Month: June 2026

If you needed to bring in more money today – gun to your head – do you have proven tactics that would do exactly that at a profitable rate?

For years, I didn’t. That’s what’s frustrating and a little scary. You don’t feel like you’re in active control of your own business. Revenue is unpredictable. You’re either riding seasonal waves or hoping that foot traffic holds. And hope is not a strategy.

That’s why I think about the McRib. The McRib is one of the most fascinating things in business. Even though it looks like food – and I assure you it is not – all it really is, is marketing. McDonald’s doesn’t release the McRib seasonally. What they do is poll their franchisees, and when sales drop below a certain level, they release the McRib. It’s a lever. It’s a lever that McDonald’s corporate uses to support their franchisees when they need more money.

That’s all I’m trying to do for restaurant owners. Build McRibs into your business. Levers you can pull when you need more money. Hopefully easier to execute and less gross.

Here are the seven levers that I’ve built across my own businesses and hundreds of clients. Each one has been tested, measured, and proven to generate revenue on demand.

Lever 1: The Pricing Lever – The Five-Minute Fix Worth Six Figures

This is the single fastest way to make more money in your restaurant. It takes five minutes. The impact shows up immediately. And it’s a two-way door – if it doesn’t work, you change it back tomorrow.

Your top five to ten best-selling items probably constitute 50 to 70% of your total item sales. If you increase the price of just those top sellers by 10 to 15%, it creates a massive tidal wave in net profit. And there’s almost no risk, because people aren’t buying those items because of the price. They’re buying them because those are the things you’re known for.

Nobody is tracking your menu prices. Nobody cares about your business as much as you do. Most of the people reading this don’t know what they paid for gasoline last week. So few of your customers have visit frequency high enough to notice an incremental change.

When we benchmark clients using P90 pricing – positioning them at the 90th percentile of their competitive set – we typically find that 40 to 60% of menu items are underpriced. For one client, just a $1.18 increase in per-customer average spend translated to over $150,000 in additional annual revenue. No new marketing. No new customers. Just optimizing the pricing of what was already there.

Pull this lever today. It costs nothing and the return is immediate.

Lever 2: The Perfect Check Lever – Engineer the Experience, Not the Pitch

Your team can’t sell. Or they won’t sell. Or they’re afraid to sell. That’s because sales feels dirty. Nobody likes being sold to. But what you call upselling, I call advocacy. And advocacy isn’t selling. It’s service.

80% of the people sitting in your restaurant every single day are first-timers. They have no earthly idea what to order. They don’t know how to engage with you. They don’t know how you fit into their life. But they want the best imaginable version of this experience. You have to define right for them.

The Perfect Check is the most idealized version of your restaurant – the combination of items that creates the best possible experience for the customer. And when that combination happens to hit the per-customer average you’re trying to achieve, you’ve aligned customer satisfaction with profitability.

Lewis owns Ramen Lab. We projected a $3.39 per-customer lift based on our engineering report. Within 30 days, he’d already hit $3. That projects out to roughly $290,000 in increased annual revenue on flat covers. No new customers. No new marketing spend. No new menu items. Just restructuring what already existed.

Another client’s menu engineering report identified over $300,000 in hidden revenue through benchmarking, attachment rate optimization, and menu restructuring. These aren’t crazy adjustments. We’re helping people make more informed buying decisions based on what the restaurant is best in the world at.

This lever requires time and intention, not money. And the ROI compounds on every single customer, every single day.

Lever 3: The Events and Catering Lever – Where 30% Margins Live

Here’s the paradigm shift that changed my entire business. It takes the same level of effort to convince someone to come in and buy a fried chicken sandwich for $16 as it does to sell a $1,500 catering order. As it does to sell a $10,000 private event. Same effort. Same attention. Same 12 to 15 to 18 hour work days. The only difference is where you aim.

One of the things I talk about with every client is hitting a 15 to 20% net margin. The answer is a blended average. We work at 10 to 12% in-house, but then we supplement that with 30% margins on events, catering, and gift cards. That blended average puts you right at 20%.

My events and catering business went from $250,000 in inbound revenue to $1.6 million in under three years. And it only grew from there. I had a client in Miami who needed to sell $500,000 in events by the end of the year. She committed to 50 calls a day and hit her target in 20 business days.

Private events are annual occurring revenue when you do them the right way. If somebody has their holiday party with you and you don’t screw it up, why would they experiment? It becomes part of their tradition. It compounds over time.

This lever is outbound, math-driven, and the fastest path to profitability. Stop waiting for the phone to ring. Start dialing for dollars.

Lever 4: The Social Media DM Lever – 200 to 500 Covers for Zero Dollars

Social media is a low-intent platform. Nobody is scrolling Instagram looking for their next restaurant. You’re on social media to be entertained, and so is everyone else. Nobody is on social media to be sold.

