Walking Through the Pain Points of the Restaurant Business with Matthew Wilson (Ep 225)
Restaurant owners who are having trouble improving their menu, operations efficiency, and team management are going to want to tune in as we dig into the pain points impacting restaurants. Matthew Wilson, owner of the restaurant and hospitality consulting business Mise En Place joins for a conversation with Jaime Oikle of Running Restaurants as he shares how he guides owners in developing a highly profitable menu, revamping employee management strategies, and more. Matthew also stresses the importance of an in-depth social audit to ensure your restaurant has a good following and reputation online.
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The Impact Of Restaurant Consulting With Matthew Wilson
Folks, you’re not going to want to miss this one as in this episode I get with Matt Wilson with Mise En Place. We dig into the hot topic pain points he’s seeing and dealing with in the biz. There are lots of good tips and insights. Stay tuned.
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I got a great episode for you. We got Matt Wilson, owner of Mise En Place consulting. Matt, first of all, welcome. Thanks for joining. I want to get to your backstory in just a second, but let me start with asking you this and we’ll dig into these in a second. What do you feel are some of the biggest pain points in the restaurant business?
Labor. Not just labor dollars but the actual ability of labor staff. Human Resources is a huge concern. Food and cost of food will always be there, but I do find just an overall labor shortage.
Looking Back
Alright, we'll come back to those. Let’s go now to your backstory in the restaurant business. Tell me how you started, where you’ve worked, and now you’re doing consulting. I believe that’s relatively recent but give me the background.
Much like many of your readers, viewers, and subscribers, I started in the restaurant business at the age of twelve. I started working in restaurants. I was chatting with somebody else a couple weeks ago and I said, “I’ve looked the same since the age of twelve.” I was one of those, I was shaving at the age of twelve. My mom had dropped me off for my interview and everything went well. I got the job and for training, she dropped me off half hour early which meant that they accidentally put me into banquet server training.
At the age of twelve, I was a banquet server, but I fell in love with the industry because there was a social side, a hospitality side, and a service side. Everything that gave reward. Almost instant reward. From there, I worked with a very large group in Ontario, Canada that does very fine dining establishments as well as lots of weddings.
From that point, off to school for Food and Beverage Management and then found myself at one of Canada’s largest multi-unit chain restaurant groups, opening restaurants, managing restaurants, and general manager both front and back of house. I moved over to the distributor side. I was with a local distributor then I went to a very large global leader in food distribution and I was director of business resource.
The cool thing about that job is it brought me right back to being in front of restaurants and restaurant owners, chefs, front of the house managers, and general managers and working with them directly. When I left that company, I took some time and said, “What do I want to do?” It felt like getting a job was maybe the easy way out, but did I want a job? I wanted to continue to help restaurants.
I wanted to basically take what I have been doing, expand on that and do it better. I opened Mise En Place. I am hands-on with restaurateurs, chefs, and general manager’s helping their restaurant.
New Ideas And Market Trends
Thanks for walking us through that. Going back to the food distribution part for a while. You’re working with a lot of clients across a lot of spectrums, products, and resources inside organizations like the one you were in. What does that look like when you’re helping folks? What were the questions they were asking a lot?
I don’t have the exact number of restaurants that I worked with and my teams worked with over all the years. It’s in the thousands. When you try to figure out exactly what they were wanting, they would initially come to us for new ideas. What’s on trend? You can get your new ideas with the next chef that you hire or new ideas from things that you see in your marketplace, as you travel and on the internet. It evolved into operational support where a lot of the time, customers would come.
Restaurateurs will come in and we wouldn’t even be in the kitchen. We would be at a boardroom table looking at their numbers. Looking at ways to dive into those numbers, what current inventory programs are they using. Are they using any inventory programs? What could they have in their business? The team that I had worked on developing a lot of different tools that we could quickly deploy professionally right across Canada. Before we started, we talked about one of my colleagues and that’s where he and I started collaborating. It’s using these tools right across Canada to help more restaurants.
Were you surprised at times by the different levels of sophistication at the different operations? Some folks may be dialed in taking inventory and costing every penny and some folks just winging it? Was it a big variety? What do you think?
Certainly, shock and awe. You see some operators as you said that are so dialed in. They know when that penny leaves and it’s inspiring. You have good conversations because I think that when you have operators like that, we can all help each other. We can learn and we can grab best practices. All the way to the other side of the spectrum where an operator loved to smoke meat and decided that, “We’re going to open up restaurants.” With no prior experience, knowledge, or foresight now the restaurant should be run.
