Restaurant Rockstars Stories Systems & Smarter Service

Roger Beaudoin [00:00:00]:

There's a difference between leadership and management. When you lead by example. It's like you're working on the business, you got the big picture. You trust and empower other people, like I said, to take on new pieces of the business, to learn the business, to help run it. And that's how you build longevity versus high turnover in this industry.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:00:28]:

Welcome to another episode of WISKing It All. We're joined today by Roger Baudouin, president of Restaurant Rockstars. Roger, thanks for joining us.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:00:39]:

Thank you so much for having me on the show and what a great name. WISKing It All. That's just terrific. I think that's awesome because that's what we do as restaurant owners, don't we? We WISK it all.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:00:47]:

Very true, very true.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:00:48]:

That's excellent.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:00:49]:

I appreciate that. I always say restaurateurs are like the entrepreneurs of entrepreneurs because it's, it's, it's, it's hard enough to just be an entrepreneur, but restaurants are such a tough space within margins. It's like the masterclass of an entrepreneur. But it's, it's really cool. So first of all, just so I want to get, we're going to get deeper into it, but just to give people that kind of 30 second pitch, can you just tell people what is Restaurant Rockstars?

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Roger Beaudoin [00:01:15]:

So Restaurant Rockstars is an online company that sells training system called the Academy, which would be a crash course for anyone who wants to start a new restaurant who's never been in the business. Contains everything you'd need to know to open your doors to a first restaurant, but more importantly for your audience and for existing operators. It's really based on the essential foundational systems that I created for my own restaurants. And those would be cost controls and profit maximization, staff training, recognition rewards, leadership, accountability, those types of things. Marketing, firepower and affinity. That is trackable marketing. So you know, if there's a return on investment, additional profit centers, anything that'll help you run a more efficient, more profitable existing restaurant. So that's the Academy.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:01:58]:

We also have a weekly podcast called the Restaurant Rockstars Podcast. And then I speak on a national stage at major food and restaurant shows. And then when time allows, which I really like is giving back by coaching and consulting to restaurants with challenges and pain Point sauce. That's what Restaurant Rockstars is.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:02:15]:

Yeah, I love it. I love it. I'm sure it sounds like you're a busy guy.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:02:19]:

I, yeah, I got a few balls in the air, you know?

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Angelo Esposito  [00:02:21]:

Yeah, exactly. Well, like, I know, I know you know, you have 30 years plus in the, in the industry of experience in the industry. And I always like to understand how people got where they are. And so we'll definitely talk more about restaurant Rockstars in a sec, but let's rewind a bit. I want to kind of understand.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:02:38]:

Sure.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:02:38]:

What was your first experience in hospitality? And you know, how did that shape the way you view this industry today?

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Roger Beaudoin [00:02:47]:

Well, it's interesting because I was a senior in high school and I got a job as a dishwasher at a private country club. Not that that was initially hospitality, but I did a really great job. But they recognized the owners of the club literally saw something special in me. And I think I lasted three weeks as a dishwasher before they decided to promote me to bartender.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:03:07]:

Oh, wow.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:03:07]:

And I was, I was trained to be the bartender. You know, I, I didn't have any bartending skills, but I was trained. And then they turned me loose. Any golfers out there know what a 19th hole is? It's essentially the lounge. When the golfers come off the course, they go to the 19th hole and that's their clubhouse kind of thing. And we're talking about business owners and professionals and doctors and lawyers and all kinds of, you know, really professional people. And I got to know them by name, but I called them sir and I treated them with respect. And I guess it was a point of pride to really deliver great service without anyone training me to do so.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:03:41]:

And I quickly found out that the cash kind of followed because every time I delivered a drink, there'd be $10 bills thrown at me and they really took a liking to me. So I was know, promoted to be a bartender. That was my introduction to hospitality.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:03:53]:

Got it.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:03:53]:

And then if you were to fast forward, you know, so many years later, I never thought I'd be in the restaurant business, but I saw an opportunity. I was living in Italy when I was in graduate school. I was studying for an MBA in business and I was doing an internship in, in Milan and I was eating lots and lots of pizza. There's a wood fired pizzeria on every corner and I was really intrigued with that. One, I liked pizza. But two, these wood burning ovens were right in the middle of the floor and they were works of art. And the, you know, the pizza makers are throwing the doughs in the air. And it was this whole cultural thing that goes back to where pizza was invented.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:04:26]:

