending bar in college, and one thing led to another. | ||
| And to chase my music career, and now that I had a bartending skill, I went to Los Angeles, got an apartment to the Oakwood Apartments in Studio City back then, which had quite a social hot tub scene back in those days, and got a job in the Troubadour, because it connected bartending and music for me. | ||
| And then evolved to be manager of the Troubadour and also worked in Barney's Beanery down the street and managed Barney's Beanery. | ||
| Yeah, it's still there. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| So that was my real beginnings. | ||
| When I took over the Troubadour, we had about eight inches of water on the floor in the kitchen. | ||
| It was flooded and we had no money. | ||
| And Doug Weston, the owner, may he rest in peace, back then had recreational drug habits. | ||
| And I would close the Troubadour and I'd put $800 or whatever in a floor safe. | ||
| And I'd have to come back at 830 in the morning to get that $800 out to pay for the liquor because everything was COD because we had no credit. | ||
| And I'd come in the morning and the money would be gone because Doug took it for drugs the night before. | ||
| So I had to run this business in the most unfavorable of ways. | ||
| I had no money. | ||
| He kept taking the money. | ||
| I started taking it home at night so he couldn't get it in the morning. | ||
| I had a flood in the kitchen that we didn't have the money to fix. | ||
| I got pallets, wooden pallets. | ||
| We threw them on the kitchen floor so we could walk over the water. | ||
| And that's how we opened the Troubadour. | ||
| And I coordinated something called the 25th anniversary of the Troubadour. | ||
| And we got everybody from George Carlin to Linda Ronstadt, all of them to come back during that month. | ||
| And we made the money and stabilized operations. | ||
| Wow, that's incredible. | ||
| So then from there, where did you go? | ||
| What are those missing ears between that and what we owe you now? | ||
| So from there, actually I worked in Barney's Beanery a short time before the Troubadour, then went to the Troubadour. | ||
| Then from the Troubadour, I got an offer to be a state manager for a restaurant chain out of Florida called Beefsteak Charlie's, believe it or not. | ||
| Oh yeah, I remember Beefsteak Charlie's. | ||
| And they had the huge salad bar and all that, and I thought that was exciting to learn the food business. | ||
| So I went and I did that, and I worked down in Florida, ran their Fort Lauderdale restaurant. | ||
| And a couple of other restaurants in Florida. | ||
| And then I received a phone call from a headhunter, and this one changed my life. | ||
| And I was recruited to go up and be a food and beverage director at Grossinger's, the largest resort in America, upstate New York. | ||
| 1,700 guest rooms, three nine-hole golf courses, our own lake, our own ski mountain, America's first snowmaking equipment. | ||
| So I went up there. | ||
| Is that Catskills? | ||
| Is that Catskills? | ||
| You bet, Grossinger's. | ||
| Two biggies with a Concord and Grossinger's up there. | ||
| So I worked at Grossinger's, I worked for the family. | ||
| and was food and beverage director and worked there for a few years, really learned the resort business, the convention business, and the hotel business. | ||
| So now I had run a nightclub, a great bar, a chain of steakhouses, and now I'm running food and beverage at a large convention resort hotel. | ||
| That rounded out my experience pretty well. | ||
| I got a phone call from the same headhunter a couple years later, said, John, I got a client who's building the greatest nightclub in the world. | ||
| He wants you to come run it. | ||
| And his name was Leon Altimos in Philadelphia, and he was creating Pulsations Nightclub. | ||
| And Pulsations Nightclub had a four and a half ton spaceship, 27 feet in diameter. | ||
| People can Google it online. | ||
| That came down and dropped a $400,000 robot on the dance floor. | ||
| And it was great. | ||
| It was rated as the greatest nightclub in the world. | ||
| I worked on that for a few years, opening and operating Pulsations Nightclub. | ||
| And now I had run a mega venue and from Grossinger's, then I was started my own company. | ||
| Actually, I'm forgetting a step. | ||
| From Grossinger's, I was hired by a hotel management company | ||
| out of Chicago called P&S Management. | ||
| And I was a hotel general manager and then a vice president of sales and marketing | ||
| for this company that had 28 hotels for about four years. | ||
| When I left that company, that was 19... | ||
| I started my own consulting company because tax codes had changed, Dave, and hotels couldn't write off the things they used to write off now. | ||
| So restaurants had to make money. | ||
| They couldn't be guest amenities anymore. | ||
| Bars had to make money. | ||
| You know, these had to be profit centers, not just amenities. | ||
| So I left that company, started my own company, Taffer Dynamics, and my first client was that company. | ||
| So they let me start my company and gave me a number of contracts. | ||
| And then in 1989, I built my first owned operation. | ||
| In St. | ||
| Louis, a place called Lynn Dickey's in St. | ||
| Louis Union Station. | ||
| And then from there I was approached by Simon Property Group to do a few restaurants in Mall of America in Minnesota. | ||
| So I went up to Minneapolis, I opened Alamo Grill, Gators, and Original Sports Bar, another concept that we worked on up in Mall of America. | ||
| That one really changed my life. | ||
| And then I took Alamo Grill, turned it into a chain of steakhouses, took it public, Then reversed it into another public company and left with stock in a huger Canadian entity. | ||
| And then I was in business. | ||
| I had owned, I had taken a public, I had run hotels, bars, restaurants, concert venues. | ||
| I had taken companies public, taken companies profit. | ||
| I was really ready. | ||
| And that, of course, was a long time ago. | ||
| So since then, I've consulted to some of the greatest companies in the world. | ||