There’s some shock and awe because unfortunately, as you know, there’s a lot of operators out there that have not only their life savings, but family and friends life savings into their businesses. Sometimes, it’s almost at the point where it’s too late. They need the help and they’re like, “What did I get myself into? What have I done?” I’m a firm believer that it shouldn’t ever be too late. We can quickly put some things in place to steer the ship the right way. If COVID taught us anything, it’s that if you were struggling before COVID and you didn’t have systems in place before COVID. There is a good possibility you didn’t make it out.
If you were struggling before COVID and did not have systems in place, there is a good possibility you did not make it out.
Those that had systems and solid foundations going into the toughest time in our industry. Hopefully, we never have to repeat her ever in our lives. Those that came out not only stronger but more in tune with their business, where their numbers are, where the dollars and cents were. I talked to clients all day long about how during the deepest shutdowns and locked down periods. They were the only ones in the business.
They were prepping, cooking, packaging, and running it out to the curb. Putting in an online order that they never had before. They were doing it all and is that tough. It’s too much like climbing Mount Everest. However, now that they come out, they have a focus on some key aspects of their business, which is great.
So many lessons during that time. If you got through that, you got stronger. It’s a very complicated business. The margins are tough.
Consulting Process
If you don’t have the systems in place, you are going to struggle because there’s so many details and it’s moving. It’s happening in real time as opposed to some other businesses. They are a little different than that. Let’s talk about those systems. You go in as a consultant and you pinpoint three things or five things. What are some of those first initial consultation identification processes?
You want to sit down and learn about the business, but I never take the quick avenue of saying, “We got to fix this.” I’m very process-oriented. Probably a few years before COVID, I went out and I got my lean Six Sigma Black Belt. That is all about pros management. At the time, I was using it for something else in the company I was with and I want to use it for that. Now, as I start my own on the consulting side, it’s held me more than I ever imagined it would.
First things first, is you need to learn about the business you need to understand that, who are the key players? Who’s at the table? Once we understand who’s at the table, we have some tough conversations. We asked them very tough questions, but then we put out a process in attacking those. There’s no sense in figuring out this if all these other pieces aren’t in place. Right down to the services that Mise En Place provides, it’s all in order now.
You could pick one or the other. I’m not saying everybody has to do everything with us, but it’s all in order for a reason. You could get down to the CX audits but if you’re branding, socials, and menu isn’t taking care of it and all the costing then the engineering and analysis. If that’s all not done, you may have put the cart before the horse.
When I first sit down, it’s understanding the challenges. What do you have the biggest challenges with? Also, listening. It’s all about you and I talking but a lot of the time, when I’m in front of a customer, it’s about me just simply listening and asking key questions. The more I listen, the more restaurateurs, chefs, and GMS will open up because they realize it’s a safe space. It’s a very safe space. I’m only there to help.
You talk about asking tough questions and I’m going to extrapolate that by sitting down and asking people about the business like what’s going on and challenging them. What’s an example of those early questions as part of the conversation?
I’d say the most uncomfortable questions would be asking about theft inside the restaurant. Theft or shrink, whatever you want to call it. asking about that is very uncomfortable because all of us inherently believe that people that work for us and that are in the restaurant are there to do a good job, they’re very loyal and this and that thing. I believe that.
However, we have to ask that question. If there’s nothing in place to identify that, you may have a bigger problem then you realize. It’s a very tough question because everywhere the chef, general manager, and front of the house manager has a connection, an emotional connection to the staff that worked. They never want to believe that there’s ever a possibility that Samantha or Billy could ever think about harming the business. That’s a tough one. There are financial ones that are tough as well but that one hits on.
It does because it points the finger and, in some cases, people end up getting fired from that when we find the answers to that. There’s so many opportunities for things to go missing, small and big. There’s so many opportunities to lose. I took down some notes from your site and you talk about menu cost engineering. When you sit down with the restaurant, you probably pull the menu out and go through it. Do you know your profitability on this? Do you know your profitability on that? What’s your cost on this? What do some of those conversations look like?
This references the earlier conversations about the different types of operators that we deal with. There are operators. I had a client that knew exact profitability. This one used to be a puzzler. Now, it’s a star. They have everything in tune. That is not the norm. The norm is, we’ve been meaning to do this and the last time we did a full costing. When we first opened two menus ago, that’s more the normal.
I don’t ever judge. At the end of the day, I’m there for a reason. It’s not to maintain the status quo. It’s to help. It’s like, “Let’s start there. Perfect. That’s grabbing what you currently have if there’s anything or let’s just start with a clean slate.” If it is 1, 2, or 3 menus old or 6 months to 2 years old, a lot of that is useless. I’m pretty sure that Canada is not unique. We have inflation in labor. We have inflation everywhere. Anything that’s dated, we might be better served to start over. I’ve had conversations where as we start down the costing side, it was the first time they ever weighed cheese for the pizza.
