Everything I know About Marketing I Learned Working in Restaurants

Living and Learning in the Southcoast, MA – Part One - WELL, ALMOST.  I STARTED WORKING AT THE AGE OF FOURTEEN AT THE OLD GULF HILL PARLOR IN SOUTH DARTMOUTH AS A DISHWASHER.  There was a gentleman named Manny Couto who was in his nineties and one of the best dishwashers there.  

 I learned from him.  He had a system, pride in his work and he cared about the cooks who put food on his plates, the waitresses who served the food and their customers. He was especially fussy about the silverware because he said even the best meal could be ruined by a dirty fork.  Guy Kawasaki would have been enchanted by him!

My manager was Ed Piccard.  He was like my father and big brother all rolled into one.  He said that although he would miss having me doing dishes, he needed me in the kitchen.  Besides, Manny would train another kid to take my place.  Working as a prep cook under Ed’s guidance, I went on to run the whole kitchen after the self-professed numero uno of the kitchen, a really smart guy named Jeff Zink, went off to college.

Working at Gulf Hill I learned about people, teamwork and systems.  I also learned how to work over forty hours between Friday after school and into the wee hours of Monday morning.   On summer Sundays we scooped Gulf Hill’s famous ice cream from the time the soda fountain opened at eleven; non-stop until two the next morning.  I also had the privilege of working for Gulf Hill’s ice cream maker – Joe Duffy – who’s only demand from me was to never run out of hot coffee.  He also only had one cuss that he uttered often; shit and three is nine - never heard anyone else who said that.  

 Most of the kids were afraid of Joe but I wasn’t.  Joe taught me consistency, product management and customer care.  He would make small batches of peach ice cream and other flavors for our older long-time customers.  I also learned how to make ice cream molds and ice cream cakes with Joe. 

Gulf Hill Parlor was in the restored barn of the original Gulf Hill Dairy.  I got the job because of our Gulf Hill Dairy milkman.  Anyway, there were two older farmhands; Gene Simmons and Freddy Bellevance.  Gene was one of the strongest guys, besides my dad, that I ever knew and one of the nicest people I’ve ever met.  He brought me my dairy order everyday and always had a smile on his face.  As I’m writing this, I’m realizing that this post will have to be in at least two parts as all these memories flood in.  Freddy was very quiet but friendly and would do almost anything for anybody.  What I learned from them was that a good team can be like family.  

Dot Frates ran the floor.  She was the waitress’ boss.  I learned all about respect from her.  Yeah, she ran the floor like an invading general and, as most women in charge who are good at what they do, she was called a bitch.  Bitch or not, she was always fair and kind to me.  Of course, I can’t forget Pat Wood.  I ended up working with her again at Freestones in downtown New Bedford when I graduated from the University of Miami.  Pat was one of the most voracious readers I’ve ever met.  She was also one of the most normal people I’ve ever met.  In a business where nearly everyone complains about anything and everything, I don’t think I ever heard Pat complain.

Restaurants are a great place to learn marketing basics.  S.W.O.T. Analysis for example; the internal controllable factors (Strength & Weakness) were about people, management and standards.  They’re internal and controllable.  Hire good people and treat them well.  Manage like you mean it.  Create and maintain standards that frame your customer’s expectations.  As for the external uncontrollable factors (Opportunities & Threats) well, you have to know what you’re doing.  Be conscious and conscientious and the opportunities will present themselves.   

As for the threats, it’s the same thing.  Rising overhead costs, taxes, regulations and whatever is thrown at you.  I remember when we had to open every single bottle of diet soda we had.  Cases and cases and cases of it and dump them out because they contained cyclamate, an artificial sweetener which caused a widespread cancer scare.  Then there was the tornado that we didn’t know was a tornado that came up from Padanaram Village.  We knew it was obviously one heck of a storm but what was more amazing was how we all worked together to survive that night.  

Gulf Hill Dairy had a great ad slogan on their products and trucks.  It went like this - You Can Whip Our Cream, But You Can't Beat Our Milk!   More about that the next time I return to this subject…

The Evolving Blogger

Short Stuff from Southcoast, MA – Blogging is great therapy! When I first started blogging back in 2009, it was to support my marketing consulting business. I played around with and blogged about a concept I developed called business engineering and gave myself the title of marketing engineer. Through that exercise, I hope I informed as much as I learned. Around March of this year, I switched gears to where I am now.

Since then, I’ve been, as the title of this blog page states – In Search of a Personal Stability Zone. Am I any more stable than when I first started? It’s not for me to say. However, I do feel I’ve worked a couple of things out in my head. It’s also given me a lot more topic ideas to blog about.

So, here I am today. This is the first of the short stuff posts I’ve been meaning to do. Why? There’s too many things I want to look into and right now it’s better for me to do hit and run postings on as many topics as I can rather than go deep on a couple. Besides, everyone’s attention span is smaller than it used to be. Too much social networking – so little time! But, if I stumble on something I want to linger longer on – I will! Blogging is great therapy and it’s helped me to be more aware of certain things and balancing writing about topics readers want to read rather than writing about stuff I want to write.