| So I always tell people during my consulting practice in young years, I made every mistake there was to make. | ||
| And that's why I got really good at it. | ||
| And now I am. | ||
| I'm probably one of the best at it in the world. | ||
| It's funny, because when I hear you talk about your resume, it's like, wow, the fact that I really only know this guy as, you know, a sort of reality TV host, but it's a lot of decades of stuff. | ||
| I mean, you just went across the food service industry and did pretty much, is there anything you didn't do? | ||
| Like, do you see any holes in that industry that you really didn't do or weren't part of? | ||
| No, I know every type of venue from concert venues to outdoor arenas, inside venues, fine dining restaurants, casual dining, fast food. | ||
| I mean, I've been in every one of these sectors as either an owner, operator, management company or consultant. | ||
| I really do know every aspect of this business. | ||
| And make no mistake, Dave, that helps. | ||
| And I think it's very important that people in casual dining have an understanding of upscale dining because they impact each other. | ||
| And there are things in service sequencing and things that one can learn in one segment from another or one category from another. | ||
| Fast food is another great example. | ||
| You know, the transactional style of fast food now has to exist in full service restaurants because of COVID and contactless. | ||
| So I think that broadness of appeal has really helped me, particularly my hotel background and resort background has been very helpful for me. | ||
| Can you talk about just some of the basic principles that you try to bring to any of the businesses that you're coaching or working on? | ||
| Because as I said, since we're doing this as Small Business Week, we're gonna talk to people, not just in the food service industry, but just some of the principles that you think actually build solid, strong businesses that can actually survive when we go through terrible situations like we're going through right now. | ||
| Well, you know, I think that a couple of things. | ||
| One, I don't think that you're doing a podcast or broadcast right now. | ||
| I don't believe that. | ||
| I don't believe that's your product. | ||
| I believe that's your vehicle. | ||
| Your product is reactions. | ||
| If your audience doesn't react to what you do, then it serves no purpose. | ||
| So you're not in the content business. | ||
| You're in a reaction business. | ||
| Content is your vehicle. | ||
| It's not your product. | ||
| That's the first thing I learned when I was younger. | ||
| That cook in the kitchen is not making an entree. | ||
| He's not making a product. | ||
| He's creating a reaction. | ||
| He's the vehicle. | ||
| When that plate hits the table, Dave, one of two things happens. | ||
| Either you sit up and you react to it or you don't. | ||
| That reaction is the product. | ||
| So I suggest that cell phone companies don't sell technology. | ||
| They sell reactions. | ||
| They achieve it through technology. | ||
| I suggest that every business is in a reaction business. | ||
| I own the term reaction management. | ||
| My first book, Raised the Bar, was all about reaction management and understanding. | ||
| And this comes out of my cultural anthropology training as well. | ||
| Understanding the primal instincts of what you react to as a consumer. | ||
| So, I believe that we don't play music. | ||
| We play reactions. | ||
| We achieve it through music. | ||
| We don't make drinks. | ||
| We make reactions. | ||
| We achieve it through drinks. | ||
| So, I am in the business of creating human reactions. | ||
| Period. | ||
| End of discussion. | ||
| And he or she who creates the best reactions in my business wins. | ||
| End of story. | ||
| That's the business that we're in. | ||
| Now, we can dissect that into connectivity, and engagement, and pace, and environment. | ||
| But every one of those things has to create reaction. | ||
| Pace is about reaction. | ||
| Go to a fine steakhouse. | ||
| They walk really slow. | ||
| Go to a Denny's. | ||
| They walk really fast. | ||
| If the waiter walks too fast in a fine steakhouse, that steak isn't worth $80 anymore, is it? | ||
| So, these things all affect reactions. | ||
| And reactions drive consumer behavior. | ||
| Reactions drive transactions. | ||
| Period. | ||
| It isn't the other way around. | ||
| So, when I take a look at the whole science of reactions, then in our corporate training, we created something else as a term that we own called GROWS. | ||
| Grow stand for guest reaction opportunity windows. | ||
| In other businesses we call it CROWS, customer reaction opportunity windows. | ||
| Points where I can create a reaction in you. | ||
| I spec them. | ||
| I design them right into the business. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I want to design this right into that business. | |
| So I'm designing not a plate, I'm designing a reaction and I'll design that plate a hundred frickin times until you sit up. | ||
| And that's the business that we are all in. | ||
| And he or she, no matter what business that we're in, are going to create the best reactions of all. | ||
| Now, if we take a look at the current situation we're right now, if we can talk about the pandemic for a moment or two. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| You know, I said this four months ago, and I was one of the first ones to say it, and research now shows that I was 2% off. | ||
| When this started, I said, people are going to come back in thirds. | ||
| The first third is the quick third. | ||
| They're going to come right out again when the doors open. | ||
| They're younger. | ||
| They're a little fearless, right? | ||
| They're gonna come out. | ||
| They might not wear masks. | ||
| We're seeing that first third now. | ||
| According to medics, according to research, it's 31%. | ||
| I projected a third. | ||
| The second third, I call the reserved third. | ||
| They want to watch for a couple weeks, Dave. | ||
| They want to see what happens. | ||
| You know, is there a surge? | ||