It’s like, “Now we’re going to weigh it.” We need to know if we’re making any money on this. We just need to be honest with ourselves. It’s tough because we’re all very proud. We’re all very proud of what we put out there in whatever space we operate on in commerce. However, sometimes we just shouldn’t be that proud and say, “Let’s just do the hard thing” You and I were joking but earlier that if I could rename the company, it’d probably be heavy lifting. It’s easy to remember and easier to spell but that’s it. Typically, it is that heavy lifting that gets put off to the side. “I don’t have time because of this.” “I’ve been meaning to get to it.” We’re just going to launch this menu. We’re going to up everything a dollar. Next menu, we’re going to look at it.
Keep it simple. Sometimes, do you find that folks identify their cash cows on their menu? Maybe they know the ones that hit home runs. Do you see that?
Not as much as I would hope for. You have larger groups that do a good job of it. Some smaller groups that know. We make everything in-house which isn’t always necessarily cheaper. In labor dollars, what are those into that? If this takes you five hours to make, we got to work that in but not as much as you would think. When we put in front and you have that, it changes a lot of conversations, “I thought that this one would have been a better cost of goods. Beef did go up. We heard about it but we got a relook at this.” I’m not saying take beef off the menu, but if you’re not a steakhouse maybe don’t have that ribeye or that tenderloin. Maybe you can go into more braised products.
I have my buddy Roger who always tells the story of his famous garlic knots when he ran a restaurant. He was making pizzas, anyway. Cut off the edges. Take the trim and some sauce. This, that, and the other. Almost zero food costs. Put it out for $10 and it costs you less than a buck. Perfect. Do that all day long. Identify those that are just pure profit. Now, I’m going to ask you the next question menu design like you throw those garlic knots. Make sure everyone is suggesting them. Make sure people are ordering them because every time that $10 hits, you’re keeping $9 of it or more. That’s important stuff. Let’s talk about it.
We’re now very into an era of social media and those garlic knots should be almost every third thing that your followers see. They should want those garlic knots. They should be talking on Thursday about getting those garlic knots on Friday or Sunday for the football game. When we get into the engineering analysis of the menu, it’s key to make sure that we take those learnings and put it onto the menu.
However, we then take that and where else are we advertising it? It’s very important that internally, we have spiffs running for the staff. Push the garlic knots. We’ll just keep on using garlic knots as an example. Push the garlic knots all day long. Going into Friday, we know it’s going to be a very busy Friday. Here’s a spiff, the first person to get to this, play the bingo game. Bingo’s only made /up of your profitable items and has everybody engaged in that.
You take that. That was all internal. We have the number one piece of revenue, which is our menu. We’ve engineered and designed that properly, then we took care of the driver to that which is a server then you bring it right into social. You constantly do a drip, a slow drip of those garlic knots. There’s a large group in Canada. They’ve had, I want to say, a decade of coast-to-coast advertising on TV all talking about one item on their menu.
It’s their chicken tenders that they do announce. They’re fantastic. They do them in order. They pride themselves on that. They take you behind the scenes. They talk about it all the time but coast-to-coast. That’s all they want to talk about. It drives so much business to them. To be honest with you, I’ve had their chicken fingers many times. They’re not like others. They’re fantastic but they charge for it and they come at a great food cost. The profitability is there, so all day long. The servers are talking about it. They have advertisements going, both in traditional media and social media. It’s highlighted on their menu every possible way. Reaching out of almost how to do one item perfectly.
Better Employee Treatment
Let’s go back to labor which we identified early on as a pain point and you can speak to it. You probably saw restaurants struggle and continue to struggle to find people, keep people, and pay people. Is anything that you find working well retention wise or recruiting wise out there?
It sounds very simplistic and in a very utopian world, this is what happens. I would say what works is to treat every employee as an important person. Don’t wait until they’re asking for a raise. Properly compensate. Look for opportunities to bonus where needed. Long gone are the days where the industry has two chefs working 60 hours. It’s more about work-life balance.
Treat every employee as an important person. Do not wait until they ask for a raise before properly compensating them.
It’s coming out of a COVID era every industry was struggling for labor. No industry more than ours. If we do what we’ve always done, we’re going to get the same results, so treat them better. Make them part of the business. They came to you originally looking for a job. You offered them a job. Let’s keep it there and I said I should have caught myself but I didn’t. I said work-like balance and it’s a very corporate thing to say.