So the goal is not to sell on social media. The goal is to use social media to get attention, and then convert that attention through direct messages.

Here’s what it looks like. Lulu likes one of my posts or comments on it. I hit her up: “Oh my God, Lulu, thank you so much for liking that post. As a family-owned and operated business, I can’t thank you enough for the support. I just want to let you know we see you, we love you, and we appreciate you.”

Lulu replies, because I’m literally the first restaurateur who has ever reached out to her directly with gratitude. She says, “Oh my God, thank you so much. We love what you guys do.” To which I say, “Have you been in recently?” She says, “No, it’s been on the list.” So I say, “You should come in this weekend. We have this special going on. Let me let the manager know that you’re coming in so we can say hello and take really good care of you.”

If you do that 35 times a day, every day for 30 days, that’s 1,000 offers. What’s the conversion rate? 20%. That’s the average conversion rate across hundreds of clients. They do this every day, every week, every month.

In 15 minutes a day, for zero dollars expended, you bring in an additional 200 covers a month. But none of those people are going to come in alone. They’re bringing at least one other person. So it’s really 300 covers. Maybe 400. Maybe 500.

This lever costs nothing. It takes 15 minutes a day. And it directly translates to more butts in seats. Start today.

Lever 5: The Pre-Loaded Year Lever – One Great Reason Every Month

How often do you think about your favorite restaurant? Never. People don’t have a loyalty problem. They have a memory problem. And what you’re there to do is remind them of how you fit into their lives.

The fallacy is that if you send an email offering five things to do, customers will scroll through, pick the one that resonates, and do it. That’s not what the data shows. When you offer a lot of things, people go, “That all sounds really good,” and then they delete the email because it’s overwhelming.

Instead of offering three options, offer three reasons to do one thing. And that one thing needs to be your absolute best offer rooted in what you already know works.

Here’s what a great year looks like. It’s one concept a month across 12 months, comprised of two annual events – signature things you’re famous for citywide. Four quarterly activations – co-branding exercises, chef collaborations, brand partnerships. And six LTOs.

The most effective LTOs are typically a combination of your best-selling items in a way that’s really exciting. I’ve got a client called The Cove. Their best-selling sandwich for lunch is a Reuben, and their best-selling entree for dinner on weekends is prime rib. So we created a prime rib Reuben concept. People drove in for hours to eat it. Of course they did. It sounds delicious, and it falls in line with what people are already buying.

At Preux & Proper, we did Fat Tuesday as a week-long annual event. Then Sleigh Bells on Spring – it looked like Instagram threw up all over my 6,000-square-foot, two-story restaurant. We spent $20,000 on decorations. Tiny customized menu. Ran it the entire month with several activations. Those were things you had to come see me for.

For quarterlies, we did chef collaborations. July is typically a terrible month in Los Angeles, so we ran a barbecue pop-up – only on weekends, because I’m trying to drive traffic when people are already out, not when they don’t want to come in.

This lever replaces chaos with a calendar. Annual planning should be a greatest hits album. You already know what’s going to work.

Lever 6: The Affiliate and Network Effect Lever – Proximity Over Influencers

In every other industry, there are people that drive traffic to other people’s businesses. In our industry, we look at community influencers and think digital – the children with sunglasses at night taking pictures of the food you’re not charging them for. The problem is you never own that audience.

I think you focus on proximity instead. When I was in downtown Los Angeles, the relationships I owned were one-to-one in nature. I was always working directly with people that would come across others who would love what I do for a living – hotel concierge, apartment building managers, office managers.

My pitch was not what you’d think. A lazy person’s pitch is, “Hey, let’s collaborate. I want to offer discounts to everyone in your building.” That’s transactional. That doesn’t resonate.

Instead: “Hey Sandy, it’s Josh. I’m at Preux & Proper right down the street. I think you’d really like what we do. Come in, bring a friend, have dinner on me. No strings attached. I just want to get to know you.” Sandy comes in, has an amazing time. A week later I ask, “What did you think?” She loved it. Then I say, “You know the people in your building way better than me. What’s worked in the past? How can we engage them?”

Now it’s not my thing for my business. It’s Sandy’s thing with me that we’re doing for the people she serves. It’s far more resonant because Sandy is making an educated guess with far more context than I could ever have.

There’s a great quote from Paul Allen: when you’re building a business, the trick is to do things that don’t scale. Building one-to-one relationships over time doesn’t scale. But you own the outcome in every market where you do it.

Lever 7: The Loyalty and House Account Lever – Status Over Discounts

The hardest thing about getting people to sign up for a loyalty program is that we treat it as a transaction. “Sign up for our mailing list, I’ll give you a free piece of pie.” That doesn’t make people feel seen or special. They feel like a tramp who’s trading their personal information for a single dessert.

People don’t want discounts or freebies. They want to feel seen. They want to feel special. They want to feel like they’re part of something. And no one has perfected this model better than credit card companies.

