SPEAKER_00 0:19

Welcome to the Toilet Paper Salesman Podcast. My name is Mike Maraki, and I'm thrilled to have Luke Labris with me today from Dennis Paper and Food Service. He is the chief marketing officer for the company. Luke, we have a little bit of history together. It's because of you that I have this podcast today, and I want to say thank you for that. As well as you were my first attempt at recording a podcast, which did not turn out well. But we're going to give it another try, and I think we're going to end up having a really good podcast episode. So welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 0:53

Well, thank you, Mike. I appreciate that. And thank you as well for the kind words.

Luke’s Two-Track Marketing Career

SPEAKER_00 0:58

So, Luke, uh, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do, and your journey as far as getting to the place where you are.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

I am a marketing person, right? The actual marketing titles don't matter. I've been doing marketing for almost three decades now. And it's all the things about marketing. I do the creative bits. I get hands-on with the computer and the camera and the editing. And I do the thinky side of things and the strategy and the planning. I don't know how much detail you want into my background. I'm not the best at talking about myself. I much prefer to talk about other people's businesses because that's that's where my brain operates, right? I that's I view the world through a lens of marketability, right? What are the marketing attributes that these different businesses might have? And for the first half of my career, I worked in a creative agency capacity as a creative director, helping other businesses bring those marketable attributes to life and create the content to fuel their marketing programs. The second half of my career has been focused on working from within a business to grow that brand. So instead of focusing on many, focusing on one. And I happen to be at an employee-owned company where my efforts directly translate to profitability and growth. It's a very good place to be.

What Marketing Means Today

SPEAKER_00 2:36

I mean, you've been on the cutting edge of marketing. One of the things that I know you've talked about is internal marketing versus external marketing, and you kind of got into that. But heck, that was a few years ago. So, what's marketing today? And how should companies be thinking about marketing, especially with all of the tools that now have come available to them? And the tools just continue to expand, especially with AI now becoming more powerful. What does marketing look like today and what does it look like a few years from now?

SPEAKER_01 3:09

I will do my best to provide a succinct answer. Marketing to me today is trying to get the attention of not only your potential customers, but the world at large, so that your presence is raised through their interaction and engagement. And I'll break that down into like a social media concept, right? If I'm putting content out there and it's going to my target customer, that's great. I'm getting my message directly in front of them. But as we know, the internet is broadcasting your message to all kinds of people, all kinds of places. If you're getting that content in front of somebody who likes it and engages it, it grows your digital profile. It grows your presence and it grows the likelihood that more people will see your content, including the ones that are in your location, in your region, wherever the case might be. Marketing has shifted from being a very, well, I'm a regional business, right? And so for me, marketing has shifted from the regional effects of television and local radio and print and all things that would target your customer within an X radius to all of the digital considerations. So I guess to put it another way, marketing is continually learning how to use the new tools that are constantly being developed to try to get the attention of consumers using algorithms that are constantly changing. So you are a student and a master of nothing in today's modern marketing world, right? You have to have thick skin, you have to have a willingness to get in there and experiment and dissect. I will say, after coming off from two industry meetings, one national and one regional, local, and having speakers that both talk about marketing and content and AI, the strategy of building a foundation of content 100% holds true today, as it did at the dawn of the internet. That is the one irrefutable thing that gives you strength in the face of change, right? Resilience as things shift and go from one focus to another. My day is always a guessing game as to what is going to need the attention and what the best tool is to create that attention, to create that content.

Clever Campaigns And Agility

SPEAKER_00 5:59

So marketing obviously evolving every day. It's different every day. The amount of growth within AI and the tools that now are available exponentially grow every day. There was a recent marketing campaign I went to want to get your take on it because I thought it was pretty clever. Burger King geofenced all of the McDonald's locations. And when you downloaded the Burger King app and you went to a McDonald's and you opened up the app, you got a free whopper. I think that's brilliant. I mean, it would what's your thoughts on that? And I think it's been really successful.