| How do the restaurants look? | ||
| Does it look safe? | ||
| Are people wearing masks? | ||
| Are they not? | ||
| If it feels good and looks good, the reserved third will go out. | ||
| Now we got two thirds. | ||
| The third third is the certain third. | ||
| They're not going anywhere until they are certain that they're safe. | ||
| So a vaccine or a rock-solid treatment needs to emerge before they'll come out. | ||
| The issue is that the third third has the money. | ||
| It tends to be an older demographic, a more affluent demographic, greater disposable income number. | ||
| They tend to feed the luxury sector more than the first third and the second third. | ||
| So there's a demographic reality to this as these businesses shuffle through it. | ||
| For example, I'm here in Las Vegas, we've been open for about a week. | ||
| We're doing pretty well. | ||
| But we're finding the first customers who come are value-oriented. | ||
| They're coming, they're that first third, they're younger, they don't have high disposal, so they're very value-oriented. | ||
| So we better come out of the gate with value propositions. | ||
| When the second third comes out... What are the kinds of things, what are the kinds of things that you guys are doing in Vegas or that you're seeing being done to address that? | ||
| Well, the average casino has about 800 policy changes in it. | ||
| From non-invasive temperature testing automatically as you walk through the door of the property, to contactless check-in to only one or two people in elevators that are policed and managed in each elevator floor, to sanitized chips and cards, and when you're finished with a slot machine, it turns off. | ||
| And it can't turn on again until it's sanitized and there's a lock and a key system on it. | ||
| So they've done all sorts of things to make it successful. | ||
| But you know Dave, what worries me is when we look at these thirds is obviously there's a progress we need to go through. | ||
| And let me ask you a question if I can. | ||
| If you were going to go out to dinner tonight in a restaurant that was open and there was a crowd of people in that front of that restaurant and none of them were wearing masks, would you go in? | ||
| So it's interesting. | ||
| So I'll tell you, I have only been to one restaurant since this all happened. | ||
| It was last week. | ||
| It was a restaurant right by my house. | ||
| Just a burger joint bar that I go to every now and again. | ||
| The waitress, I was not wearing a mask there and it was pretty sporadic. | ||
| So, you know, I was with one person. | ||
| The waitress was wearing a mask and a face guard. | ||
| And, you know, it's not that comfortable. | ||
| You know this. | ||
| You need to read people's faces to feel comfortable. | ||
| It feels sort of weird with all that. | ||
| I think for me at this point, as a relatively young, healthy person, if I went to a nice restaurant, let's say in Beverly Hills or something like that, I would be okay if people were not wearing stuff. | ||
| I actually would be okay with that. | ||
| But I don't consider myself in the last third that you just talked about. | ||
| I think I'm somewhere between the first third and the second third, I think. | ||
| And also, here in Los Angeles, where we've been closed for so long, I think I'm also having a reverse reaction, which I think a lot of people are having, which is like, let's just go. | ||
| Let's just go and see what happens, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I worry about irresponsibility, not on the part of restaurant owners. | ||
| You know, I'm concerned, Dave, that a restaurant does everything right. | ||
| It sanitizes. | ||
| Puts their employees in the proper gear, does all the procedures in the kitchen, all the PPE attire, you know, has everything exactly right. | ||
| But then a bunch of customers come in without masks, create a bad impression. | ||
| Pictures go on social media of this place, Pat, and then all of the portion of society that wants to wear masks will never go there. | ||
| So there's a real challenge for business today. | ||
| And I think I know the answer, but I'm not quite sure if my answer is right. | ||
| If you, and this is deep, Dave, if you were in a bar business and you said, okay, I'm going to play country music. | ||
| No rock and roll people are coming. | ||
| You've made a decision. | ||
| That's going to completely segment your business to country people only. | ||
| So you're not, you're going to see some boots. | ||
| You're going to see some hats. | ||
| You're not going to see a lot of Armani suits probably. | ||
| And it's going to be a country environment. | ||
| Let's say you chose, I don't want to do that. | ||
| I'm going to play rock and roll in my bar. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| No country people there. | ||
| No hip hop people there. | ||
| You just segmented your business to a portion of the population. | ||
| Let's say you say, I'm going to play hip hop. | ||
| Same deal. | ||
| No country, no rock. | ||
| You segmented yourself into a certain segment of the population. | ||
| My point is this, there's the mask wearers and there's the non-mask wearers. | ||
| And I think that restaurants are going to be put in a position where they're going to have to choose. | ||
| Just like that music segmentation. | ||
| Either you have to wear a mask in my restaurant when you're not eating, you have to wear a mask when you're wearing outside, or you don't. | ||
| But I don't think mixing it is going to work long term. | ||
| And that's a really tough choice. | ||
| And nobody's talking about this in the industry. | ||
| Do it or don't do it. | ||
| What do we have to do? | ||
| And it's a segmenting decision, just like music is, or price points are. | ||
| So I'm of the belief that restaurants need to pick. | ||
| And I'm of the belief for long-term sustainability, and here's what I worry about. | ||
| We are living in a culture of accountability today. | ||
| People go out, have a bad meal, it's all over Yelp in a matter of minutes. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Dirty, all over. | ||