All credit card companies do the same thing – they loan you money at high interest. All restaurants do the same thing – sell food at a markup. Both are commodities. But you’re an Amex person or a Chase person, and it says something about who you are. How? Not through points and redemption. Through status and access to the inaccessible.

Can you offer priority reservations on Valentine’s Day? Can you have a secret menu only available to loyalty members? For those of you flipping your menu seasonally, why not do a preview two hours on a Thursday, from five to seven, with a couple of mini cocktails, so your best customers see it a week before it releases?

Here’s how we get sign-ups. When we drop the check, we say: “Did you want the money you spent today to go towards your points on your house account?” The customer says, “What’s a house account?” We explain it’s a loyalty program with access to off-menu items and off-calendar events we throw for our best customers. All we need is a phone number. An hour later, we text them: “We’d love to give you something special on your birthday. Click here to complete your profile.”

We anchor the benefit to the one thing everyone has – a birthday. We set the expectation that every time we reach out, we’ll surprise and delight them with things no one else can get.

Your 7-Day Revenue Lever Action Plan

Day 1: Pull the pricing lever. Identify your top five to ten best sellers. Raise prices 10 to 15%. This takes five minutes and the impact is immediate. It’s a two-way door. Nobody’s watching.

Day 2: Map your Perfect Check. Find your best server. What does their average check look like? That’s your target. Document what they do and start teaching it to the rest of the team.

Day 3: Start your outbound engine. Make 20 calls to law firms, accounting firms, and large offices near your restaurant. Ask if they have events or catering needs coming up. Track calls made, not revenue generated. Leading indicators drive lagging indicators.

Day 4: Launch the DM strategy. Spend 15 minutes responding to every person who engages with your social media. Use the script: gratitude, connection, invitation. 35 DMs a day, 1,000 a month, 20% conversion. Do the math.

Day 5: Build your pre-loaded year. Map the next 12 months. Two annual events. Four quarterly activations. Six LTOs based on your best sellers. Stop trying new things. Run a greatest hits album.

Day 6: Identify three proximity partners. Who are the hotel concierge, apartment managers, and office managers within walking distance? Invite them in for dinner on you. No strings attached. Build the relationship first.

Day 7: Launch your house account. Train your team to ask one question when they drop every check: “Did you want this to go towards your house account?” Track how many sign-ups you get this weekend. That’s the beginning of your owned audience.

How much does all of this cost? Not a dime. It costs time and intention. Money likes speed. Start today.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a revenue lever in the restaurant business?

A revenue lever is a mechanical action you can pull to generate a predictable revenue increase on demand. Think of the McRib – McDonald’s doesn’t release it seasonally. They poll their franchisees, and when sales drop below a certain level, they release it. It’s a lever. Your restaurant needs the same thing: proven tactics you can deploy whenever you need more money, from pricing adjustments to outbound catering calls to social media DM campaigns.

How many revenue levers should a restaurant have?

At minimum, you should have levers across all three categories: profitability (pricing, menu engineering), awareness and conversion (social media DMs, SEO, affiliate relationships), and customer frequency (pre-loaded year, loyalty programs, LTOs). The goal is having multiple levers so you’re never dependent on any single tactic or any single season.

What is the fastest revenue lever I can pull today?

The pricing lever. Identify your top five to ten best-selling items, which typically represent 50 to 70% of total sales. Raise their prices by 10 to 15%. It takes five minutes, the impact shows up immediately, and it’s a two-way door – if it doesn’t work, you change it back tomorrow. One client added over $150,000 in annual revenue from just a $1.18 per-customer increase.

How does the social media DM lever work for restaurants?

Post content to generate engagement, then directly message everyone who likes or comments. Use a gratitude-first script: thank them, tell them you see them, then invite them in with a specific offer or event. Do 35 DMs a day for 30 days – that’s 1,000 offers. The average conversion rate across hundreds of clients is 20%, which translates to 200 or more covers a month. Since they bring guests, the real number is 300 to 500 additional covers for zero dollars spent.

What is the pre-loaded year strategy for restaurants?

Instead of figuring out what to do month by month, plan the entire year in advance: two annual signature events, four quarterly activations like chef collaborations or brand partnerships, and six limited-time offers based on your best sellers. Give your audience one great reason to come in every month instead of five mediocre ones. Annual planning should be a greatest hits album – you already know what works.

I want to start with a number that should terrify you. Before I figured out how to optimize flow in my restaurant – how to maximize the capacity of every stick of furniture I had – the ignorance tax I paid was $1,144,000.

That’s the delta between what I was actually making and what I should have been making. Every year. For three years. I was completely unaware that I wasn’t making the money. Completely healthy, completely busy – and completely leaving over a million dollars on the table.