Researching Platforms And Audience Signals

SPEAKER_01 6:31

100%. And, you know, that's they're leveraging the advertising mediums of today in very clever, clever ways. And it's funny that you would talk about Burger King and McDonald's. I was scrolling through LinkedIn this week and I saw a really old McDonald's commercial. I think it was from Germany, and it showed a young boy who had his McBag of McDonald's, and the local bullies kept taking it. So one day he puts his McDonald's inside a Burger King bag and everybody left him alone. And Burger King cried foul to the German Better Business Bureau. And McDonald's said, okay, we'll we'll pull the ad. And it worked in McDonald's favor because everybody wanted to see the ad and they went online to go find it, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, the tactics that are being utilized are constantly changing. So to be able to be clever like Burger King and use a geofense feature is phenomenally whimsical and nimble. And I think that's where any brand, national, local, mom and pop, needs to be thinking. I had a conversation with a fellow marketer the other day about content calendars. And he is much more of the structured mindset where you plan out your content calendar and you have all these executables and you're building up and you're tracking this and that. And it said that's all fine. But by the time that you've built up your plan and executed on it, the world has changed. The moment is gone and you've moved on to the next thing. So there are pros and cons to being whimsical and letting the day choose what the message is going to be and versus the content calendar. I think you have to find the happy medium that gives you the ability to continually learn, to continually explore. And as you pointed out, to do the research of what else is happening in the industry, in marketing and advertising as a whole. So you used an example of fast food advertising, which is one of the ones that I think most people, most consumers see easily because it's across most mediums. The opportunities that we have as individual businesses to take a look at each of the major platforms, I think is the real opportunity. So if you are a marketer, if you are a brand person, if you're even in sales, right, part of your day should be doing this quote unquote research. You should understand what the audience is gravitating towards in TikTok, what the tone of the day is in Twitter and or X now, right? What is the trend that's hitting Instagram and Facebook reels? And no, you cannot pick out this is how to go viral or this is the one thing, because it's not just one thing, it's thousands of things. You are looking at an aggregate. Your brain needs to be dissecting this and say, okay, how can my brand play in this space and not be a copycat, not be a me too, right? To bring my own unique voice to it. So that's again, that's back onto what is marketing, right? Marketing is taking the gauge, the temperature, what the audience wants, right? Then going and executing that content and then putting it out in such a way that it's um the way they want to receive it on those platforms, the way they expect it to come across. You know, if your strategy on Instagram was to use 20 hashtags, it's not going to work for you on TikTok because there's only five hashtags now.

SPEAKER_00 10:08

You talked about brand, and I think brand is really important. So if you have a small company and the larger companies who have marketing firms and everything, they're working daily on their business. We deal a lot with smaller companies and you do as well, mom and pop type companies who are trying to do their best to market. What would be your best advice? And let's talk a little bit more about brand, too, because I want to explore that. But what would be your best advice to a mom and pop? How could they best market their business to get the most bang for their? I say buck, but a lot of this is largely free. But how do they get the most out of their marketing efforts? You hit it right there.

Brand Building Through Quality

SPEAKER_01 10:49

And the most succinct answer, or the fullest succinct answer I have to that question, is about an hour-long stage presentation. And it's called Do the Free Stuff First. And I've done this talk a couple times now, and it directly answers that. What and how do these independent businesses with little to no budget, no marketing, no branding, no advertising budget, they're doing it themselves in-house. How do they move the needle? And the short answer is do the free stuff first. It's as simple as that. The internet wants you to succeed. It is a playground, at least for now, that is free to enter and engage and set up your shingle, set up your storefront. Yes, there are paid things. Web hosting is not free if you want to have your own domain and certain levels of quality, right? You can go free across the board, but it's going to be something like your website.squarespace.com or something like that. And if you are a legitimate brand who wants to do business, it is fully worth the 30 bucks a year or whatever it costs to own your own domain name. So do the free stuff first. Yes, there's a few paid asterisks in there. But Facebook is free, LinkedIn is free, Instagram is free, Pinterest is free, Yelp, Google My Business, all of these places. If you're a physical location, if you have a phone number and an address and a website, the internet knows where you are and who you are, right? You have to go out and claim that free listing on Yelp. These are basic building block steps that everybody should just be crossing the T's, dotting the I's, making sure that they have done. And if you do all of that free stuff, right? If you really do it, if you fill out the profiles on these social media platforms completely, if you fill out your Google My Business profile, if you go in and then look at each of these platforms once a week, twice a month, whatever it is, you will have done 80 to 90% of the legwork needed to have a digital presence and start broadcasting your brand on the internet. Like I said, the internet wants you to succeed. All these places are there. Yelp wants to provide users the best possible information, right? So they're constantly scouring the internet. They're asking their users, hey, have you been here? Tell me about this restaurant, leave a review. Have you been to this place? Do you what do you think of this dry cleaner? Do you have any updates you can share with me? It's asking the internet at large and the users, right? Your customers, what do you think? And they're providing answers. It is up to you, the brand, the business, to go in and verify, to qualify, to review, right? To upload your own photos, your own images, to be in control of your brand. Do the free stuff first. That will take the majority of your initial efforts, right? And you will learn so much in that exercise. Step two is just become a user of those platforms, both in uh a browsing capacity so that you continue to learn and educate yourself, and in a posting capacity about your business. The little trick for each of those platforms, social media-wise, anyway, is you should be trying to post in the way that the users of that platform expect content to be received. You shouldn't be trying to force your TikTok video into your ex-audience or your Instagram crowd. You should be trying to treat those platforms with respect for the audience for the type of content that they're looking for. But again, to give you another long answer, Mike, it's do the free stuff first.