| So, if people get sick in a restaurant and it's traced back to a restaurant, done! | ||
| Case closed, that place will never open again. | ||
| In New York, they're going to take liquor licenses away if customers act irresponsibly. | ||
| So, we're at a turning point as an industry. | ||
| Are we going to allow the behavior of customers to destroy our investment? | ||
| Or are we going to regulate that behavior? | ||
| The nightclub business has been doing this for years by segmenting by music, segmenting by dress codes, and doing segmentation. | ||
| We've survived in a segmented world since I got in this business all these years ago. | ||
| I don't believe that we can succeed as an industry if we don't choose what side we're on. | ||
| And if we choose to run in an unprotected environment, And choose to not do some of these processes that can keep people safe. | ||
| We may pay the ultimate price and the ultimate price is not only getting somebody sick or potentially killing them, but destroying your business. | ||
| So I take an opposite position to you and I'm not sure that I would let you in my restaurant or stand in front of it without a mask. | ||
| Yeah, and I totally hear you. | ||
| It's a personal choice, not only for the individual consumer, but obviously for the owner of the bar or restaurant. | ||
| Do you think what makes it even more muddled, what confuses it even more, is that it's one thing if you're walking into a clothing store and you're wearing a mask. | ||
| Well, you're not using your mouth. | ||
| You're not using your face. | ||
| At a restaurant, it's like, well, wait a minute. | ||
| I can walk in, I have to wear a mask, let's say, when I walk in, but we do know I have to drink through my mouth. | ||
| I have to eat through my mouth. | ||
| So there's these sort of inconsistencies where it's like, people are just like, well then why am I doing it at all? | ||
| Like, it's just the natural questions that arise. | ||
| Well, if there's spacing at the tables and people are standing in front of the restaurant without that level of spacing, I think it's reasonable for us to say we'd appreciate you wearing a mask until you're seated. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Seems like a simple definition. | ||
| My worry is this. | ||
| If I had, and I've said this on Bar Rescue, if there's 60 motorcycles in front of a bar, there's a bunch of people that won't go to that bar. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If there's a bunch of people dressed in gang colors in front of a bar, there's people who won't go in that bar. | ||
| Today, if there's a bunch of people in front of a bar that look irresponsible as it relates to COVID, there are customers that won't go in that bar. | ||
| It's no different. | ||
| So when you say about how are we going to be successful, there's two issues. | ||
| There's that issue and All of that is driven by this one premise. | ||
| And bear with me for a minute, Dave. | ||
| If you, you're a burger guy, right? | ||
| You love a good burger? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| So let's say that your favorite burger place in town, after this pandemic, you go walk up to it. | ||
| Everybody's packed in there. | ||
| They're not wearing masks. | ||
| You know, they're not even wearing masks behind the counter. | ||
| The whole thing just doesn't feel right. | ||
| But two blocks farther away is your second favorite burger place. | ||
| Farther. | ||
| But they're clean, they're tight, their staff is in mass. | ||
| I mean, this place is together. | ||
| It looks great, it's safe. | ||
| You're now gonna go to your second favorite burger place, which is farther away than your first burger place. | ||
| Dave, that changes everything. | ||
| Trust has now ratcheted to the top. | ||
| So now you're gonna walk farther to go to your second favorite burger place, because your first favorite burger place didn't gain your trust. | ||
| That's power. | ||
| Well, it's interesting because you're talking about free market capitalism and also talking about rules. | ||
| But ultimately, you're saying it's on people to make the right choices. | ||
| So, if in fact trust is ratcheting up to the top of the motivation list of what businesses I choose to do business with, how do we build trust? | ||
| And this goes back to your question, how do we get successful now? | ||
| Well, if we know that we have thirds, Then if we know we have to build trust, even for you who's quicker to go out maybe than I am, then how do we build trust? | ||
| Well, trust isn't words. | ||
| Trust isn't advertising campaigns. | ||
| Trust is transparency, right? | ||
| You begin to trust me as an individual once you get to know me a little, right? | ||
| Trust is built. | ||
| So trust is a very difficult emotion to build in a person. | ||
| So we need to be transparent. | ||
| So the way we create transparency is by creating visual standards of what people see and what they can expect in our business. | ||
| So, for example, a few weeks ago on my social media, David, some guy's making lasagna in the kitchen, and he posts a picture of a cook, and he's standing in the stainless steel line, and he's laying a lasagna noodle in the pan. | ||
| And the post says, our famous lasagna will be ready for curbside pickup at five o'clock. | ||
| Pretty noble effort, right? | ||
| Guy's not wearing a mask. | ||
| He's wearing a ball cap from home. | ||
| He's wearing clear sheet plastic gloves that somebody wears in a salon when they do hair color. | ||
| It's not even food service rated. | ||
| All the imaging is wrong. | ||
| So if we don't build trust, nobody's going to eat that freaking lasagna. | ||
| So we as an industry have to really understand how to build trust. | ||
| What are the marketing communications of trust? | ||
| When you walk up to the front door of my business, retail, restaurant, bar, what looks different? | ||
| Oh, they changed this. | ||
| And subliminally, you're saying, well, they changed it for me. | ||
| They're keeping me safe. | ||
| This is a good thing. | ||
| Oh, I feel good about this. | ||