But I didn't think that I'd be in the restaurant business then. But if you fast forward it a couple Years after that, I was interviewing for a position at a large ski resort in marketing. And I'm driving through this small town in Maine that had this huge ski resort that did about 600,000 people a year in the wintertime, and there's four, maybe three or four restaurants only this tiny little town with a year round population of 1500 people. And the every business, whether it was the restaurants or it was the video rental store, if you remember those that are long gone, there's lines out the door. And I tried all these different businesses and none of them offered any type of sophisticated experience. No ambiance, no vibe, no great service. They just succeeded in spite of themselves. And that's when that idea from all the pizza in Italy came back into my head.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:05:15]:

And I'm like, wow, you know, if you were to start a wood fired pizzeria in this town for all those skiers, it would be a overnight smash success. And so that's exactly what happened. The story goes deeper than that. I can tell you about, you know, hiring my first chef and him stealing $40,000 of my startup capital from me. Professional con man. That was a professional chef. Okay, that happened. I was looking for a million dollar loan because I wanted to run before I could walk.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:05:43]:

I wanted to buy a beautiful piece of property in an excellent location. I wanted to build a building and create this authentic European experience. I meant to mentioned the sophistication piece, right? And so here, here I am, an unproven guy with no restaurant experience other than being a bartender so long ago, asking for a million dollar loan to buy land, build a building and start a restaurant, right? So I get laughed out of a lot of banker offices. And finally I met a banker that skied at this resort every single weekend. He knew the opportunity, he knew I had business skills. He's like, I know you can start a business. I'm still not going to give you a million bucks, but if you scale this project way back, I'll give you $150,000. So I got $150,000 loan.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:06:24]:

And as you and your audience know, you can't do much with that. You certainly can't. You can't do what my plan was. So I had to find this dumpy space on the wrong side of the railroad track, six miles away from the action, with a leaky roof and no parking. But it did happen to have four failed restaurants in that space before I got there. They came, they went, they just all failed. So there was a stigma of that location, but it was really the Only thing available. So rented the space, got in there.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:06:52]:

Two years later, after proving I could do what I said I could do, I got my million dollar loan, bought an 18 acre piece of property in the great location, built the 6,000 square foot building, and then grew this business every year. And one restaurant led to several more before I ended up selling all the properties in 2014. So that's kind of a history of where I came from.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:07:10]:

Very cool. I mean, first of all, I do, if I don't ask, I'm sure the audience is going to be mad. So I need to ask. And I'm also curious. I got to know that chef story, so. So, okay, yeah, it's more common than not. You know, there, there, it happens like people still leaving off 40,000. So let's know what happened, how you caught it, you know, like, give me the details.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:07:32]:

All right, so crazy restaurant stories, we all have them. So I'm literally, I don't know, maybe a month out from opening the doors to this first place. And I made the mistake of thinking I needed a full blown chef, a culinary professional. What I really needed was a kitchen manager that could put the pieces in place. So I answered an ad in the Boston Globe newspaper. And this was a seasonal chef on the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts, who was looking for a winter gig. When his summer gig was over and the ad sounded good, so I called him up and my partner and I interviewed him over the phone and he sounded great and he said all the right things and he started talking about the things he had done in the past about startups and all this kind of stuff. So, okay, we got a candidate on the line.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:08:18]:

So he invites us to the island of Nantucket to. He wants to cook for us. He wants to meet face to face. So we, we literally jump on this ferry from Cape Cod to Nantucket. He meets us at the dock and everybody knows this guy, right? We get off the boat and we're walking through town. It's a small town, of course, but everyone's like, hey, Jerry, how are you, Jerry? He's like the mayor of Nantucket. Like, everybody likes him. That's a good sign.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:08:41]:

Okay. He's a likable guy. He walks us into this restaurant that had just shut down, like the day there's still a bunch of food in the walk in. So he gets behind the stove and he starts whipping up these amazing dishes. And everyone tasted like he. He cooked a bunch of stuff and it was fantastic. We're like, wow, this is impressive. So we're like okay, we again, we got this solid candidate.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:09:02]:

So now two weeks later, we invited him up to Maine to see the space, to see that we rented and the concept, it needs a little bit of equipment, it needs this, it needs that. But we're putting the thing together. So we ended up coming. So he stays in the town all weekend. You know, he's got a hotel room and now every meal he's cooking for us, breakfast, lunch and dinner, and knocking our socks off with everything he cooks. We hire the guy, we write up a contract, we agree on a salary, all this kind of stuff, and then he goes back to Nantucket to pack up his stuff. So a week after this, my partner gets a phone call from this guy, Jerry. And Jerry's at an a so called equipment auction, right? Where everything is pennies on the dollar.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:09:45]:

It's a foreclosure restaurant thing, you know, and he's like, we need this and we need this and we need this. But it's all, you know, we need all this stuff. And I've got. It's all right here. All I need to do is rent the U Haul truck, blah, blah, blah, and I'll bring it up next weekend and we'll load it into the restaurant and we'll start setting up the line. All you got to do is wire me the money to this bank account. Okay? Something didn't sound quite right to me. But I didn't mention I had a full time job at the ski resort at the time.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:10:11]:

While I'm simultaneously starting this restaurant, I'm under some big deadline. My partner calls me Jerry. He found all this stuff. Where else are we going to get it? It's there. He's going to bring it up in the U Haul truck. It didn't sound right, but we didn't really have a choice. We wired $40,000 to this bank in Connecticut and then the truck never showed up and we never heard from Jerry again. So now it's an out of state crime.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:10:32]:

So we contacted the FBI and yeah, so it turns out they tracked the, the money and the wire transfer and the whole thing. They had him on camera at this casino in Connecticut. Turns out he's a compulsive gambler and he gambled away the 40,000 bucks. So then they tracked down his parents. It was probably all those things. So we meet the FBI and we meet the parents in, in their home in Rhode Island. Elderly couple, right? And once again, the tears are streaming down their faces because they've heard this story so many times. And he's Been in jail so many times, and he's taken every family for every dime they ever had, and the money is gone.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:11:12]:

And we never saw it again. So my partner and I had a really big decision to make. We went back to the restaurant, back to Maine, you know, and we slept on it. And we decided we either pay back the 110,000 that we still have and scratch this whole idea of starting a restaurant and be on the hook for the 40 grand with nothing to show for it, or somehow we try to make this restaurant work with $40,000 less than we really needed. We actually needed more money than that. And we ended up throwing all kinds of stuff on personal credit cards to make it work. But we decided to move forward with the restaurant and it was virtually an overnight success. So crazy story, right? But it happened.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:11:50]:

That is crazy. I didn't think we'd be talking about FBI's and gambling fraud on. On WISKing at all, but I love it.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:11:56]:

It's 1994.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:11:58]:

That was lesson learned. Wow. I mean, what's that saying? If it's good to. If it's too good to be true, it probably is kind of things.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:12:05]:

Oh, sure, absolutely, man.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:12:08]:

And I love to hear, like, I'm curious now, like, okay, so then, then you open. Can you talk a bit? You know, we have a lot of restaurant operators listening, so I'm curious, like, what are some things you can attribute. And I know this was, you know, maybe a while back, but to that success, right? Like, you're working hard.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:12:23]:

Fair.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:12:23]:

But a lot of restaurants work hard. What do you think you did right. That you can maybe share with the audience?

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Roger Beaudoin [00:12:28]:

Well, I became obsessed with, with three things that were really the keys to my success. And I talked about systems earlier, but the first one was profitability. I needed to learn cost of prime cost. But more than that, I needed to produce a menu that was pretty much profitable across the board, where, you know, everything was selling. We cross utilized ingredients so that we didn't bring in one or two items that only went on one dish. It's like everything went on every, you know, on several pizzas or we also had pasta dishes. We kept things simple. We had one salad, one dessert, a brownie sundae, and specialty pizzas, probably 10 specialty pizzas.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:13:07]:

And then a build your own. But all those ingredients could go on the pastas, could go on the pizzas. And then I really just dialed in the numbers and watched those closely just about every day, every week for those first two years. So we made it very, very profitable. The second Thing was guest service. I mentioned that all those other businesses really didn't have any sophistication or service. But I trained my team every single day. We had pre shift exercises and it wasn't okay, what's the chef special tonight? It was really a strategy on how to read tables and how to make friends with guests and how to suggestive sell and tell people about we knew they would enjoy and appreciate especially if they were a first time visitor.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:13:47]:

And I created this program called Salestars which literally was a really fun training program that got them to really use their own unique personalities. It was all based on the fact that I believe to this day that the restaurant business is entertainment, it's showbiz. And your front of house team that interact with guests every day are not hosts and bussers and servers and bartenders. They're literally actors and entertainers on stage. And we encouraged everyone to use their unique personality and to be unique, special and different. To make friends with the guests and to make suggestions and to know menus inside and out. To know the, the restaurant inside and out so that they could speak intelligently and not have to say gee, I don't know, let me go ask my manager. Which was a negative impression.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:14:31]:

And I had quizzes, pop quizzes all the time. We held their feet to the fire, we did role playing all the time. And the service was a standout and just blew everyone else away. So that was the second thing. And then the third thing was trackable marketing where we knew that any dollar we spent on marketing L we had a 2x, a 5x, a 10x return and we could track where that business was coming from. And all of these things that we're talking about form the basis for this training academy that we have now. All the things that made me successful are all in there and it's all turnkey. But yeah, that's kind of what made me successful.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:15:04]:

That's really cool. And I'm curious, like where was the. The the. And we're definitely going to get into some of those systems so we can at least talk. And I think there's a lot of people on, in our audience that could, could benefit. So we'll make sure to, to plug you and, and your website and all that good stuff. But I'm curious from your perspective or from your journey, what was the aha moment that made you say I'm gonna create the restaurant Rockstars. Right? So I'm sure there was more restaurant operation stuff you're doing and opening and closing and growing and this and that.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:15:34]:

But at one point, you said, you know, hey, I want to create restaurant rocksters. How did that.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:15:39]:

I'll take no credit for that at all.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:15:41]:

Okay?

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Roger Beaudoin [00:15:43]:

So I. I credit. I am very quick to credit my wife for everything. I'm the bricks and mortar restaurant guy. I can start a restaurant. I can be successful at it. I've got all this knowledge in my head, and that's what she said. So if you were to go back in time to 2014, we had.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:15:57]:

@ that point, we had started and operated four different restaurants. We had sold one or two, but we still had a flagship restaurant that had 325 seats. We lived next door. I built a. I mentioned we bought the property, right? The 18 acres. We built the big building that was the flagship restaurant. And then there was all this extra land, and I was able to build a subdivision and build spec houses in there and sell real estate, which, you know, it was unbelievable that that was just pure money that came from buying land that wasn't all utilized by the restaurant. So we actually built our own custom house next door.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:16:33]:

I used to walk to work. It was about 100 yards to the restaurant, all that kind of stuff. So in 2014, my wife, who had grown up in a small town in Maine, who had lived in San Diego and Los Angeles and other big cities, as did I, was tired of living in this small town. And she said, you know what? We're out of here. We're going to sell the restaurants, we're going to sell our house, we're going to get an rv, and we're going to cruise the country and end up somewhere with the kids. But while we're doing that, she's like, you've got all this knowledge in your head that could help restaurants around the world. It's a global opportunity. And this is hard when you start something from scratch and it's your identity, you know, and you're the president of the Chamber of Commerce, and you're a big fish in a small pond.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:17:11]:

You know, I was happy. And she's like, you'll never know how much greater your life can be unless you got the courage to leave the shore. And so we did what she said. We sold the restaurants in the house, we moved across the country. We ended up in Sun Valley, Idaho, and we went double down on building restaurant Rockstars. So she said, okay, let's focus on these fundamentals that you were such an expert at. Let's focus on the cost control and the profit piece. Let's put the courses together.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:17:37]:

That'll teach everyone else how to put an inventory system in place, how to calculate the cost of goods, how to really dial in your labor.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:17:45]:

Right.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:17:45]:

How to maximize profit across the business. So I'm like, you know, typing away, and she's, she's typing away and we're putting this course together, video trainings, all this kind of stuff. And then she says, we're going to do a podcast. And this was 10 years ago, right? I didn't know what a podcast was. I didn't know what a webinar was. I'm like, what's a podcast? She's like, okay, we're going to get you set up with this microphone thing and we're going to start by you just talking about things that made you successful. This was before we interviewed any guests, right? So that's. So that went okay.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:18:16]:

I did about five or six of those. And she's like, now you got to get some guests and we need to turn this into a real show. And believe it or not, I silly, you know, I naively sent a script to my first guest and said, I'm going to say this and you're going to say that I'm going to say this. I scripted the whole thing, you know, and she laughed at me. So now we're 450 episodes into a podcast that we've been doing for years. And the guests come to me because, you know, hospitality PR firms send us guests in our inbox every day. How about this guest? How about that guest? So that was my foundation there. But I mentioned too, I have a passion for working with restaurants.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:18:52]:

Obviously, the pandemic was devastating to our industry. I didn't tell you that. After selling all those restaurants in 2014, we made the brilliant decision to buy another restaurant late in 2019, just before the pandemic hit. Okay. And it's a turnaround situation. It's your grandma's breakfast cafe, you know. But it had a couple of opportunities. One, it had two apartments over the restaurant, which was rental income.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:19:18]:

And then it also had this really beautiful New England post and beam barn that was totally unfinished, but it was a storage space for the prior owner. But we had this vision of creating another concept in the barn, you know, maybe a wood fired pizzeria, a bar, Italian lights in the courtyard, acoustic music, like a real draw in this town. And that was the plan. Two or three months later, everything goes sideways. And obviously those plans fell by the wayside. I hate to use the word pivot, everyone's used it to death. But this Place got shut down by the state, as most restaurants did, and then all the rules and restrictions and we couldn't have seats anymore. We had to pull all the booths and all the chairs, and we literally turned it into a grab and go market, selling everything from baguettes and cheese to bottle of wine and beer and greeting cards and kitty litter and milk and toilet paper, and anything you could sell is the market now, you know, and then we ended up selling the real estate in the property.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:20:15]:

I think we owned it two years, went through that pandemic, somehow made it through, and then sold that business. So, you know, it kept me in touch with the audience. I went through everything that your audience has gone through with the pandemic. But to bring this full circle, it just, you know, it just pains me to see business failure. It pains me to see businesses that are struggling, the low margins that you mentioned, the labor challenges that restaurants are having, all the. I have solutions for all these things, and I love to give back and help others through the things that. That I've made successful. So, you know, anything we can do to give back to the industry.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:20:49]:

The podcast is our way of giving free information to people, as do you. And then, you know, when I coach restaurants, it's really gratifying to see them, you know, get them rediscover the passion of why they got in this business in the first place and give them solutions to their challenges.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:21:05]:

Yeah, I love that. I love that mission. It's funny because even at WISK, part of the. Part of our mission was always just giving restauranters their time back to focus on things they actually love. And, you know, it's not that we're so passionate about inventory. Inventory is pretty boring, but it's like, it's important cost of goods and recipe costing, and it's just all these important things that you need to do, but not really why the average restaurateur gets into the space in the first place.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:21:31]:

Well, well, you know, I often say when I speak on stage on a variety of topics and I speak to customers or restaurateurs and GMs at these restaurant shows, it's always about running a business, not running a restaurant, you know, and there's a huge difference there and building a strong brand and putting these foundational systems in place, because to me, it was an exit strategy. I work worked on my business, not in it. I created what I call intrapreneurs that ran my business. You know, they took on additional responsibility. I saw talent in them, and I gave them these opportunities. And I monitored them closely, but I, I trusted them and I, I figured they would use their good judgment, they wouldn't want to let me down. And so many people rose up in my businesses to run the places if they owned it. And that was kind of a saving grace.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:22:19]:

That's awesome.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:22:20]:

But when I came, yeah, I know.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:22:21]:

A big thing with you is, you know, you say profit begins with training, so I'd love to maybe just break that down on, you know, what a sales driven team actually looks like, you know, from your point of view.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:22:35]:

Well, I guess I started by saying it's all about menu, product knowledge and restaurant knowledge with obviously training that happens daily. So we talked about the pre shift training, which was strategy sessions. I talked about Salestars, which was a template, a series of short form videos that walked people through what guests are looking for. They want to be recognized, they want to be acknowledged, they want to be served. The basics of hospitality. I didn't get so foo foo as, okay, this is the oyster fork and this is where the, you know, the salad fork goes on the. No, none of that stuff. It's about treating people like they're the most important customer in the place.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:23:12]:

Even if they're a first time visitor, making, you know, building a relationship with these guests, introducing yourself by name, being respectful of their time. Like anyone who is a server that had a section, we had like this three minute rule. Like you must approach a table within three minutes of them being seated. Whether you've got time to take an order or to talk to them or not. You have to go up to that table, you need to introduce yourself by name and create that relationship. And then tell them you'll be right back to take their drink. And that buys you time. And now they feel like they've been recognized.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:23:45]:

That was one foundational thing. And then there was the suggestive selling place piece where we quizzed people on all the different opportunities that they could tell the guests. We had these signature items that we called hooks. One, they were very profitable, but two, they were a lot of fun. They were something that captured the imagination of the guest. And it was something that the phones would come out and they'd take pictures and they'd post it to social media. I could give you an example of that. Well, one was the wood burning brick oven that was right in the middle of the dining room.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:24:13]:

You could see the fire blazing at 900 degrees and the pizza makers throwing the doughs and that just creates the ambiance of the showbiz.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:24:19]:

Right.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:24:20]:

And then, then we had these drinks, they were like fish bowls with a stem and they held 40 ounces of liquid, but you'd pack it with ice and it literally had a couple of shots of, well, liquor in there and some fruit juice or a tonic or something. We had 10 different varieties of these drinks we called glacier bowls. And we put, you go to these parades and you see these glow sticks that kids have for bracelets and they put them around their neck. You crack it well, it's a non toxic thing. And we put, we splashed blue curacao or grenadine on top of every one of these drinks. And when you dropped a glow stick in there, the whole drink would glow like antifreeze from the inside out. They'd go through the dining room and they would sell themselves. They were 20 bucks a piece.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:25:02]:

And the cost, the cost was probably $2 of ingredients. We made $18 profit on every one. And they were just cash cows. They just sold and sold and sold. And I could tell you numerous examples of cash cows and how that lowers your food cost, increases your profitability. And it's a hook, it's a signature item and you promote those things. So of course my team were promoting all these hooks. They were taking selfies with the guests.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:25:26]:

They were really giving people reasons to come back again and leave us positive reviews on social media. So that was sales stars and then that was really, really one piece of the sales increase in the profit. But two, we dialed in our menu so that every single item had a very similar profit in each category.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:25:44]:

Okay.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:25:44]:

And I now consult to restaurants and it's amazing. Many restaurants have not costed out their menu in light of, you know, the volatile markets and the inflation. And they're selling items that they're losing money on and they don't even know. And they're filling their seats, they're wondering, why is my bank account not growing? So I've done some analysis and the three most recent clients I worked with, I like a year's worth of data. But the academy we're talking about has a template. It's called the Menu profit Accelerator. It's a total turnkey tool. But when I coach restaurants, I do it for them.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:26:15]:

We cost out the menu and. And then I rank every single item in each category by the most profitable item to the least profitable item. And you wouldn't believe how many dollars difference. I call it the spread in every category when every time this appetizer sells versus that, you're leaving $2 and $3 on the table. Whenever this entree sells versus others. You're leaving 5, 6, 7, 10, $12 on the table. You plug in a year's worth of data, all this information from the point of sale system into my template, and suddenly you realize that you left $300,000 of potential profit on the table last year. What restaurant can afford that? Right? So my most recent client, not to belabor this story, was it's a five location pizzeria.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:27:01]:

And again, they didn't cost out their menu. We did that. And then I plugged all this information in the template. I ranked all the items from most profitable to least profitable, plugged that in, went to the point of sale system, plugged all that in. They had probably 20 different specialty pizzas, five different stores, managers in each store that could come up with their own pizza concoctions without even costing it out, just slap a price to it. And the most popular pizza, of course, is just a plain large cheese pizza. And they sold 75,000 of those last year across the five stores. But every other pizza out of those 20 specialty pizzas were more profitable.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:27:39]:

And every time they sold the cheese pizza, they left anywhere from $2.53 on the table for up to almost $8.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:27:46]:

Wow.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:27:46]:

So the bottom. And this problem wasn't just in the pizza category. It was in salads, it was in the sandwich and wrap category, and it was in the dessert category. So the bottom line was I plug all this information in, and last year this chain of five little pizzerias could have sold, or I said, or I should say could have had a profit of $885,000. That's what was lost because of what I just explained.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:28:12]:

Like, so many opportunities in that it's.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:28:14]:

Hits them like a ton of bricks, you know, it's like I had no idea. And they're almost embarrassed to get this data, you know?

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Angelo Esposito  [00:28:20]:

Right, right.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:28:21]:

But then, but then we tell you what you can do immediately to stop the bleeding. One, now that you know what items are the most profitable to sell, you train your staff to suggest those every table. Every time you look at portion control standards that so many restaurants don't have, you know how many slices of pizza you know a pepperoni is the spec on this pizza versus you got three different people making the pepperoni pizz. One person's putting 12 slices, one put in 15. And it's like if the spec is 10 or 12, every time you sell that pizza, you're losing three slices of pepperoni every day, 360 days a year. It's like all this stuff adds Up. And so this is what I mean by running a business versus running a restaurant business of a thousand details. But I was really dialed into the finances, the marketing, and the guest service training.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:29:05]:

No, I love that. It's just to echo one point, because it's. We see it all the time at wisk. You know, we help with a lot of cost control and inventory management. And. And part of it is, is the recipe costing. And to your point, the costs are so volatile, right? You're buying from your suppliers, and pepperoni might go up, and this goes up, and cheese goes up. Everything's always changing price.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:29:24]:

And we have this. This concept called a cost alert. And so if your food cost on that dish is, you know, let's call it 30%, you could set it to 30 on the dot or 31. And if it ever surpasses 31, you get a notification. And to your point, sometimes I don't think restauranteurs realize how much of an impact it is until. And this was the key part for us, and you mentioned it extrapolated across the year and across all the locations. And we had a similar story recently. And it was acai bowls, and it was one ingredient.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:29:55]:

It was just papaya. For whatever reason, papaya, that region, inexpensive. And same thing. Did the math. It went up like, I don't know, like $2 or something like that. But we did the math on how many they sell a day, how many they sell a year, blah, blah. And it was something ridiculous where it was like 20. Close to 20,000 a year per location.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:30:12]:

Those seven LOC. And it was like that. One ingredient, one bowl, one. Right?

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Roger Beaudoin [00:30:16]:

So it's all it takes.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:30:18]:

That's all it takes. So. So I love that you have these systems for people, because I think to your point, for better or worse, a lot of restaurants sometimes open up from the perspective of an idea you're with friends. It feels very like. It feels. It feels. Because it's not. But it feels like a very low barrier to entry.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:30:38]:

So a lot of restaurantes are like, we can open up a bar. We can open up a restaurant. And I think because of that mentality, sometimes they don't realize the business side of it, which is, you know, the people side, the process side, the scaling side, which I actually wanted to pick your brain real quick. Scaling side. I know you have a ton of experience there too. We have a lot of listeners, and some of our listeners might be thinking, hey, I got one or two restaurants. I'm hoping to get to five. I'm hoping to get to 10.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:31:02]:

Obviously, this question varies depending on scale. If you're talking 10 to 100 or 1 to 2, but let's say for the ones that have 1 to 2 locations, looking at slowly expanding, stand to maybe 4, 5, 6. What advice can you give them? They're listening. They're like, I like Roger. He knows what he's talking about. I'm going to check out his website. What advice can you give them?

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Roger Beaudoin [00:31:23]:

Let's go back to the word manager because I don't mean to, you know, insult or disparage anyone that holds the title, but in my mind, anyone that holds the title of manager or is promoted to a manager does not necessarily mean that they're experienced, they're competent to lead, or that they get the best performance from their team. So I encourage everyone to become a leader. And now there's a difference between leadership and management. When you lead by example, it's like you're working on the business. You got the big picture. You trust and empower other people, like I said, to take on new pieces of the business, to learn the business, to help run it. And that's how you build longevity versus high turnover in this industry. And you need what I call career descriptions, not job descriptions.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:32:06]:

Because I don't want anyone to think of their position as just a job. And then three weeks later or a month later, oh, I'm off to the next place because the grass is greener. It's like, I want to create opportunities for my people to move up and let them realize that this career can take you anywhere around the world where you have a nice lifestyle, you meet great people, you can have fun, you can make money, you can start off in the dish pit and own your chain of restaurants. And I have stories about people that started in my restaurant that owned their own place, you know, so these things happen. So, yeah, it's about leadership, but then scaling, it's like you need to trust and empower your people and put them in positions of responsibility and then just monitor the big picture. I've always believed that people recognizing talent in others, and that's what leading by example is not being the figurehead in the back office, but literally having the big picture your business, recognizing the talents of people, even if they're not doing the job, just seeing where they could go in your organization. And it's okay if somebody, if you've got a stellar line cook like I did, who was a line cook for like 10 years for me before I sold my restaurant, he didn't want to do anything else. The guy just, he could cook a hundred steaks to temperature, perfectly loved it.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:33:13]:

And that's okay, we encourage that. But just know that there's lots of people in your business that don't want to stay in the same gig forever. And if there's an opportunity for them to take on additional responsibility, if there's something in it for them, an incentive, a bonus, whatever it is, and I always did that, you know, I would recognize and encourage that. We also gave our people a voice because their opinion mattered. I recognize that anyone working a job in the trenches, you know, saw things that I might not see because they're doing that over and over again. And you don't ask, you don't get. But I always said, you know, what can we do to make your job easier, better, more productive? And they sing like canaries. And then I say, do you have any ideas that would make things more profitable, better, whatever.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:33:54]:

I actually had a. And people would tell me, so then all of a sudden I have a meeting once a month where we have these big flip charts and Sharpie markers. And I called the whole team together and it was a brainstorm where I said, listen, you know, you guys have ideas. I'm like, no idea is a crazy idea. Throw something out that you think might improve this business. I'm going to create a short list. And if I can track a bottom line, you know, needle mover out of any of these things, if I can track what it, what the impact is, either a cost savings or a profit increase, I'm going to give you a piece of that action as long as it contributes to the bottom line and as long as you work for me. So I had people that worked for me for 10 plus years, and 10 years later, they're still collecting extra money for an idea they came up with 10 years ago that's still delivering to the bottom line.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:34:38]:

It's like, where do you see that?