SPEAKER_00 14:49

Okay, it's a good answer. I appreciate you expanding on that. Let's talk about brand because brand is ultimately so important. And you see it every day. You you make buying decisions every day at a supermarket, and brands always matter. When you're not sure about the quality of something, people will go to the brand because they trust it, they know it, they've used it. What's the number one thing you can do to help develop your brand?

Inexpensive Luxuries And Food Trends

SPEAKER_01 15:17

In a word, quality. It used to be that the major brands of the world, we'll we'll use consumer package goods, right? CPG as our example. Maybe focus on coffee. Okay. It used to be that the major players had the advertising dollars. We'll put Folgers and Maxwell House front and center, right? That's what America knew were the trusted coffee brands. Everywhere you went, those were taking up the most retail space. Those were taking up the most advertising space in magazine and in newspapers and TV and radio. That's what we knew. That's what we trusted. So when other smaller players came along, they had to compete in a different way. They had to compete with in-person taste tests, with regional marketing, with local sales support, because they weren't able to pay to compete against the national advertising dollars of major brands. The internet changed all of that and it continues to change that with how it quantifies content that we as brands create. Today, the internet is very interest-driven. So, in other words, it doesn't matter how many followers you have, how many followers your brands have, how many followers. Don't get me wrong, it helps get your message out there. But you could start using the internet as a brand tomorrow and go viral and get your video in front of a million people. That didn't used to be the case. So that power, right? That power the internet gives us gives you the ability as a small brand, as a new brand, as a regional player to market yourself at the same level as national players. And what is that level, right? That level is quality. You could be a smaller, we'll keep it as a local coffee roaster. Maybe you just bought the roasting equipment and you have the capacity to put 200 bags of coffee out your doors a week, right? Very, very, very small operation, just niche. You could make your coffee look like the most premium, the most expensive, the most interesting coffee of the year with your digital marketing efforts because you bought a website, because you're invested in the story. For any fans of Seinfeld, and I'm dating myself a little bit, I call it the Jay Peterman effect, right? When Elaine was working with Jay Peterman on the catalog, she was coming up with stories about the product from Jay Peterman's travels, right? The urban sombrero and all these different things. The story was selling people on it. It's no different today. You just have the ability today to make a highly visual, high-quality story far cheaper with greater broadcasting power than ever before. And I think that's really the secret here is you don't phone it in, right? Don't phone it in on the free stuff. It's nowhere to spend. Don't have your cousin's kid make your logo for you and send you a scan that you only have one low resolution copy of and you're using it in all your marketing. I see major brands that have a low quality logo that can't be expanded, can't be blown up. You reach out to their marketing teams, they don't have a file to send you. That's a red flag. Just stop right there and say, hey, we're a big brand. We need a vector logo. We need a high quality photo of our products. We need a high quality video. Those are things to start identifying and say, okay, how do we achieve those within our marketing budget? And then you put those out there. Quality, quality, quality is how you compete against the big boys because people are going to gravitate towards what interests them most. Craft, niche, small, housemade, homemade. Those are all big sellers right now. The big boys are shaking. And it's the economy is rough. So, you know, economies of scale play into account here. Craft product, quality, regional, local, those are all still powerful, powerful selling tools.