| I like this. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| This make, from one little thing, all of these assumptions go through your head. | ||
| So what has to be different? | ||
| I suggest that every business needs to change something. | ||
| They need to change their seating layout. | ||
| They need to change signage in the front. | ||
| They need to put a podium out front for checking. | ||
| They need to do something that sends the message of trust in a transparent way. | ||
| If I can send the message of trust in this world, I can get the first third, the second third, and the third third. | ||
| If trust, if that first third slams out social media with untrusting visuals, you're going to have a hell of a time getting it to second and third third. | ||
| So where do you think government and regulation kind of fit into this? | ||
| Because, you know, we're hearing all sorts of arbitrary things or seemingly arbitrary things every week, depending on where you live. | ||
| You know, okay, we can be at 50% restaurant capacity, but that's regardless whether you've done all of these precautions or not done all of these precautions. | ||
| And I'm sure you must be hearing from Owners of restaurants and bars who are saying, hey, I'll do everything that I possibly can do. | ||
| I'll put all the investment in, we'll do all the work. | ||
| But if we can only open at 50% capacity, there's no way we can succeed regardless of doing everything or not doing everything. | ||
| Well, I don't disagree with you. | ||
| So new revenue centers need to be found, hence delivery, curbside pickup. | ||
| But these third-party delivery apps are destroying our industry. | ||
| They're the only people who make money. | ||
| You pay them 25, up to 35%. | ||
| Third-party delivery app. | ||
| So I beg people on this podcast, if you want to do a to-go order or a curbside delivery order, call the restaurant directly. | ||
| Don't call one of these third-party sources. | ||
| It's a huge deal to them. | ||
| It's a huge difference in the way they make money. | ||
| So we have to create these new opportunities for revenue models. | ||
| You know, I have a friend, Tiffany Dairy. | ||
| You've seen her, Chef Tiffany Dairy on Bar Rescue. | ||
| You know, her restaurant now does family meal packs for four to go. | ||
| And for $39, you get an amazing meal with potatoes and vegetables and chicken and soup. | ||
| So she's come up with a new way to package her product. | ||
| You know, we take a look at, I was on a consulting call with a big brewery in Canada, and they have a merchandising program called from tap to table. | ||
| It doesn't work anymore. | ||
| Now it's from tap to home. | ||
| We got to get our brand home. | ||
| We got to get delivery packaging. | ||
| We got to get our brand to move. | ||
| So I'm with you, Dave, but here's the problem. | ||
| I'm at 50% capacity. | ||
| So if I'm at half the capacity, I have to double my hours of revenue. | ||
| So an hour and a half of lunch doesn't work for me anymore. | ||
| I need three hours of lunch now. | ||
| So I need to do early bird lunch specials, late bird lunch specials, early bird dinner. | ||
| I got to generate more hours to offset my loss in capacity. | ||
| So I got to look at that, which means I have to do some promotional activity, you know, free this, free that, get this $2 off to drive more hours of traffic. | ||
| The problem is I've also increased my labor cost, right? | ||
| Because now I'm doing in three hours what I used to do in one hour, an hour and a half. | ||
| So it affects the whole economic model. | ||
| Here's my point. | ||
| We have two challenges in front of us as an industry. | ||
| One is to sustain ourselves during this. | ||
| And the second is to have the resources to launch properly when it ends. | ||
| If we spend all of our money sustaining ourselves, Dave, we are never going to reopen with the resources to win. | ||
| If we hold back our sustaining dollars now, and hold them for when we can open properly, I personally think that's the better scenario. | ||
| And I've found for very my many friends, sure, we want to keep our employees working, we want to do everything we can, but it might make sense to close for a few weeks. | ||
| And open with a real marketing plan and an activation plan and a promotion plan and open with a bang later when we have the potential to do so. | ||
| It's hard to spend the money to do anything with a bang when you're locked at 50% capacity. | ||
| You know, the other thing that you said, which was important to me was, you know, what do we do? | ||
| What are the standards? | ||
| 25%, 50%, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| So I think it's paramount. | ||
| And I know the NRA, National Restaurant Association, not Rifle, I know that the NRA, I always get hate notes when I put NRA on social media. | ||
| I had a buddy in the food service industry who was always telling me to go into the NRA meetings, I think they were in Chicago, and it was always very confusing, but we figured it out. | ||
| But you know, they put together some wonderful programs and standards that we can follow to assure consumer safety. | ||
| I think that there needs to be some federal standard. | ||
| I do. | ||
| I believe that. | ||
| And the problem with the governors is they tangle with the federal government now. | ||
| There's an ego thing. | ||
| There's a push and pull in power. | ||
| We're more divisive than ever before. | ||
| So a Democratic governor is not going to listen to a Republican president no matter what the standards are. | ||
| If he says 50 percent, they're doing 25. | ||
| And I'm not being political here. | ||
| But there are standards that make sense and the disease can be contracted just as easily in Florida as it can in Oklahoma. | ||
| There's no chemical difference between the disease in those places. | ||
| So if there was a standard that was safe, a national standard, you and I could start to feel comfortable with that standard. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So, I think that that's the problem, is you don't know what to expect. | ||
| And every state is a free-for-all in standards. | ||