With that in mind, I’m contemplating renaming this blog site (still a working title) to: The Evolving Blogger. My mission, should I decide to accept it, will be to blog about my thoughts on what we need to smile, survive and succeed in the 21^st Century. Hopefully, those thoughts will be sought out by and subscribed to by blog readers. What prompted this yet another change or adjustment? My – A Twisted Finger of Fickle Fate - post back in April of this year. It had the highest hit rate of any post ever. It’s been read by almost five times as many people as the other posts. All of the other posts are pretty much a close second individually. Maybe it was more about how I wrote it than what I wrote about. Maybe it was enchanting?

In Guy Kawasaki’s latest book - Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions – he speaks of enchantment as likability, trustworthiness, and a great cause. In my upcoming posts I will attempt to increase the likeability of my topics, gain your trust and explore the great causes; the one’s you’re interested in. Here’s a couple of working titles that may give me an opportunity to get you smiling, as well as, offer opinions on surviving in business and a few ideas I’ve come across to help in succeeding as a human being.

Thoughts on Sustaining Better Health, Lifestyles and Legacies

• The Longer the Whiskers, the Fatter the Cat. – Food for thought about how we eat.
• What to do if Your Child Wants to be an Artist – A report from the Island of Misfit Toys.

Opinions on Doing Business the Way We Forget to

• Cukes or Zukes? Cabbage or Lettuce? - Attracting, training and rewarding super employees.
• Busy Better Be Profitable! - Actions require accountability.

Stories to Ponder & Pass Along

• My Buddhist-Quaker Teacher - Thanking someone who is no longer around to thank.
• A Roundabout Legacy of Place - UMass Dartmouth’s architecture doesn’t inspire straight answers.

REMEMBER: If you can't pay for a thing, don't buy it. If you can't get paid for it, don't sell it. Do this, and you will have calm and drowsy nights, with all of the good business you have now and none of the bad. If you have time, don't wait for time. – Benjamin Franklin said that!

Please stay tuned as I evolve, adapt and move on.

Before Its Time – No Whining About Wine Show

Is it possible to be ahead of the times? May Ray, the avant garde artist believed that something was either of it time or not. Perhaps a better question is what happens when you have something that no one realizes they need? I think that’s the real point. If you have a product or service that may intrigue many but doesn’t sell, then it’s because you haven’t done a good enough job of persuading those who could use it the most. That’s the biggest “trick” in marketing. The other big trick is to get paid for what you do. Payment equals a confirmation of value. When you give something, anything, away, there needs to be some form of reciprocity. Without compensation or reciprocity the value of free is, well, nothing.

And, once people have access to something for nothing, you can’t charge them for it. Well, you can, but, it takes some strategy. The strategy is similar to the anecdote about boiling a frog. If you drop the frog in hot water, it’ll jump out. Wouldn’t you? But if you put the frog in a pan of cold water and turn on the heat, the frog will slowly get used to it. Buying requires commitment. Commitment comes from an expected consistency in the relationship. Once you have a happy customer, they’ll not only come back over and over, they’ll introduce their friends to you. The more likes, friends or fans you have, the more, as Robert Cialdini states in his best seller – Influence, social proof you have.

How could we have gone wrong? It was a simple business plan. Eat good food. Drink good wine. Meet interesting people, travel and get paid for it. Well, three out of five ain’t bad! The philosophy was as simple as the business plan. We were not wine experts. We knew more about wine than the average guy and a heck of a lot less than the real wine experts; the people who made it and sold it. We started our adventure on cable access. We had a hummable theme song that was a parody of the old Rawhide television series – swirling, sniffing, sipping… We took on the sacred cows and dumbed down wine so the average Jane and Joe could not only understand it but enjoy the process of it as well. People liked the show. Then we were asked to “bring it on over” to the local ABC affiliate in Providence, RI. We did a pilot for Public Television. We were on our way!

It all came to a crashing halt. What my friend and neighbor and the other half of the original (I’m almost positive we were the first in the country) Wine Guys came to realize is that we needed sponsors to get the show produced as a public television how-to series. Okay, we knew we needed sponsors but we thought we’d get sponsors in the wine business. Why didn’t we? Marketing 101 – if you make something too simple then the price may be scrutinized. The wine – if you make wine simple and understandable and less mysterious, you cause a lot of problems for some people. Now this was before Trader Joe’s and Charles Estate got together to give the World, the one, the only – Two Buck Chuck. You see, we were ahead of the consciousness curve. We were even approached by one of the folks who saw what we saw and made his family’s New Jersey wine business a huge really big success even though we didn’t sell him the Wine Guy name. Oh, well. And now, it seems that Seven-Eleven is launching a line of good four dollar wines in their stores, too. Even though our audience liked us, trusted us and thought we offered them something useful, the people who sold wine weren’t sold on supporting us.