Here’s why. The flow of your restaurant – the single most important operational metric you have – is probably being dictated by a 19-year-old part-timer who’s going through a breakup right now. Flow is everything. It’s how you capitalize. And if you’re not deliberately engineering it, you’re leaving six figures on the table every single year.

You Don’t Sell Food and Beverage. You Sell Seats for Defined Periods of Time.

What industry most closely parallels the restaurant business? It’s not retail. It’s not theater. It’s the airline industry. What does Delta sell? Not hospitality. Not travel. Not convenience. Delta sells seats on a plane. And they’ve become best in the world at getting you on and off that plane as efficiently as possible.

Your restaurant works the same way. How much more money would you make off one more bar stool? One more table? Not on a Tuesday when you’re half full – but when you’re busier than you can handle and it’s 7:30 on a Saturday night. That’s your highest-margin inventory, and you’re almost certainly not maximizing it.

We think of inventory as food and beverage. We need to think about tables and chairs. You do not sell food and beverage. You sell a seat at a table for a defined period of time.

Are You in the Manufacturing Business or the Experience Business?

Before you can optimize flow, you need to answer one question: what business are you actually in?

There’s a deli down the street from me that I talk about all the time. They have servers that take care of every table – and I put “take care of” in air quotes because they do a terrible job. They have servers because they think they’re in the experience business. But I don’t go to that deli for the experience. I go for the Reuben. That’s why I go.

If they wanted to offer me an exceptional experience based on why I actually use them, they would put a tablet on the table. They would let me order on my phone. I shouldn’t have to wait because they’re deeply understaffed, because nobody wants to work there, because they can’t make enough money – because they think they’re in the experience business when they’re actually in the manufacturing business.

At my fast casual fried chicken concept, South City, we had what LA Weekly rated the best fried chicken sandwich in the city. But when it took 20 minutes to get it into someone’s hands, the best sandwich in the world tasted like garbage. Why? Because it ruined their lunch hour. They had 60 minutes. It took 15 minutes to get there and 15 to get back. That left 30 minutes – and 20 of those were spent waiting.

So during our peak lunch window – 11:30 to 1:30 – we pushed everyone to kiosks. Not because we didn’t value hospitality. Because during that manufacturing window, speed IS the hospitality. Any other time, you could order from a person. But during peak, the kiosk made you faster, which made your lunch better.

The Katana Experience: 45 Minutes of Perfection

Let me tell you a story that changed how I think about flow forever.

I took my wife to Katana in Los Angeles for one of our wedding anniversaries. It’s a sushi concept on Sunset Boulevard that’s been around forever. We had an absolutely amazing experience. Here’s what it looked like.

We walk in. They say, “Happy anniversary.” They seat us. They ask if we want the wine list. We said water is fine. Flat, sparkling, or tap? Tap. Salt of the earth people. The server walks up, walks us through the menu, tells us the chef would prefer they take the entire order at once and then course it out. So we do.

They coursed it out perfectly. Amazing experience. At the conclusion, they pre-bussed the table. Offered dessert. We passed – we were going somewhere else for dessert. They asked if we wanted refills on water. We said no. So they removed the empty water glasses. Brought the check. I paid. They removed the check. And eventually we got up.

The reason we got up was that it was just me and my wife sitting at an empty table with a candle on it. The entire experience took 45 minutes.

Now let me ask you something. If they had dragged it out to 55 minutes – slower courses, waited longer to bring the bill – would that have created more perceived value? Would you have enjoyed it more?

No. You would not. The reason people don’t leave is because they don’t know it’s time to go. You control the pace of the experience. They do not. When you’re sitting at a perfectly manicured table with nothing on it, it’s time to go. And they know that.

I don’t want to hear that people want to sit in your restaurant for three hours. They don’t. It’s not that interesting. They have other things to do with their lives.

Hesitation Is a Hidden Expense

Here’s what I believe. On your busiest nights, you’re losing money in places you’re not tracking.

Indecision at the table. Servers hesitating instead of leading the conversation. Lag between courses. The kitchen waiting on the floor. The floor waiting on the kitchen. Every second of hesitation during peak hours is a hidden expense. It’s not on your P&L, it’s not in your POS reports, but it’s costing you more than almost any line item on your budget.

And the bottlenecks exist across every tier of dining. When I see lines at a restaurant, what I see is inefficiency. Every person in that line is trading time – and time is the one thing they’re not willing to part with during a lunch break.

At my Hollywood bar, we pulled the stools away from the bar at 9 PM on weekends. During the week, they lived there permanently. But on a Saturday night, seated bar guests made it harder for standing customers to order. Standing customers with cash in hand were higher-velocity revenue. The stools were literally slowing down our highest-margin hours.

Check Your Back-End Settings: Someone Else Is Limiting Your Revenue

For those of you using waitlist or reservation software, for those leveraging online delivery – who set your turn times? Who’s setting the capacity and availability?

