Porch and Parish The Podcast
Our mission is to make sure every Zachary resident feels heard and engaged! Host Mike Gennaro facilitates candid conversations with local leaders, influencers and innovators in Zachary, Louisiana and beyond with the help of producer Mike Holt. New episode every Monday at noon!
Porch and Parish The Podcast
Transforming Hospitality: Marketing Masterclass with Industry Expert Rob Powell
Unlock the secrets to transforming your hospitality business with our latest episode featuring marketing maestro Rob Powell. With an illustrious career that includes stints at Disney and Grand Casinos, Rob shares his unparalleled insights into creating unforgettable customer experiences and building rock-solid brands. Learn why marketing is the lifeblood of the hospitality industry and how its absence can lead to devastating customer dissatisfaction.
Discover the power of personalization and data-driven decisions in reshaping business operations, especially during these post-pandemic times. From contactless delivery methods to omni-channel marketing, Rob discusses the new norms and how businesses can adapt. Hear about the marketing triumphs of the NFL and ESPN and the cautionary tales of Bud Light, and understand why consistent messaging is key to maintaining brand integrity.
In our engaging final segments, we delve into innovative strategies for boosting customer engagement and loyalty. Rob shares brilliant examples of creative promotions that have reignited customer interest and driven repeat visits in the restaurant and casino industries. We also tackle the sensitive issue of online reviews and reputation management, offering practical tips to turn negative feedback into positive outcomes. Tune in for an episode brimming with actionable insights and eye-opening stories from a true industry expert.
It's Jesus Christ Superstar meets Sister Act! Inspired bt4 gospels of the New Testament!
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Hey, baton Rouge, I'm Rob Powell. Keep listening to Porch and Parish the podcast.
Speaker 2:Waiter, can we get our check please? Today we're going to talk hospitality, that is, hotels and resorts, restaurants and cafes, events venues, travel, tourism and entertainment venues. Notice that many of these struggle when managers don't know how to well fill in the blank effectively. That's when we, the patrons, get frustrated or disappointed because these companies aren't living up to our expectations. We live in a bedroom community in Zachary, and one that finds itself often confused where it fits into the larger picture in our growing MSA, and marketing is a key element that gets left out of this business plan. All right, folks, brace yourselves for a marketing masterclass.
Speaker 2:Our guest today is a founding partner at Cardinal Capital and lecturer at the University of Arkansas, recognized as a marketer of the year by both the American Marketing Association and the Academy of Marketing Sciences, rob has also been awarded the Presidential Pin of Excellence for his contributions to Native American gaming, and the Crystal Pineapple Award Sounds so cool for his impact on hospitality education. I would definitely put that on the mantle. Yeah, with a career that includes leading marketing at Grand Casinos and Rainforest Cafe, and experiences across Asia, north America and Central America, rob is here to share his world-class insights, so let's give him a warm welcome. Thank you for being here, rob Powell.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here, yeah.
Speaker 2:As always, we're here to bring you the best of Zachary in the Baton Rouge area through engaging conversations every Monday from our Virginia Street headquarters. This is Porch and porch and parish, the podcast. Stay tuned because the lightning round is coming up next. Looking for a family outing off the beaten path? Trot over to Breck's far park equestrian center for a unique experience. Far park offers guided trail rides throughout the fall. Starting on September 22nd, you and the family can enjoy the fresh air, beautiful scenery and quality time with loved ones Perfect for all ages. Follow the link to sign up. Spots are limited. Coming back with the lightning round. Okay, If you could improve the marketing at any company in the world, which one would you choose?
Speaker 1:Wow, love this question. A bunch of the local restaurants and bars, of course, but I'd say actually two industries, if I can Commercial banking and higher education. Both need help in marketing areas.
Speaker 2:I might be in one of those.
Speaker 1:What are you going say likewise, likewise and if I had to choose a company, I'd say honestly and I hate to do this because I got my career start there but I'd say disney company has taken a little different move and I would also say in bev and the latest bud light, um, you know, a little scandal that they, they stumbled on, has proven a lot and it's taught us a lot I would love to talk about that.
Speaker 2:Sure, sure, yeah, yeah, I mean, who would have thought that, uh, one day I would grow up and and see disney getting boycotted come on right they made snow white.
Speaker 1:How easy could it be, just just be disney again, right, exactly, well, you know that's, that's part of our, our cornerstone, or mine is, uh, going back to the basics, but yeah, let's talk about it.
Speaker 2:I mean, bambi was always a favorite topic of the philosophers at my university anyway. It just seemed too cruel to be Anyway. Favorite diner in Baton.
Speaker 1:Rouge. Let's see Deerman's. You got Frank's George's Beausoleil Love that place. Jasmine's on the Bayou is also good.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there, love that place. Jasmine's on the bayou is also good yeah yeah, there's a lot of good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, uh, we're known for our food. Yeah, louis, yeah louis. I was gonna say you gotta go to louis, everybody goes there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I feel like I I walk into a seinfeld episode every time that I I get to louis I'm like I don't know something special about that one um, and you and I ate at deerman's, which was awesome. That was one of the favorite haunts of my real estate mentor, mike Falgo, as well. Uh, favorite place in Louisiana other than home or work New Orleans.