I’m focusing. I’m focusing! The real problem with the Wine Guy concept was that two middle-aged guys who made learning about wine simple and funny was great until it clashed with the mystique of wine and the price structure that it supported. The cost of a bottle of wine is based on several things. One of those things is cost perception. The mystique of wine adds to the dollar value. Drop the mystique and you’ll have to drop the prices, too. Part of the mystique is that the more you pay for a bottle of wine, the more it’s worth. Yes, there are other pricing factors including the quality of the vintage, which is based on the harvest, the case yield and a bunch of other practical stuff. That’s the short version of it. Most people, women in particular, make a wine selection to drink or to give based on how attractive the bottle label is. Most guys select a wine based on price because they think price in an important indicator of quality. As stupid as that is, that’s the way the wine distributors like it. Now you’d think one of us (yeah, the guy who teaches marketing) would have figured this out - wrong! We were having too much fun swirling, sniffing and sipping to pay attention to the reality of the business. The other thing is that the closer you are to something the harder is to see it as it really is. Yes, in vino veritas – in wine there is truth – no kidding.

So here I am looking back and looking forward. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately. Can we, knowing now what we didn’t know then, resurrect the The Wine Guy Show for giggles or for profit? Hum, let’ see. The name – wine guys is so generic and has been glommed by so many that, well, we’ll have to rethink the name. That’ll be the first point of business. The whole wine craze isn’t as big as it was when we kicked off our first show. And, bag-in-a-box wine has become somewhat of a secretive guilty pleasure. Hey, this stuff keeps walking away with the prizes in double-blind taste tests. What now? Well, I say we take this dog and pony show back on the original trail with a couple of tweaks to the master plan – mainly – making money. The other consideration is reflecting on how many wines there are in the world and where they come from. All fifty of these United States produce wine from either grapes or fruit. There are at least fifty vineyards and wineries in New England alone.

So I think, we, the original wine guys, Mike Daigle and I (Ron Fortier), should focus on our own wine appellation (area) of these United States – The Southeastern New England Wine Growing Appellation. This is an area that stretches from Cape Cod and the Islands and on down the southern coast of Massachusetts towards coastal Rhode Island and coastal Connecticut. There is a lot to see, eat, drink and do here. We’ll become the ex officio, de facto and self-proclaimed - Vinomytes or Alvinos or, Vinificants of our own backyard. Better to be a good sized fish in a small pond versus a minnow in a big pond anyway. Ah, yes, making money is as important as having fun since, if people pay you, you must be doing something right. Maybe we offer our very own line of affordable wines, as well as, limited edition collections of the best the Southeastern New England Wine Growing Appellation has to offer. We could add to this mix, our original earthy approach to teaching anyone who’ll listen how to begin and continue to enjoy wine. We’ll go back to our plan to eat good food. Drink good wine. Meet interesting people, travel and, damn it, this time we’ll get paid for it!

Technology has come a long way since the original Wine Guy Show aired in 1992. The internet was in its infancy then. Streaming video was crude. Social media didn’t exist. And, video wasn’t as easy to produce as it is now. Please join us in raising a glass to this repurposing of the vintage Wine Guy Show concepts with a bit more focus, social media and a beautiful part of the country to play in. Based on Guy Kawasaki’s new book: Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions – if we decide to resurrect the concept, we’ll have to reaffirm our likability, as well as, the trust people had in us to tell the truth about wine and, we’ll have to work on making our product (that’s us) great! Self-aggrandizing as it may seem, our audience and followers thought we had a great product and, that we also had good chemistry. They trusted us to gently teach and guide them through the sometimes confusing and overwhelming world of wine. And to mimic what Sally Field once said at the Oscars – they like us, they really like us! Folk trusted us because we always reminded them that even if we knew more about wine than they did, we still didn’t know as much as the experts. That’s why we surrounded ourselves with people in the business. Sure, we were having fun but they had a business to run.

One question I’m pondering is whether or not we’re still viable. The other thing is that, the show was never about wines. It was about wine. The difference is that the experts deal with the minutia of the wines of the world but we dealt with wine as a metaphor for sociability. Wine was the original social medium. Wine was once safer to drink, in most cases, than water. It was central to religious rites and cultural ceremony. Wine, in our opinion, was always about the conviviality of the table. And, we think it’s needed now more than ever to get people back to the table to eat, converse and share in one of nature’s miracles. We always believed that, as someone wiser than us once said, excess is the death of pleasure. Even though the show’s been off the air since 1997, people still ask or reminisce about some of their favorite episodes and coax us to bring back the show. You can’t buy brand equity like that! With that in mind – let’s see what happens. Maybe I should call Mark Hellendrung to see how he resurrected Narragansett Beer…