I can almost guarantee those settings are optimized for the convenience of your host or your general manager – neither of whom is incentivized to make sure you’re as busy as possible. The same applies to online delivery. Typically it’s the people working the line setting those limits, not the person paying the bills. But it should be the person paying the bills.

Go into the back end of every system you use – reservations, waitlist, delivery – and make sure they’re optimized so that when you have the most demand, you can absorb the most capacity. This is a two-minute fix that can add thousands per month.

The booking landscape has also changed dramatically. At Preux & Proper on a Monday, we used to be fully committed for Friday. By 2019 into 2020, we weren’t fully committed on a Friday until Friday. People are making decisions more last minute because technology gives them visibility. If you’re not using waitlist software, if it’s not abundantly clear how quickly people will be serviced at your location, you’re leaving money on the table.

Forget Tuesdays. Scale On-Peak.

How much time and effort have you put into initiatives that ended up doing nothing for your business? That Tuesday promo that was totally going to turn around the week? That late-night happy hour that just never took off?

Here’s why that stuff doesn’t work. When you ask someone to come in on a Tuesday, you’re not just asking them to patronize your restaurant. You’re asking them to get off the couch, put on pants, get in their car, and drive to a place they don’t want to go to eat food they didn’t want to eat when they’d rather be doing something else. You’re trying to alter behavior. And altering behavior is incredibly expensive.

Instead, focus on influencing behavior. People who are already out on a Saturday are easy to redirect. “You’re already out – why don’t you spend some time with me?” That’s a fundamentally different proposition. High margin. Low overhead.

All of you have untapped capacity. All of you. I assure you, there’s an extra $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 a week sitting in under-capitalized revenue on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays.

In Los Angeles, when it drizzles, revenue drops by two-thirds. I never cared. I made all the money I needed on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Tuesday and Wednesday were surplus – just extra profit.

Less for Less: On-Peak Promotions That Don’t Require Discounting

At Preux & Proper, with a per-customer average of about $125, even customers who had the best dinner of their lives weren’t coming back soon. They’d either saved up for the experience or they had options and wouldn’t repeat the same one. So I had to figure out what else I could sell them.

We launched a flights and bytes concept for happy hour. You could come in before dinner or late night after, enjoy a curated experience at a lower price point with flat margins. It wasn’t a discount. It was a different experience at a different price – less for less. The customer got something fun, I got full margin, and it drove people to the shoulders around my peak hours.

One of my clients, Tarja from Dogville, runs a casual burger concept. We created a burger flight paired with rotating complimentary beers, offered only from 4 to 6 PM on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. People were already out. It was a cool, fun thing to do. On-peak volume scaled by 36%.

Discounting is the last bastion of a desperate brand. You don’t need to discount. You need to create experiences that bring people in at full margin during the hours when they’re already inclined to spend money.

Your 7-Day Flow Optimization Action Plan

Day 1: Answer the question. Are you in the manufacturing business or the experience business? If people come to you for speed and convenience, optimize for throughput. If they come for the experience, choreograph every second of it. Most restaurants are confused about which one they are.

Day 2: Walk through your restaurant during peak. Arrive like a customer. Where do you wait? Where does your team hesitate? Where does the kitchen stall? Where does the floor stall? Write down every friction point. Those are your hidden expenses.

Day 3: Audit your back-end settings. Open your reservation system, your waitlist software, your delivery platform. Who set the turn times? Are they optimized for your maximum capacity during peak, or for the convenience of your team? Adjust them today.

Day 4: Calculate your ignorance tax. What’s the delta between what you’re making on weekends and what you could be making with optimized flow? If you’re doing $36K weekends and could be doing $58K – that gap is your ignorance tax. Put a number on it.

Day 5: Design one on-peak promotion. Not a discount. A less-for-less experience that gives people a reason to come in during shoulder hours at full margin. Think flights and bytes. Think burger flights. Think curated experiences, not coupons.

Day 6: Choreograph your closing sequence. Pre-buss. Offer dessert. If they pass, remove the water glasses. Present the check. Remove the check. The table should communicate “it’s time to go” without anyone saying a word. Practice it this weekend.

Day 7: Forget Tuesday. Calculate how much additional revenue you’d generate if you added just one more turn to your Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. That number will dwarf anything you could build on a slow night. Focus there. Make your weekly money on the weekend, and let Tuesday take care of itself.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I optimize restaurant flow without rushing guests?

You don’t rush – you choreograph. I took my wife to Katana for our anniversary. The entire experience was 45 minutes. It wasn’t rushed. It was perfect. Every course arrived at the right moment. The table was cleared naturally. The check appeared seamlessly. When we were sitting at an empty table with just a candle, we knew it was time to go. Guests don’t feel rushed when the experience is complete. They feel rushed when the experience is interrupted.

What is the ignorance tax in restaurant operations?