Speaker 1:It's my escape, okay, um, it's an assault on all five senses and, uh, no other place like it on the planet and I can go there and become invisible. But it also has a shelf life of three to four days, which is just enough to get your batteries.
Speaker 2:I have no follow-ups on that one. All right, let's start with a little bit of background. You're a hospitality veteran, so let's get get us up to speed with that career journey where it's taken you, and let's kind of start from the ABCs of how you define hospitality.
Speaker 1:Well, I got my start. I did undergraduate graduate work here at LSU. My family was in the hospitality business, the restaurant business, with the local restaurant, and my dad famously told me don't get into the business. And of course I wound up stumbling on the business because I used to chase him around the back of restaurants stumbling, sliding on the floors and yada, yada, yada. But I did undergraduate graduate work, did some PhD work in the quantitative field, but it was all under marketing umbrella. Then I left there and I went to work at the Disney company and had an absolute you know, you talk masterclass. They, you know, wrote the book in some cases on the customer experience and how they treated employees and how they built a brand. Yeah, absolutely amazing. I was there during the Michael Eisner timeframe, which he was quite famous. They often used to say what would Mike do, as opposed to what would Walt do, you know that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:And then after that I went with a startup company called Grant Casinos and when I started with them they had a bingo hall in Northern Minnesota and I had no earthly clue even how to operate a slot machine. But I pitched the owner of the place and we had a ball. We were on the cover of Forbes magazine at one point, for the fastest-growing company in North America opened seven casinos across the country. Excuse me, nine casinos across the country, both tribal American or Native American and non-Native American, that we owned and we went public, made a whole lot of people, a whole lot of money and just I wound up with the marketing hat on. But in those days I'm telling you one day I would be putting together a slot machine base and the covering on some of the tables and the next day I'm running perceptual maps of brand imaging for some of the tables and the next day I'm running, you know, perceptual maps of brand imaging yeah, for some of the organizations then from there, and there's actually a book written about this, uh did you write it?
Speaker 1:yeah, no, no, no there's a uh, uh, this guy pitched our chairman.
Speaker 1:Uh, after we sold grand casino, he pitched our chairman on this idea. That became rainforest cafe, and I'm truncating the story, but, um, anyhow, we said okay and we pulled our money together and started one at the mall of America in Minnesota, went public with our second store in Chicago and I wore the marketing hat again, built 32 of these things across the country, all different styles and, um, and it was fantastic. I basically my job as the marketing guy. I had to make sure they didn't screw things up and, uh, because it was a fantastic brand, as is, uh, you know, we we had two of them in Disney, you know, if you've ever been down there, you've been to those and, uh, you know, it's just an amazing experience. Then, after we sold that to Tillman Fertitta out of Houston, I had some time on my hands, went to work for the Second City, which is a comedy troupe out of Toronto and Chicago, and it's fantastic. You can sit in the back room in the green room and you got Dan Aykroyd, martin Short, all these guys.
Speaker 2:I've listened to Second City just to get a little bit better at improv.
Speaker 1:And improv, I think, is a fantastic skill that you can use in corporate communications. I use it in teaching all the time because it is an improv fielding questions. We're trying to get concepts across. So the skill set itself is amazing and that was a revenue stream that we built at second city to help them use that skill and use these wonderfully talented comedians and improv artists, giving them another outlet.
Speaker 2:They can teach management companies how to communicate properly Shout out to more second city alumni alumni. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Pick them. Robin Williams, like I said, martin short, eugene Levy, tim Conway Gosh we did some of his Dorf videos, which are fantastic. Oh, let me see John Candy. John Candy, of course. Matter of fact, I work directly with and for one of his pallbearers and there are some phenomenal stories about that, most of which are not safe for broadcast. But yeah, they pretty much anybody you've seen on saturday night live were in um the second city yeah, and walking, steve corral, steve corral was yeah, all the, all those uh again, if you, what is the office?
Speaker 1:yeah, and all those guys. They all spent time usually there. Gilda radner yep, um, you know we did a gilda radner concert. Uh, um, that was just absolutely amazing.
Speaker 2:Um, the cast of um ghostbusters yeah, well, I think improv probably has a lot to do with good um marketing and hospitality. There's probably a lot of tie-ins to that.
Speaker 1:And I gravitated towards that and I saw the tie-in, the parallels there are amazing, because you're always dealing with a live audience and, coming from Disney, we always looked at everything. You're on stage, you're always on stage, whether you're back of house or front of house, you do have an audience and you're always supporting somebody. If you have that ethos going into it, you can put on your performance every day. You put on your costume, you put on your your um, you know your character face and you go out and you perform. Yeah and uh. You know that works in improv, that works in hospitality. It certainly worked at, uh, disney, it worked in rainforest and arguably, it worked in the casinos as well. Yeah, so yeah it's fun stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that. Uh, I tend to kind of play around with them, probably with my, my teenagers and all um. I tell them it's kind of like being a wide receiver in the nfl that's about to get hit all the time, like you gotta wake up every day and just go out there really locked into the moment if you want to be good at that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:So it's fun yeah, but um all right, let's get into some marketing trends. So they evolve quickly um what are some of the latest trends you're seeing in hospitality and how can smaller local businesses adapt them to their scale?