SPEAKER_00 19:37

And you've seen those brands just grow dramatically to the point where the big guys now start to buy those small brands up to gain that same identity. So they're leveraging off of the work that was done to build that small brand. And now you have the national guys coming in and buying up those brands. So sometimes you're looking at a brand that you might think is a small brand, but when you flip over the label and you see the craft owns that are one of the large guys, then you know, and in that strategy, because they felt threatened and they saw the traction that these small companies were getting, consumer today loves inexpensive luxuries. A special cup of coffee, a bottle of maple syrup that costs 10 bucks or 20, whatever it is. But the consumer today, inexpensive luxuries are what happens because frankly, a lot of the consumers don't have a ton of extra money and aren't able to spend money on a Rolex watch or a Ferrari or so they indulge themselves with inexpensive luxuries. And that's why some of these brands have really gotten that type of traction.

SPEAKER_01 20:47

Absolutely. And they're looking for the maximum amount of value in those inexpensive luxuries. And my industry is food. So you're looking at the consumer spend has dipped post-summer, heading into the Thanksgiving winter holidays. A lot more at-home dining. But where there is growth is opportunities where the consumer knows that they're fueling themselves. You use the inexpensive luxury. I think that sugary food sales are probably taking a hit next to protein sales. So you take uh Starbucks, for example, and just off the top of my head, I'm gonna guess that protein foam sales are up and uh lemon, lemon cake sales or cake pop uh sales are down, right? Because the sugar is a luxury and the protein is a fuel. And people are making determinations and considerations like that. So being a user of these platforms, no matter what your industry, allows you to see where your consumer, where your buyer sentiment is ultimately trending.

The Future Of Dining And Innovation

SPEAKER_00 21:59

How do you see the trends going forward? And you know, let's talk about your business a little bit and let's talk about dining trends because we've seen dining trends with foot traffic being down, or seeing DoorDash and some of these delivery companies really surge as people continue to get home delivery takeout seems to continue to grow. Where does this all end up? How do you see it a couple of years down the road, five years down the road, as far as the food service industry, the restaurant industry? You see C stores now, aren't C stores. They're really quick serve restaurants with a gas station, guys like Wawa and Sheet. And where does it end up?

Menu Focus And Operational Efficiency

SPEAKER_01 22:37

In my humble opinion, and I like to look at this as the glass half full. This is my industry, and I have high hopes for it. If we can survive the pandemic, and I we as the industry can survive the pandemic at the level that we did, the current headwinds from the economy we're facing and heading into should not be insurmountable when we focus on innovation. And I think that is the biggest key. Innovation helps us identify growth sectors for consumers and improvements in our own operations. I think AI is going to help streamline many, many different industries. It could be uh, again, on the food side, it's order taking both from the consumer to the kitchen, but also from the kitchen to their distributor, right? If we can shave hours and minutes out of people's days, we can make people and systems more efficient. So I think innovation is going to drive cost efficiencies at the operational level, and it's also going to help us find the product mix that is right. And again, I'll focus it on food. That's why McDonald's brought the snap rack back. They're reading between the lines at that affordable, and they're not saying luxury, but they're saying affordable fuel. They know protein is high, low fat. That snack wrap hits on all cylinders. It's low fat, it's high protein. That's the perfect example of innovating to fit the current market. Now, it's not a completely novel thing, it's just a product that they brought back. Um, but I'm sure they'll continue to explore that category. We will probably see more wraps like that in the future. Um, you nailed it with the sheets and the wahwa and the convenience becoming a almost a fast casual restaurant. Consumer confidence in their convenience store chain food quality is continuing to grow. Local, regional, and national players will all set a new standard for food quality. And that's a continued growth sector for them, much in the same way that these users, uh, these consumers are using social media every day. You know, you're guaranteed to get in front of your audience on these platforms. That consumer is stopping for gas, is stopping for coffee, is commuting by these locations. Um, and those are often easier, faster, and less expensive stops than a sit-down dining establishment. But sit-down dining establishment is not dead by any stretch, right? That there's still growth opportunity there. Yes, we're shaking up. Optimizations are shuttling weaker business models out, but the consumer still wants an experience, right? They still want to have an opportunity to uh engage their community, their friends, to be social, to meet people, or even to tack that on to some other event where it's dinner and drinks and a movie, or it's just the social downtown atmosphere in the same way that restaurants want to succeed. Towns, regions, downtown chamber of commerces, that type, they want success across the board as well. So they're willing to support. When you think about the size of the average full-service restaurant menu 15, 20 years ago, right? You're flipping page after page after page. They've got overhead, they've got inventory, they've got workers that are specialized in doing one or two menu items, right? That's where you have to focus on your innovation in food service. You have to pare that menu down to something that's manageable. You have to look at cross-utilization in your inventory. You have to look at what your kitchen is able to produce with not only the labor that you currently have, but the labor that you expect to have for the foreseeable future. You know, are you in tight with your regional culinary schools? Is there a regional culinary school? You know, all types of considerations that might help you determine what the future mix of your menu is going to be. And I'll tell you, I went out with my wife uh for a date night, which a rare date night that we had recently, and we went to a local brew pub that is probably only been open for about two, two years. The menu was wood-fired pizza and chicken wings. And that was it. And you had your choice, obviously, of pizza toppings and sauce for the wings, and they had uh beer and other drinks and things we could choose from. It was a wonderful experience, and it checked off all of the boxes in terms of wanting to go out and have an experience. There were sights and sounds and smells, the staff was engaging. You know, you're watching the pizza in that big wood-fired oven, and you're, you know, you're smelling the food that you're soon going to be eating. But every little detail was, it made it uniquely their establishment from the way they cooked the wings and served and sauced and all these different things. The menu, the overhead on that establishment is so low. It's chicken wings, no balls, and some toppings, sauces that have an extremely long shelf life. The product is frozen. So if they lose power, you know, it's just a tightening up of circling the wagons. I think that is where um businesses will protect themselves with innovation.