The ignorance tax is the money you lose because you don’t know what you don’t know. Before I optimized flow at my fine dining restaurant, the gap between what I was making and what I should have been making was $1,144,000 over three years. That’s the ignorance tax. It includes under-booked peak hours, sub-optimal turn times, inefficient back-end settings, and capacity you’re not using.

Should I focus on growing Tuesday sales or maximizing weekend revenue?

Maximize weekends first. Always. Growing Tuesday sales requires altering customer behavior – getting them to do something they don’t want to do – at poor margins with high overhead. Growing weekend sales means influencing behavior during hours when people already want to be out. Most restaurants have $5,000 to $15,000 per week in under-capitalized weekend revenue. Tuesday will fill itself when you’re so busy every other night that it’s the only day people can get in.

How do I know if my restaurant is a manufacturing or experience business?

Ask why your customers come to you. If they come for speed, convenience, and a specific product – you’re manufacturing. Optimize for throughput. If they come for the ambiance, service, and occasion – you’re experience. Choreograph every second. Most fast casual and quick service concepts are manufacturing businesses pretending to be experience businesses, and it’s killing their throughput.

What are on-peak promotions and how do they work without discounting?

On-peak promotions are less-for-less experiences that bring people in during shoulder hours at full margin. At Preux & Proper, we did a flights and bytes concept before and after dinner service. A client ran burger flights with rotating beers from 4 to 6 PM on weekends and scaled on-peak volume by 36%. The key is offering a different experience at a lower price point – not discounting your existing experience. People are already out. Give them a reason to spend time with you.

I’m going to share the paradigm shift that changed my entire business. It took the same level of effort to convince someone to come in and buy a fried chicken sandwich for $16 as it did to sell a $1,500 catering order. As it did to sell a $10,000 private event.

Read that again. Same effort. Same attention. Same 12 to 15 to 18 hour work days. The only difference was where I aimed.

Once I understood that, I stopped going after the small money. I started chasing the big money. I started dialing for dollars. And everything changed.

I had a decent events business at my restaurant. We were doing about $250,000 a year in inbound events. Within 12 months of switching to outbound, I grew it to a million dollars. The next year, we did $1.6 million. And it only grew from there.

Here’s the thing about private events and catering that most restaurant owners don’t realize: they’re annual occurring revenue when you do them the right way. If somebody has their holiday party with you and you don’t screw it up, why would they experiment? It becomes part of their tradition. It becomes part of their routine. It compounds over time.

Why B2B Is Where the Real Money Lives

One of the things I talk about with every client is hitting a 15 to 20% net margin. And people always ask, “How do you do it if we never talk about cost controls?”

The answer is a blended average. We work at 10 to 12% in-house, but then we supplement that with 30% margins on events, catering, and gift cards. That blended average puts you right at 20%.

Think about what you don’t carry with catering and events compared to in-house dining. You’re not paying for the full theater of a restaurant experience during those transactions. The margin structure is fundamentally different. And when you stack that on top of your existing infrastructure – same kitchen, same staff, same fixed overhead – the incremental cost is minimal.

My restaurants existed only to promote my catering and events business. Because that’s where the money was. That’s where the volume was. That’s where the margin was. The dining room was the marketing engine. The events and catering were the profit engine.

B2B is a more predictable sales cycle. You’re not trying to sell people something they don’t want. You’re trying to convince them to do something they’re already going to do – just do it with you. Companies are going to order catering. They’re going to throw holiday parties. They’re going to host client dinners. The only question is whether they do it with you or with someone else.

Understanding Who You’re Selling To

To sell anything effectively, you need to understand the people you’re selling to. And the people who professionally book catering and events are very nervous people.

Think about it. Imagine you’re setting up a holiday party for everybody at your company, and your overall performance review is going to be influenced by how it goes. The final sentiment at the close of the year is going to be rooted in the performance of someone that is not you – the restaurant or caterer you chose.

These people are not looking for you to give them a deal. They’re not trying to save money. More than anything, they’re looking to not get fired.

People only book for one of two use cases. Either they’re booking for people who give them money, or for people they’re directly related to. They don’t want to disappoint their boss, just like they don’t want to disappoint their mother-in-law.

What you’re selling isn’t food and beverage. It’s not events and catering. What you’re selling is confidence. And confidence comes from making the buyer feel like everything is handled, everything is going to be perfect, and they’re going to look great for choosing you.

Stop Waiting for the Phone to Ring

Here’s where most restaurants fail with catering and events. They wait for inbound inquiries. They put a “Private Events” tab on their website and hope someone fills out the form. Hoping for someone to fix your problems for you is not a great strategy.

I want you to think in terms of leverage. What are high-leverage activities you can do that will guarantee you more money? And the answer is outbound. Cold calling and cold emailing people who are more than likely going to do the thing you’re trying to sell them into.

Let me give you a quick example. I had a chef I work with in a very small metro. I told him to use our targeting system and reach out to as many people as he could, asking if they were hosting a holiday party that year. I didn’t hear from him for three weeks. Then he follows up and says, “Well, Josh, it didn’t work.”