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Angelo Esposito  [00:34:40]:

Right?

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Roger Beaudoin [00:34:40]:

That was innovative.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:34:41]:

Yeah, that's how we do that too. Super innovative. I've never heard of that. It's smart, very smart.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:34:47]:

So empowerment, right? Okay, so I don't like the word manager. I also don't like the word delegation because again, overused. Anybody can tell somebody what to do and how to do it it. But empowerment is a whole different animal where you're literally nurturing and encouraging people to up level their skill sets and then you're recognizing, rewarding that performance and then you're giving them some type of an incentive for improving the business. And that for me was super powerful. I love that that's how you scale from one restaurant to 10 to 20 to whatever. Create these intrapreneurs, people that will stay with you forever if you give them a piece of the action, not ownership, but just give them a piece of, you know, give them a taste of what they've accomplished for you. And then weekly recognition and rewards, which we did every week, which became super fun.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:35:30]:

And the team just loved, you know, and it was very simple. It didn't cost very much, but they. And it's not the employee of the month stuff. It's not the standard stuff you would think of. It was a little bit out of the box, but it was super fun.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:35:41]:

Yeah, that's really cool. I know. As we're slowly kind of wrapping up, one question I have for you is if you can share, like what's a brutal truth, you know, with. With 30 plus years of experience, right. About running a restaurant that you wish more people heard before they jumped in. So maybe people are listening in and either they started or thinking of starting a restaurant. Something that you just want to say, guys, caution.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:36:06]:

Well, that goes back to that whole cost of goods versus profit thing. I think this industry is overly focused on a low food cost. And although that's important, a low food cost cost comes from efficient ordering, low waste and spoilage, or virtually no theft. Cash cows that I talked about that printed money, pure profit items. All those things give you a low food cost. But what you really should be concerned about is profit per dish. I would rather have a steakhouse with a 40% food cost that contributes more profit than a pizzeria with a 22% food cost because every item I sell contributes so many more dollars in profit. And that's what I was focused on.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:36:43]:

So that's sort of a fallacy. And I've always wanted to switch that mindset to think about profit, focus on food cost because it's important. But I told you how you get there. But focus on having a profitable menu.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:36:55]:

I love that. Well said. And as we kind of wrap up, I want people to be able to reach you, find you. So you know, you. You've taught thousands, you know, through restaurant. Rocks are so. And you've seen a lot. So that's a lot of knowledge that you can, you know, share across.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:37:11]:

So first thing first, where could people find you? So just you or restaurant. I was like, just plug away. We'll include all the links. But it's good to just for people listening in.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:37:22]:

Well, I always encourage listeners, your listeners included, if you have a challenge or a pain point. I, I devote time every week to answering email questions. If you've got a challenge or something and you just got a question, I'm happy to, you know, answer your emails. If it's more serious than that, I will schedule, you know, a 30 minute, no obligation consultation and we can talk through the problem. So to reach me, it's R O G E R. That's also the URL to the website restaurantrockstars.com the Academy training system that we talked about is@restaurantrockstars.com and one thing I didn't mention, you know, we talked about this empowerment thing and trusting people and giving them additional responsibility. The Academy has all those lessons we talked about. Know the finances, the marketing, the sales and hospitality training.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:38:13]:

The Academy allows any owner or leader in a position of authority to assign any lesson to any number of employees to learn that piece of the business, to execute that piece of the business, and then to track their progress through a dashboard. Pretty powerful, you know, system there. So all that's@restaurantrockstars.com I love that.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:38:34]:

Well, you heard here guys, Roger from Restaurant Rockstars. So I'm going to encourage people to go check out the website, check out these systems because I'm a big believer in Systems, especially with 30 plus years of experience in the space. So we'll make sure to link all this good stuff up. But Roger, thanks for sharing a bit of your knowledge today. I think it was super, super valuable. So I appreciate having you on the show.

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Roger Beaudoin [00:38:54]:

Thank you, Angelo, for having me. I appreciate it as well. And I want your audience to stay tuned and stay well.

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Angelo Esposito  [00:39:00]:

Awesome. If you want to learn more about wisk, head to WISK AI and book a demo.

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