If restaurants were to say, “We’re going to focus on life-work balance,” and they just changed these two words. All of a sudden, the cook or the waiter or the bartender or the host or hostess can continue to play soccer on Monday nights and take care of their mental and physical health. That’s where we need to get to. There’s some that are already there. I was at a restaurant with a client and he looked into the kitchen. Now, he struggles for staffing like many operators. He looked in the kitchen and it was a very busy evening, but they had a brigade. They’re been seventeen cooks there. He looked and said, “I would die for 2% of that.” I said, “What are they doing differently?” The restaurant group doesn’t matter but I can’t tell you, I know this group does life-work balance.
I like that a lot. I know you work with the folks at 7shifts, so I want to bring to play that we’re doing this the day after I released my episode with 7shifts, Jordan Boesch the CEO there. We talked about a lot of the stuff you just hit on, why folks want to work at a restaurant. What can you do to keep them there and it’s not just about pay. It’s about camaraderie. It’s about saying thank you and culture. The episode was a lot about those things. That’s why people want to work for you as a leader because the days have changed like you hinted on. I’m sure we’ll pull that out as a quote. Flipping that life-work balance, I like that a lot, Matt.
All I wanted to say, not to make it a commercial for 7shifts. I love their products. I love what they do for restaurants, especially independents that struggle with managing and scheduling. However, the biggest thing every client that I talked to either are already on 7shifts or that I’ve helped onboard into 7shifts. They say it’s the communication piece. It has changed everything for them. Whether you’re a large corporation or an independent, the one complaint is the same as any employee in any industry. It’s communication and 7shifts helps in streamlining communication.
Social Audit
Thank you for bringing that up. It’s one of the things we did touch on. It’s changed a lot how to get a hold of people and do all that stuff. Good stuff. I do want to start to head towards wrapping up but give me a couple quick things around social. You mentioned it. I know something that you do is called the social audit. What is that?
Social is one of those where many people do it incredibly well. Many people manage social very well. Their presence is out there. The one thing that as you go through my services and offerings, I referenced it earlier where everything is in order and there’s a process. The thing that comes before social is establishing your brand standards. The one thing I will say about social is it’s great. However, it can also be a detriment if it’s not managed properly.
My OCD is constantly getting worse but in my personal social, I will take five photos before I put that one out there and then I’ll delete photos and adjust photos. I’m like, “What does my mom care?” It’s all about that personal brand. When we go into the realm of business, specifically restaurants. What is your brand? There was somebody else I saw and they were talking about socials and they put very clearly. People don’t wake up, get on their social and wonder what Matt’s Bar and Grill is cooking tonight. They’re not wondering what dish is being taken a picture of. They want to interact with your brand. First, we need to establish our brand and then what is that brand? What is the feeling?
If you’re a restaurant or you’re a venue that does live entertainment, let’s just say open mic night or concerts or something like that. That might be what you want to do out there. Showing another picture of a burger probably isn’t going to drop people in as much as understanding your brand and understanding the fun, the atmosphere or the elegance. We can talk about the fun and the atmosphere in the party, but there’s some people that just want to make sure that when they go out for that anniversary or that celebration, the elegance is there. You can easily get that through on social by how touching your brand first and being on with everybody at the table.
Good tips. I appreciate that. Some folks have a knack for doing social well.
I was talking with this one client. We took over their socials and they said, “We have an Instagram account. I don’t know if we can access it. I haven’t used it forever.” I said, “Let’s figure out that because if you have an account that has old information on it and old posts on it and you’re not doing anything. It’s worse than not having an account at all.” Again, if I’m looking up Matt’s Bar and Grill and I see posts from 2018. There’s no trust and you posted a picture of the menu. I see that a kid’s burgers $5 and now it’s nine $9. Let’s get control.
If your restaurant business has an old social media account with old information and posts, and you are not doing anything, it is worse than not having an account at all.
Episode Wrap-up
Last words of wisdom. Send them to the website or social. Anything else you want to point them towards. Parting thoughts?
MiseEnPalce.ca. There’s an easy booking tool. It always starts with a conversation. Go to booking and find time that works for you. A 20-30 minute conversation about your business and let’s get to know each other first. If it’s going to be a fit, then we move from there but I have lots of experience of many years of being in the industry. I’m so happy that I decided consciously to continue helping restaurants.
We’ll have to revisit in the future because there’s plenty of topics we didn’t hit on but we’ll sign off for now. Matt Wilson of Mise En Place. You can find it on the web MiseEnPlace.ca. For more great restaurant marketing, service people, and tech tips stay tuned to us at RunningRestaurants.com. In the meantime, wherever you’re reading or watching, please do us a favor. Hit the like button and subscribe. Give us a review or rating. All that stuff is very helpful and we appreciate it. We’ll see you next time. Thanks so much, Matt.