I said, hold on. Tell me what you did, and then we’ll figure out what didn’t work.

He says he spent all this time on it and only brought in $9,000 in event sales. So I asked him how much time he actually spent. We went through the math. He spent about six hours on it. That’s $1,500 per hour.

A chef owner spent six hours doing outreach and generated $1,500 per hour for that effort. What else could he possibly be doing that’s worth $1,500 an hour? And if he were to 10x that effort, what would happen? A lot more money.

The Math of Outbound: Leading vs. Lagging Indicators

Most restaurant owners focus on lagging indicators – sales, revenue, event bookings. I don’t care about event sales as a metric. I worry about the things you do on the front end to get event sales. Those are leading indicators, and the best leading indicator is calls and emails.

Let me walk you through a real example. I work with a fine dining restaurant in Miami. She reaches out and says, “We need to sell $500,000 worth of events by the end of the year.” And it’s September.

Challenge accepted. Here’s the process we used.

For her to sell $500,000 in events at her tier, she needed to sell roughly 100 events at $5,000 each. We subtracted out her current events and the people she thought were going to book – all the fence-sitters, all the people we knew would ultimately close. That left us needing 75 new $5,000 events.

Then we looked at close rates. We assumed that if her targeting was right, one out of every 10 would close. Then I said, let’s make it worse. Let’s assume a 5% close rate – half that. At 5%, she’d need to reach out to 1,500 businesses to get those 75 bookings.

Based on the timeline from September, we had roughly 30 business days. So we agreed she would make 50 calls a day over those 30 business days.

Did she hit her target? She sold $500,000 worth of events in about 20 business days. Not 30. Twenty. Why? Because her targeting got better. Her close rate got better. Her pitch got better. She iterated over time. She didn’t stop. She actually stopped before reaching out to 1,500 businesses because she was already at capacity. She couldn’t take on any more business.

That’s what I want you to understand. You are in control of how much money you make. You just don’t know what you’re supposed to do with your time to make it.

Who to Target: The Law Firm Lesson

I worked at a law firm for about six months until I got fired. I’ve been fired from literally every job I’ve ever had, which is why I was forced into entrepreneurship at 24 years old. But when I worked for that law firm, the only thing I was qualified to do was order lunch for them.

Here’s what I found. Number one, they wanted variety. Number two, they had no budget – because they were always billing it back to the client.

So when I started South City fried chicken and began building our corporate catering strategy, I went straight to law firms. Then accounting firms. Then economics firms. Any large office where I knew they were billing catering back to the client.

Today, we use targeting systems to create prospecting lists based on proximity, industry, headcount, and then rank them by their perceived capacity to pay. Then we just reach out to those people.

Most law firms cater. They cater all the time. They can’t stop catering because they don’t have a budget – they bill it back. When I worked at that law firm, they ordered catering five days a week, and all they cared about was that it was delicious.

If you just started by making 20 calls a day, five days a week, you’d be making hundreds of calls a month. And it would directly translate to more money in your pocket.

Speed Kills the Competition

Here’s a question. When somebody reaches out to book on your website, how quickly do you get back to them? 24 hours? 48 hours?

The goal is one hour. But here’s the real statistic. If you reply to somebody within one minute of them filling out a form, you are 391% more likely to close that client.

One of the first things we do with all of our clients is replace the forms on their website with automation-backed forms. When somebody fills out a form, it immediately replies via text: “Hey, this is Josh. I want to let you know we got your inquiry and we’re working on it now. I’m going to follow up with you in less than five minutes with a couple of follow-up questions.”

Then four minutes later, an automated email goes out with specific questions we could have asked on the form but didn’t. Why didn’t we ask them on the form? Because we’re trying to engage in an authentic way.

Here’s what I figured out about my own business. When people reach out with an inquiry, they don’t want to book an event with you specifically. They just want to book an event. Period. Your goal is to stop their prospecting process. Make the inquiry they send you the last one they make, because you seem like you’re on top of it.

This works especially well in our industry because most restaurants aren’t aware of these automations. So it feels like a high level of service without tech getting in the way.

The Hand-Raising Email: Turn Your B2C List Into B2B Gold

Here’s a strategy that has generated massive results for my clients. How many people on your mailing list own businesses or work for businesses that could host a private event? How many of them work for companies that do catering all the time?

You don’t know. You can’t sort your list that way. So we use something called a hand-raising email to pull the B2B prospects out of your B2C list.

Instead of saying “Did you know we do corporate catering?” – which is talking about yourself with no benefit – we give it away. Here’s how it works.

We send an email to the entire list: “We are so excited about our new private events program. We’ve upgraded it this year, and to celebrate, we’re going to give away a complimentary holiday party to someone on this list for up to 250 people. To enter, reply with your name, business name, business website, total number of people, and the person who’ll be managing the event.”