| I think we need a national program. | ||
| I do. | ||
| And I'm just not sure the states will agree to it, but I'm pushing for it very heavily. | ||
| That defines space requirements, distancing requirements, food service, back-of-the-house requirements, so that everybody knows that it's an even playing field. | ||
| That every restaurant is in the same playing field, the same economic modeling, the same consumer presence. | ||
| It all changes. | ||
| You know, years ago, Dave, I can remember when Tempe, Arizona put a no smoking policy in place. | ||
| It was a little town. | ||
| Nobody else around it did. | ||
| Every bar went broke when that happened. | ||
| You can't do things. | ||
| The guy that lives on the Tennessee-Kentucky border, the guy in Tennessee is making a fortune. | ||
| The guy in Kentucky is starving. | ||
| They're across the street from each other because the regulations are different. | ||
| That doesn't work in a business environment. | ||
| I think we need to level the playing field, create some national standard of behavior for us that's predictable to you, so you know whether you go to Dave's restaurant or John's restaurant, it's going to have the same policies in place. | ||
| We have to get to that point somehow, I believe. | ||
| Do you think when we get... Do you? | ||
| I'm curious what you're thinking. | ||
| Well, it's interesting. | ||
| As a general rule, I'm a big states' rights guy, so I want the states to be able to set whatever regulations are as possible, because then the experiment sort of bounces around. | ||
| But as I say on this show all the time, something like coronavirus or any virus doesn't respond to states' borders, so I think we need something that blends both state and federal, would be my short answer on that. | ||
| And I'm with you, I'm very state rights oriented and local as well. | ||
| But you know, I think in this position, the problem is that the actions, and I'm just picking Tennessee, I have no issues with Tennessee. | ||
| You know, the issues, if somebody works in Tennessee and lives in Kentucky, the policies of Tennessee could be impacting the state of Kentucky. | ||
| So I think there is a cross responsibility here, particularly near the borders, that we have some standards of behavior so that no state, town, or person is disadvantaged. | ||
| That seems reasonable to me. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's always a matter of how do you get there? | ||
| I suspect we all want to get to the same thing, which is people back to work and enjoying themselves. | ||
| Do you think, regardless of how the third, third, third shake out, I could sort of see everything going one of two ways. | ||
| One way would be, which would be terrible for the economy and certainly for the food service industry, would be that people have now just new behaviors. | ||
| We're used to bringing in food all the time. | ||
| Most of us are cooking more one way or another, and that that behavior will just sort of continue. | ||
| Or there's another part of me, and I hope it goes more to this, where when we really are on the other side of this, that there's more of a roaring 20s feeling. | ||
| You know, we are in the 20s now, and there will be more of a feeling of like, yeah, let's remember what it was like to go out there and, you know, go to a bar and hang out with your friends or meet some new people. | ||
| Or go to your favorite restaurant. | ||
| I'm really missing Boa Steakhouse on Sunset. | ||
| Like, to do that kind of stuff. | ||
| Do you sense we will go one way or the other? | ||
| I do, but I think it might get split by those thirds a little bit. | ||
| You know, I think that the sting is going to last longer for people of an older demo. | ||
| I just do. | ||
| And I think that if I were to do a prediction, I think the luxury dining sector is going to be the most challenged. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I think they're going to be the last ones to come out, even though they tend to have more spread dining rooms. | ||
| Anyway, they probably lose less seating with six foot separation, right? | ||
| Because the tables aren't bunched like in a casual dining environment. | ||
| You know, I'm very concerned. | ||
| You know, there's a way to look at this too. | ||
| Let's say we do lose 30 to 40% of our restaurants and bars. | ||
| Well, in theory, we now have 40% less capacity and seating, but we have about the same marketplace. | ||
| So, you know, I think that the ones that survive might actually survive into a very vibrant marketplace. | ||
| And I think I agree with you on a roaring 20s analogy, but I think we need to get to a vaccine and a place where, you know, that safety is somewhat assured. | ||
| How worried are you that small businesses, the guy that just wants to make a great bar, a great restaurant, not a franchise, not a big business, but the guy that wants in his hometown to just put the greatest restaurant ever there, that they will have looked at what happened over the last year and be like, you know what? | ||
| The risks, risks always, I'm sure you know the numbers for restaurants and bars, if you wanna tell everybody the failure rates, they're always absurdly high. | ||
| But now the risks seem almost incalculably high for people to wanna get in on this. | ||
| You know, it's interesting that you mention, I own a franchise called Taffer's Tavern. | ||
| And we created this franchise, you'll find this interesting, and I'm not doing this as a plug. | ||
| We, two years ago, had no labor pool. | ||
| We were approaching $15 minimum wages, and the labor pool that we did have were mostly new Americans who didn't speak English so well. | ||
| So I said, I gotta create the casual dining concept of the future. | ||
| So I wanna cut labor costs in half, I wanna bring in robotic cooking, Robotic ovens, eliminate back of the house, create this whole new restaurant model. | ||
| So I did. | ||
| I worked with companies like Middleby and worked in test kitchens around the country and created this kitchen of the future concept a year ago. | ||
| Created called Taffer's Tavern, did our franchise registration, started to franchise. | ||