SPEAKER_00 28:29

I I think a good example is Dave's hot chicken. That chain, I don't know if you've tried it. I just tried it recently. I'd never have had it. One opened up near us one night. Let's go in and try days hot chicken. That menu is one item, basically, with a couple of sides. That restaurant chain is absolutely exploded. And I I think that's the reason. You're going to Day's Hot Chicken for Day's Hot Chicken. That's what you're going for. And you get it and you eat it, and it's good, and then you go back again. I think you're 100% right in the paring down of the menus. You know, we used to go into the diners, right? The diners have these 50-page menus with everything. Like you can get everything. And I think that's very difficult to manage, as you said, from a cost standpoint, from every standpoint. And the quality can't be good on everything. And that's really where you fall down because it almost becomes like menu roulette. You're picking an item that you think could be good, but if it's bad, then you have a bad experience. We don't want menu roulette. You want uh some you want assurance that you're gonna go in and get a great meal and a great experience, like you said.

SPEAKER_01 29:33

On the food side, right? It's also not a fight to the bottom. It's not a you don't want to have a fight to the cheapest possible thing. You're using a basic iceberg mix with shredded carrot and that the pink cabbage looks like it belongs on a school cafeteria plate. You know, you're not gonna be winning any consumers over with your with your garden salad offerings. It's a combination of choosing the right mix of product for your customer, for your establishment, so that you're theoretically charging more and the consumer, the customer is happy about it.

Packaging As An Ingredient

SPEAKER_00 30:10

The other thing we talk about a lot, and I'm in the non foods business, so we talk a lot about packaging and the importance, especially because of the income. Increase in takeout, the increase in deliveries, the quality of the packaging, and how that relates to the experience. Because it directly relates. Many, many restaurants don't appreciate and understand that the packaging that they're serving their food in is a direct reflection of their restaurant when it comes home and what that food tastes like. And when you open the package, you know, and they're they're looking at it from a cost standpoint, but I don't know if you agree with me or not. I believe that takeout packaging is actually an ingredient. And I had an argument with uh ChatGPT on this, and I threw out the theory that takeout packaging is an ingredient, and it was arguing with me until I convinced it otherwise that I did. And because what does an ingredient do? An ingredient changes the quality or changes the experience or changes the taste of the food. Any ingredient that you put in is going to change the taste of the food. And it's chemistry, really, is what it is. And my argument is when you take that food and you put it in a package and it sits for 20 minutes, that is making changes to that food. And if you don't have it in the right package, uh for example, if you take french fries and put them in a foam container that's not venid and you close it up, it's gonna be mashed potatoes when it gone. So it has a direct effect on the quality and the taste of the food. So in my opinion, that's an ingredient. What I suggest for restaurant owners to do is cook your food, put it in a container, close it up, wait a half an hour, and then try it. You'd be shocked that most restaurant owners don't do that. They'll be really diligent on buying the best ingredients, but then they don't look at their takeout packaging as an ingredient as well. They'll go for the cheaper takeout packaging because that's an area they feel like they could save money, except for the fact that that is the key, the consumer getting a great experience when they bring it home. And I'll give you a quick example. I had a vendor of mine who really appreciated, I helped, I was able to help him out on something, and he was very appreciative, and he wanted to get me a gift card. And I was like, I don't really need a gift card, but he insisted, and of course, you don't want to say no to something like that. You only want to accept a gift when somebody wants to give it some, you know, is it's it's reasonable. And so he sends me a$250 gift card to Ruth Chris's steakhouse. We're sitting here and we're going, well, we have a Ruth Chris, it's in a casino. My wife and I aren't aren't casino people. And so what we did is we went out to Long Island where my daughter lives, and we got takeout. Now, we brought that takeout home, and the packaging was so exceptional. Everything you opened a packaging, it was beautiful. It was overkill in a lot of cases, but really not because of what you're spending for this meal. You know, when you're buying an$80 steak or a you're spending this kind of money and you're getting this home, and this packaging is an experience, and the food tastes delicious, and it was wonderful. And you go, that's kind of the extreme. That is a high-end restaurant, but there is packaging out there that, with from a pricing standpoint, that doesn't put you in the Roos Chris range, but does put you in a range that gets you really great quality food and offers an experience that helps that consumer to appreciate the quality of the food that you offer.