Then we get a flood of responses. And I don’t know how this is possible, but it seems like every single time, the winner is the person with the fewest number of employees.

Then I send out a bulk message to everyone: “Congratulations to Lulu, she won, and we’re so happy to serve her. For those of you that didn’t win, I want you to feel like winners too. I’m going to be reaching out directly.”

Then I reach out to each person individually. “Hey Adam, you lost, but you’re not a loser. You’re a winner to me. And you still have this holiday party that you need to book for 150 people on December 19. I’d love to host it for you. Why don’t we connect, and I’ll go through all the things we can do. I assure you, I can plus up the event to the point where you feel like a winner too.”

It works. It works really well. Because they already opened your emails. They already know, like, and trust you. They already told you they have an event to plan. Now you’re just going to plan it together.

What It Looks Like When It Works

The Dundee Dell in Omaha, Nebraska – literally the oldest bar in Omaha – saw private events skyrocket by over 100% compared to the previous two years after implementing these strategies.

Marquise Steakhouse in Milton, Ontario increased the average price of their private events by 50% and doubled their event bookings.

These aren’t flukes. These are the predictable results of having best-in-class assets, an outbound system, and the discipline to make the calls.

And here’s what I’ll tell you from my own experience. When I ran a virtual reservationist service for hundreds of restaurants, I literally guaranteed complete strangers a 15% lift in top-line sales within two weeks. We hit it every time. Why? Because everyone was under-booked. The capacity was there. It just wasn’t being used.

Your 7-Day Catering and Events Outbound Action Plan

Day 1: Reach out to every past client. Contact every past event and catering client you’ve ever had. Invite them in for lunch or dinner. Say, “We appreciate you. Curious to know – do you have anything coming up on the horizon?” They’ve already given you money. They already know, like, and trust you. Bridge the gap and restart the conversation.

Day 2: Build your targeting list. Identify law firms, accounting firms, and large offices within your delivery radius. Focus on businesses that are billing catering back to clients. Create a list of at least 100 prospects to start.

Day 3: Set up automated response. Replace the forms on your website with automation-backed forms that send an immediate text response and a follow-up email within five minutes. Remember: responding within one minute makes you 391% more likely to close.

Day 4: Create your hand-raising email. Draft an email to your existing mailing list offering a complimentary event to one lucky winner. This pulls B2B prospects out of your B2C list without any hard selling.

Day 5: Start making calls. Commit to 20 outbound calls per day. That’s hundreds of calls per month. Track your leading indicators – calls made, emails sent – not just your lagging indicators like revenue.

Day 6: Audit your response speed. Time how long it takes your team to respond to an inbound event inquiry right now. If it’s more than an hour, fix it. The inquiry they make with you should be the last one they make.

Day 7: Do the math. Calculate what your business looks like with a blended margin. If in-house runs at 10-12% and events and catering run at 30%, what does your total margin look like when B2B represents 20% of your revenue? 30%? 40%? That number is your north star.

How much does all of this cost? Not a dime. It costs time and intention. And the ROI is the fastest money you’ll ever make in the restaurant business. Money likes speed. Start today.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I start a restaurant catering business with no existing clients?

Start with your mailing list. Use a hand-raising email to identify B2B prospects from your existing B2C audience. Then build a targeting list of law firms, accounting firms, and large offices near you – businesses that cater regularly and bill it back to clients. Make 20 outbound calls a day. A chef I worked with spent just six hours on outreach and generated $9,000 in event sales. That’s $1,500 per hour for his effort.

What margins should I expect from restaurant catering?

Events and catering typically run at 30% margins compared to 10-12% for in-house dining. When you blend those revenue streams together, your overall margin jumps to 15-20% without cutting a single cost. My events business went from $250K in inbound revenue to $1.6 million in under three years. Same kitchen. Same staff. Same fixed overhead.

How many outbound calls do I need to make to fill my events calendar?

It depends on your close rate and average event size. A client in Miami needed $500,000 in events. We assumed a 5% close rate and calculated she’d need to reach 1,500 businesses. She committed to 50 calls a day and hit her target in 20 business days – not because the math was wrong, but because her pitch improved with practice and she closed better than 5%.

How quickly should I respond to catering and event inquiries?

Within one hour at the absolute maximum. But the data shows that if you reply within one minute, you are 391% more likely to close. We use automation-backed forms that send an immediate text response and a follow-up email within five minutes. The goal is to stop their prospecting process. Make yours the last inquiry they send.

How do I make catering and event revenue recurring?

Private events are annual occurring revenue when you do them the right way. If a company has their holiday party with you and you don’t screw it up, it becomes tradition. They won’t experiment. The same applies to regular corporate catering – law firms I’ve worked with order catering five days a week. Once you’re their vendor, switching is friction they don’t need. The key is not screwing up the first one and following up consistently.