Are You Selling a Culinary or a Dining Experience?

Zappos.com launched in 1999 with a plan like that of many dot-coms birthed in the tech bubble: to be an online shoe company without ever touching a shoe. Customers would order footwear on its website, it would transmit the orders to vendors, and vendors would ship them from their own warehouses.

“On paper, it was a great idea,” CEO Tony Hsieh says. But in practice, it wasn't. Four years after its launch, Zappos.com wasn’t profitable, it couldn’t raise funding, and retail shoe sales nationwide were only just recovering from the 2001 recession. To survive, Hsieh realized, the company needed to stop selling sneakers and start selling something more valuable: A Customer Service Experience.

It worked. Customers were happier. Workers were happier. And gross merchandise sales grew to $2 billion, driven by repeat customers and word of mouth. “Our customers do the marketing for us,” Hsieh says. And, in November 2009, Amazon.com bought the company in an agreement worth $1.2 billion at closing.

If you keep on selling food as opposed to delivering a memorable dining experience, you are just the same as any other restaurant or hospitality establishment.

Are you secretly failing with your business? Call 310-266-9463 for your FREE CONSULTATION TODAY.


Andre Plessis
restaurant/Hospitality Consultant
Customer Service Expert
tel: 310-266-9463

How to build your restaurant business

For any restaurateur to maintain long-term prosperity and sustain the competition, you'll have to provide more than just food and culinary experience to your guests.

There is no doubt that cooking great food is important, nonetheless it is expected from every diners who spend their hard-earned money. But if you choose to provide great culinary experience to diners you are no different than everyone else.

There are great chefs all around the country that went to great schools and have also learned from the very best. So no matter where diners go, they'll get the same, a great meal. But if your only focus is food, you won't be able to grow and sustain the increasing competition. There is no doubt that you'll be in business for a while and striving. As soon as you open your restaurant the bloggers and the press will rave about your new restaurant, and your chef creative menu. Diners will come and check you out. But is your cuisine enough to impress the guests, so they want to come back?

Keep in mind that after a while other restaurants will open with new ideas, new concepts, new menus, new decors and atmosphere. If you have failed to create customer loyalty, you are simply inviting diners to continue their culinary journey and try various cuisine all around town. When you understand hospitality you know that people need much more than just a great cuisine to be attached to your brand.

So how do you grow your clientele? Your most powerful weapon to sustain the increasing competition, is to hire a fabulous front line staff that will engage the guests with meaningful conversations. When your staff engage with the guests they add to the culinary experience and provide a delightful dining experience.

Only when your staff deliver a memorable dining experience, you have built a defense against the increasing competition, because those guests will become loyal and your advocate. They will in fact speak highly of you. What could be more powerful than their free advertsing and word of mouth?

Professional waiters know perfectly that when they live a restaurant establishment, their loyal customers will leave as well. Those guests won't be taken care of by their favorite waiter, and when they come back to your establishment they will in fact be highly disappointed as their expectations are high.


So what are you doing to sustain the competition? How do you train, educate and retain your best employees who are totally engaged and invested in your business? What benefits do you offer your employees? Do you offer more than a paycheck? How do you compared with your competition when it comes to providing benefits to your employees? Do you treat your workers as just workers or as partners? How do you value, and reward your employees?

If you study the most successful organizations in the country such as Marriott, Disney, Ritz Carlton, Four Seasons etc.. they have achieved their status and have created huge profit because they value their employees, give them great benefits, educate them, and teach them what hospitality is all about. There is no secret; if you want to keep on striving you'll have to do more than just giving a paycheck to your employees.

If your success is not their success, but yours only, employees won't be able to connect with you and it is just a matter of time for you to see your business decline and possibly vanish at some point.

Andre Plessis
Restaurant & Hospitality Consultant
Customer Service Expert
Tel: 310-266-9463

The only way to sustain the competition

There are countless of restaurants opening everywhere. So great cuisine at any restaurant is expected from anyone who dines out. What is not expected, but will make you stand out from all others, is to be a home away from home for every guest that steps into your restaurant.

The only way you can sustain competition and avoid being knocked off is to have your front line employees engage with the guests and build strong relationships. Once you build customer loyalty, it gets very difficult to knock you down.

The guests will come back to you, no matter how many new restaurants open around you. So how efficient is your front line at engaging your clientele with meaningful conversation?

Andre Plessis
Customer Service and Hospitality Consultant
AP Consulting
Tel: 310-266-9463

Who's to blame when the customers don't come back?

While it’s easy to blame the customer for the deteriorating relationship, 85% of the time it’s not their fault.  The business owner can control whether the relationship is solid and grows by being responsive and proactive. No matter what business you're in you must nurture your relationship with your current clientele. Fail to do that and they'll go somewhere else.

When it comes to providing dining services, restaurant employees can either be an order taker, who simply takes the order and gives the customer exactly what he or she requested or it can have a higher agenda, where the diners will get much more than they expected. Being an order taker may be fine, especially in industries where there is little competition, but in order to grow the business, you must have a higher agenda.

Successful businesses are very proactive in agenda setting. They spend enough time with the clients/customers/guests, learn from them and give them more than what they need.

What else will set you apart from your competition?

Andre Plessis
Customer Service & Hospitality Consultant
AP Consulting Los Angeles

Struggling with bad service?

Struggling with bad service? Before you unleash on the next bumbling waiter or clueless salesclerk, hear the words of ANDRE PLESSIS, a customer service and hospitality consultant who has been on a crusade to improve service standards in Los Angeles. Here he tells business owners that delivering memorable service in Los Angeles is uncommon, but is not only possible, it’s easy, as long as you check your attitude at the door.

Andre Plessis

Customer Service & Hospitality Consultant

Tel: 310-266-9463

Customer Service Tip

Clients can tell the difference. They can tell when it wows them and when it is mediocre. And if it doesn't wow them, they won't come back. Too many choices out there. Fail to impress them the very first time, and your life in business will be short lived, TRUST ME.

Andre Plessis
Restaurant/Hospitality onsulting
AP Consulting