SPEAKER_01 33:38

Mike, I love it. And you know, I feel like the title for this episode needs to be quality and experience, the expectations of the customer, of the consumer, of the end user. That is the whole game. And if you ignore the interconnected layers, right, of how you got me thinking about putting the food, right? Making your food, having it sit for a half an hour in the packaging, and then try it. Take it one step further, bag it up, carry it somewhere. So you're testing the bag, use the utensils that you would give the consumer, right? That you give out. Are you giving the little plastic baggy utensils with the little salt and pepper packet that bends as soon as you put the fork into something? You know, that that's a freebie packet that is meant to be put out at like a grab and go stand where you don't care if Sally's grabbing 20 of them to stick in her kids' lunch, right? That is not something that you send out with your premium entree. So you need to be thinking about how are they cutting that food? How are they serving themselves that? How are they eating that food? It all plays out in the perceptions of the establishment. Whether or not they're going to reorder takeout or come in, guaranteed, you're probably gonna want to go to a Ruth Chris steakhouse next time you have the opportunity because of how well that meal was packaged and the fine details. And your brain says, well, if it's this good for takeout, I can't imagine what it is in person. Like that's gonna be phenomenal. You know, same, same for me when I'm ordering takeout and my expectations are met, right? That's fine. But when they're exceeded, it becomes something that you remember, something that you tell your friends and family about the flip side of that. Let's say you cheap out on the packaging. How does that affect your operation as a whole? Do the cooks and the servers who are packaging that product are they messing up meals? Is their X number of broken? Are you using foam that is ruining the product, whatever the case may be, just to save a buck? I think when you really start to dissect those things, you see how it can impact more than just the consumer experience. There can be other bottom line costs that just you're not seeing.

Digital Touchpoints Must Match In-Person Quality

SPEAKER_00 36:01

I could give you a real example of this. It is exactly what you're speaking to. We had this wing place that was local. They had a sit-down restaurant, and then they had a wing stop, is what they called it. And the wing stop was closer to us than the restaurant. So we would go to the wing stop, and this is when my son was younger, and we would go to the wing stop and we take out wings, and they were using an aluminum pan with a plug paper lid, and that was their takeout packaging for their wings in a t-shirt bag tied up. This is the packaging. And as you can imagine, the wings weren't great, you know, because they're sitting there for 20 minutes or so in that packaging. The the container's sweating, the wings aren't crispy, they they don't they taste okay, they're fine, but they're certainly not anything like what you would get in a restaurant for I don't know, five years. My son, this is the only wings he's ever had from this place. And one day we're in a car together and we're driving down the road and we were close to the restaurant. I said, Hey, let's go to this restaurant and get the wings. And he's like, Nah, he goes, Those wings aren't really that good. I go, stop right there. I said, Let's go in and try them. And we try them, and he's like, Oh my gosh, these are incredible. And it's like, yeah, but the problem is that the only thing that you experienced was the wings from the wing stop, and that's what you thought the quality was of the restaurant. And that happens every day. Owners have no idea the impact that when they send that out and they put it in a t-shirt bag and foam containers and it rolls around the car, and you know, you get it home and you open it up and it's it's sub-quality. They have no idea the impact that that's having on their restaurant.