| COVID happens. | ||
| We find out we don't have any raw protein in our restaurant. | ||
| It's all sous vide cooking. | ||
| Everything is individually wrapped, prepared in computerized ovens. | ||
| It's really high quality. | ||
| So we don't have raw and cooked product. | ||
| We don't have grease. | ||
| We don't even have hoods. | ||
| So we have a very different cooking model. | ||
| It is the kitchen of the future. | ||
| We are the most COVID-safe kitchen in the world. | ||
| We didn't even design it this way. | ||
| So now we put uniforms on our kitchen staff. | ||
| We have cameras in the kitchen so you can see your food be prepared right on your phone. | ||
| And we created the safest, cleanest kitchen concept in the country. | ||
| Starting on a whole different basis. | ||
| So I launched my franchises, and I'm answering your question for you, because this is interesting, David. | ||
| We sold a bunch of franchises. | ||
| We sold Washington. | ||
| We sold Atlanta. | ||
| A whole bunch of territories. | ||
| We're doing very, very well. | ||
| The franchise is going. | ||
| COVID hits. | ||
| Shoo! | ||
| Sales stop for franchises. | ||
| About 45 days later, we get a phone call from some people that say, listen, we're a franchise company. | ||
| We're interested in buying your franchise. | ||
| And here's why. | ||
| We want to buy it now because we think some of the greatest restaurant locations in America are going to become available in the next 90 days. | ||
| And we want to jump on those locations with a concept that has good, solid economic modeling. | ||
| And you know, it's an interesting I never quite thought that way. | ||
| So we just sold the city of Boston. | ||
| We just sold the city of Washington DC to sophisticated developers who are now dropping them in places like Faneuil Hall because these locations have become available. | ||
| My point is this there's opportunity now. | ||
| And the industry is going to go through a shift, there's no question about it. | ||
| But there's great locations that are going to be available now. | ||
| There's aggressive landlords who will give you very aggressive deals right now with tenant allowance packages and free rent for a year or two. | ||
| I mean, they will bend over backwards to do those deals. | ||
| So to that fictitious restaurant guy that we were just talking about who's scared to do it, maybe this is the time to do it. | ||
| And I put a fascinating thought model out there. | ||
| Now, we have a big to-go element that we've put in Taffer's Tavern and a curbside element, so we shifted the business model post-COVID, obviously, Dave. | ||
| But my point is this. | ||
| If you've ever wanted to be in a restaurant business, one of the highest costs we got is occupancy and construction. | ||
| Today, there's unbelievable opportunity out there. | ||
| Don't just think that COVID is bad for the industry. | ||
| It could be good for the industry, too, for some people in the end. | ||
| Interesting view, isn't it? | ||
| Yeah, well, chaos always brings opportunity. | ||
| I'm actually glad you brought up the automated kitchen and mentioned a little bit about the economics of some of this, because it is something that I talk about a lot on the show relative to minimum wage and the rest of it. | ||
| So for you as a guy that, I know you wanna employ people, you want people to feel empowered and feel like they have some control in their lives and all that. | ||
| When you're making those decisions to go, well, wait a minute, I can't pay these people $15 an hour because technically they're not if they don't speak the language and all that | ||
| without getting into all the specifics of that. | ||
| Do you have sort of like a, almost like a philosophical struggle there | ||
| between how to go ahead and do a new business that isn't gonna hire as many people potentially, | ||
| but is gonna be more of say a restaurant of the future and something that's sustainable? | ||
| That's your whole point. | ||
| Honestly, no. | ||
| And of course there's a personal fact, you wanna hire as many people as you can. | ||
| You know, my proudest day is when I had about 900 employees and I used to say, think to myself every night I put about a thousand meals on the table every day. | ||
| I was really proud of that. | ||
| But you know, today my responsibility is to sustain the jobs of the people that work for me, to provide them with an opportunity that is consistent, is going to last and provide them with a good income. | ||
| Bigger doesn't necessarily mean more stable, doesn't mean more income for everyone. | ||
| Also, what about the guy who built all the robotics? | ||
| Who programmed all the systems? | ||
| They got jobs that didn't have them before. | ||
| So, I don't think I'm eliminating jobs. | ||
| I think I'm redistributing those jobs a little bit into technology plays rather than just straight cook lines. | ||
| But, you know, I think that the restaurant industry is being challenged unlike others. | ||
| You know, there's many states where tipped employees get paid about $2.20 an hour. | ||
| And it's an employee tip credit. | ||
| of whatever it is, $13 an hour to adjust their payroll down. | ||
| So these employees typically make 20, 30, $40 an hour in tips in many of these places. | ||
| So they make $2.20 an hour in payroll. | ||
| From $2.20 an hour to $15 is a 600% payroll increase. | ||
| There is no business in the world that can sustain a 600% payroll increase. | ||
| So I'm trying to protect my industry. | ||
| I'm trying to protect the people that work in the industry by creating a stable economic model. | ||
| So, there is no guilt in stability. | ||
| There is no guilt in following economic models that provide prosperity for those who work for us. | ||
| It isn't my choice. | ||
| I'd much rather be hiring more people, but it isn't something I have any guilt about. | ||
| Yeah, I love the answer. | ||
| I mean, that's the honest answer and unfortunately we've got a lot of business owners these days that would give you the guilt answer to just sort of pretend they're doing the right thing as opposed to actually doing the right thing. | ||
| If somebody's watching this right now and they're young and they always wanted to get into the biz, you know, you talked about a long resume of doing basically everything. | ||
| What would you recommend? | ||
| I mean, is the first job just to be a bar back? | ||
| Or do you have like a specific idea on how they get in on this? | ||
| Yeah, you know, I think the most important two jobs are a wine cook and a bar back. | ||
| You learn everything from those two positions, or bartender. | ||
| So, you know, I'm of the belief that you should not go into this business until you at least 10 bar and work in a kitchen. | ||
| Those are the two areas where waste occurs. | ||
| Those are the two areas where theft occurs. | ||
| Those are the two hearts of the business. | ||
| If it breaks down there, In either of those places, you have no business. | ||
| The worst thing in the world in a restaurant industry is to be held hostage to ignorance. | ||
| I can't tell you how many friends I've had over the years that have opened restaurants that have never been in a business before. | ||
| They hire a chef, right? | ||
| They pay him X amount of dollars a year. | ||
| They're open 60 days. | ||
| The chef says, this is all on me. | ||
| I want equity or I'm leaving. | ||
| And the guy who owns it doesn't know how to cook a steak or doesn't even know one of his own recipes. | ||
| He's held hostage by his ignorance. | ||
| This is a challenging business. | ||
| Think of a retail store, but the t-shirts go bad after three days. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| Imagine a t-shirt shop that they rot away after three or four days. | ||
| We have to manage production. | ||
| We have to manage retail, manage merchandising, manage staff, manage purchasing. | ||
| It's a very difficult business. | ||
| And you can't do it from a point of ignorance. | ||
| Those are the people who fail. | ||
| And it's interesting, Dave, because if you look at the statistics, About one of eight restaurants succeed for first-time operator. | ||
| Seven of eight succeed for the second time. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It's a fascinating shift in the statistics. | ||
| So once you've made those mistakes the first time, Dave, you're sort of ready now. | ||
| But without the experience, you're not in a very good statistical place. | ||
| With the experience, you're in a far better statistical place. | ||
| What resources can we send people to? | ||
| Are you still doing seminars on all of those? | ||
| Oh, sure. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| We still do seminars. | ||
| You can go to johntaffert.com. | ||
| Matter of fact, we're working on an industry webinar in the next couple of weeks. | ||
| So you can go visit johntaffert.com. | ||
| You know, there's great resources out there for restaurant people. | ||
| Please go to the National Restaurant Association site. | ||
| They have wonderful COVID information, great marketing programs and such. | ||
| There's another organization, the Nightclub and Bar Show and Media Group, which also has great information on it. | ||
| And then of course, you know, we have our TVT, which is about 40 hours of training content, marketing promotion that we have that's available on our website. | ||
| Also, my point is this, you know, when this pandemic started and I'd like to sort of be positive here for a minute, Dave, you know, when this pandemic started, I saw people get paralyzed. | ||
| They didn't know what to do. | ||
| They were frozen. | ||
| You know, my second book about excuses, which we talked about, you know, I realized that at this time, great marketers are going to bubble to the top, aren't they? | ||
| We're going to see some amazing stuff. | ||
| Great promoters are going to bubble to the top. | ||
| We're going to see great activations and programs and online events and great operators are going to bubble to the top. | ||
| We're going to see incredible things happen out there. | ||
| So this is a time to mobilize, not paralyze. | ||
| This is a time to think about what it takes to bubble to the top. | ||
| Dare I say, those of us who perceive this as an opportunity and act upon it can turn this into an opportunity. | ||
| Those of us who freeze, You say, oh, you know, this isn't the time. | ||
| I believe we're going to be left behind. | ||
| This is all up to us, not the pandemic. | ||
| It is up to us. | ||
| Don't let this pandemic be the excuse. | ||
| And we talked about that earlier. | ||
| You know, that's just making yourself feel warm. | ||
| Well, it's the pandemic that caused me to fail. | ||
| And I'm going to say it, bullshit. | ||
| It's up to us. | ||
| And at a time like this, we can figure out how to be successful. | ||
| And a lot of restaurants are going to do that. | ||
| Well, John, I don't know that I've ever felt better about what I do for a living, because you didn't yell at me once in 50 minutes, so I must be doing okay over here. | ||
| Well, you're a great host, buddy. | ||
| You have a great cast. | ||
| I'm proud to be here with you, but I think you do wonderful work. | ||
| And I think anybody who listens to your podcast always learns something about themselves and their business. | ||
| So keep up the good work, my friend. | ||
| Well, I really appreciate it. | ||
| And listen, I'm gonna be in Vegas in a couple of weeks for Freedom Fest. | ||
| And if you've got a little time, I'd love to take you out for a drink or a steak or whatever you're doing these days. | ||
| Oh, wait, you're probably not gonna be, are you gonna wanna go out? | ||
| No, there's a few places I'll go to. | ||
| There's a few places I'll go to, you bet, you bet. | ||
| It's on me, man. | ||
| Well, I really appreciate it. | ||
| Thanks a lot. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| Nice talking to you, Dave. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about lifestyles instead of non-stop yelling, check out our lifestyle playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | ||
| They're both right over here. |
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