SPEAKER_01 37:42

Now, take that same thought and apply it to digital marketing, to your web presence, to your social media, an owner operator who thinks, oh, I can just outsource this to my cousin's kid, and he can do it. You're you're devaluing a front-facing touch point of your brand right off the bat. Or I'm going to outsource my creative marketing, my website to this media company. We all have them in our neck of the woods, the local media company who has five radio stations, maybe a TV station and a newspaper deal, and they want to sell you banner ads on their website, and they're going to put you on the morning drive show or all this other stuff, and it's only going to cost you 500 bucks a month. I could crush an entire year of marketing for$500, right? You're putting the money in the wrong bucket. You're letting importance go for things that you should be holding at high import, right? The posts that go out on your social media should support your establishment if we're focusing on food, right? The same way that your takeout packaging does. If you value a customer experience, why would you turn over the digital experience to a lower level of quality, right? Why would you not hold it at the same level? Our brand is this, our perception is this, and it needs to be this. I've gone to eat at some wonderful local restaurants that have homemade food that would make you, you know, you'd have to wear your sweatpants. It's just the best food, the best, you know, atmosphere. And the only marketing and branding that they'll do is the photo of the marker board. You know, the white marker board says today specials are this and meatloaf 11, 90. That's it. They're happy, I guess, those types of establishments with their customer base, with they're not treating their marketing, their digital presence with the same respect and effort that they are, their food, their customer experience in person. And that's the trick, right? Whatever your level of quality is, you have in person, you're always trying to beat that. Same for online, same for digital, same for takeout packaging, same for the bathroom experience, right? If I judge an establishment by its bathroom, like there are little, little places where you can start to tackle. So if you, Mr. or Mrs. Listener, are hearing this and saying, well, gee, I work extra hard to make sure my establishment is clean. I hide the dumpsters. We just built a new fence to hide the dumpster. All of these things, right? That you know maybe you have somebody focused outside because the insects build up around your external lights and you don't want customers walking past that. All of those little considerations, you need to treat your digital social the same way.

SPEAKER_00 40:52

Agreed. That's an excellent point. Well, we're running out of time, and we didn't get to talk enough about AI because we wanted to get into that. That was one of our goals. But you know what? Let's do another one.

Quickstart AI: Treat It Like An Assistant

SPEAKER_01 41:05

Let's definitely do an AI, but I want to give you an AI nugget on the back of this that I think could be useful for anybody who wants to dive in now. AI should not be this scary, off-putting thing. There are dozens to choose from. That's probably the hardest part, right? Which one am I going to use? I've tried Copilot, I've tried Claude, and I've tried ChatGPT. They're all relatively the same. The point is try one for free and treat it like an amazing assistant. That's what it is. Treat it like AA, right? Well, maybe not AA. Think of AI as your flip it, right? It's your intelligent assistant. Whatever acronym you need to tell yourself to make your. The point is, you can ask it how to use it. But I would just start right off with what's the first thing you want to tackle? What's the challenge you're facing and talk to it like a human and seek advice? If you're launching a restaurant and you're you'd like to avoid the missteps that other restaurants have felt, ask it. Hey, I'm launching a new restaurant. This is the business model, this is the types of food I want to serve. What pitfalls should I avoid? And it'll give you a list. Or you could ask it for a list of restaurants that have failed or succeeded in your neck of the woods or your region and ask it why they failed or succeeded. If your industry is something else, right, focus it on that and start asking questions. AI isn't something that you have to learn how to use. You already know how to use it because you're a human being that speaks to other human beings. That is the only skill set you need. That is the only entry, right? Is that you speak words. Doesn't even have to be English. You don't even have to know how to type. You can just hit the little microphone button. I think that is as simple as I can make it. You treat it like a person and you ask it, here's the thing I want to do. Tell me how I use it, tell me how I go about this. That's it. That's step one.

Closing Thoughts And Part Two Tease

SPEAKER_00 43:13

That's a great uh way to end the podcast and a great set of advice. And Luke, I really want to thank you for coming on and spending some time with me today. Just wanted to say thank you.

SPEAKER_01 43:24

My pleasure, Mike. Always a pleasure talking to you. You get my gears turning as well. So uh I look forward to picking up part two of this conversation anytime.

SPEAKER_00 43:32

That sounds great. That's all we have for today. Who says selling toilet paper isn't glamorous? Thanks a lot and have a great day.