Speaker 1:yeah, if you google marketing trends right now, you're going to get these big, massive, massive capital intensive projects which are, which are amazing, but they're all getting at the core concept of more personalization, which blows me away. If you're in the hospitality business, how can you go away from personalization? You have to be. I mean, it's a people business. You have to talk to not only your employees but your customers coming there. Now, how do we use this? We use data-driven decisions and you can get data. I don't care if you are a mom and pop hotdog stand or if you're a multi-unit. You know full service restaurant or you know what have you. So you're getting into that. One of the great things out of the pandemic is we learned about different revenue streams and contactless delivery. You're getting into places. Shoot, if you go to an airport now you got a QR code, you hit it and there's your menu. You can actually order everything there. You don't have to see anybody at all, which is a double-edged sword there. Because you can. It's very efficient, yeah, but there's the employees.
Speaker 2:Don't learn how you're getting rid of that personal touch and when you show up to order in person, they don't like it. They want you on the app because, yeah, it's one or the other, right, right, yeah and the more we get um.
Speaker 1:These organizations run by the finance guys.
Speaker 1:No offense and I'm sort of one as well. They cut the costs. And where do you cut the costs? The easiest ones are in the human cost. So you get rid of that and you get more technology, but you sacrifice some of the other wonderful aspects of that thing. The other is omnichannel messaging From a marketing perspective. We see thousands of messages. I think it's now up to 10,000 messages a day, which is ridiculous. How can you compete with that? And there's so many different channels? Now, even on our little business, cardinal Capital, we've identified about 32 different channels that people can see our brand. And how do you do that? We call it omni-channel marketing, which is the consistent message across all of the channels that you know and you can control. So it has a greater impact. And you know, before it was radio, tv, outdoor. What have you?
Speaker 1:now it's, oh my gosh, everywhere yeah so omni-channel is another one um, you know, I laughed earlier.
Speaker 2:Go ahead. Oh, I'm sorry, I was going to ask, before you move off of that, what's a good example of a of omni-channeling? Is that?
Speaker 1:Okay, let me see how you put me on the spot here. Let's see Omni-channeling. If you do any PR work, you've you've got press releases out or you do local radio spots they all have to be pretty much on this same image or, excuse me, the same message. If you've got email campaign, you want to have the same message.
Speaker 1:If you've got an online campaign, the same message and make sure if you're running a promotion for example, if you're giving away oh I don't know Um you know free dinner, um, a night, you know, for a family for the next four weeks you're giving them. You know, every Friday they get a free dinner. Come on in, you know what have you? It's gotta be across every single channel that you put out there.
Speaker 2:So it's a uniform, seamless experience Exactly, exactly. Okay, so let me think about, uh, nfl, I get, I get that vibe from NFL.
Speaker 1:Um.
Speaker 2:I feel like they're the same. You know from the football that I might buy at Walmart that says NFL on it through.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you've got brand discipline on there. Yeah, you know, and you've got. You know your visual representation, your obvious, the brand ID. And then you've got the sound as well. Everybody knows the jingle of the.
Speaker 2:NFL yeah exactly Crazy.
Speaker 1:So, and it's on everything when it's available, it's on everything. Yeah, so it is consistent. Now you want Monday Night Football, You've got Monday Night Football across all of their channels online and what have you?
Speaker 2:It's hard to put you on the spot. No, no, no, but you made me think Even.
Speaker 1:ESPN. They just launched ESPN Bet and it's even an extension. It's the same thing. You look at it and you realize it's ESPN. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You, but Bud Light was synonymous with NFL at one point. Now I'm starting to see a lot of Miller Light out there, but you mentioned it. We can go there. Sure, I'm just going to let you lead it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sure. Well, what Bud Light did is and we've learned so many lessons from that particular instance. And for those of you that don't know, yeah, if you're in marketing, you really know it we call it Bud Light's. Marketing Blunder, what they. Yeah, if you're in marketing, you really know it. We call it Bud Light's Marketing Blunder and they went out there and they I can't remember the influencer's name- I can't either.
Speaker 2:Oh, I can look it up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, dylan Mulvaney.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it was a fraction of Bud Light's budget, but the impact it drove their, their revenues to I mean down. They just, they just lost share, absolutely Everything took forever to recover. They lost two of their senior marketing people as a result of this. They they aligned themselves with a cause supposed to be or their idea was to be inclusive among everybody, Right, which means you're nobody, you're not an identity to anybody. At that point, they diluted their brand to such an extent that what are you talking about? You're not talking to me as a customer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, whereas Miller Lite, they've been pretty customer. Yeah, whereas Miller light, they've been pretty consistent. Yeah, they're always good. I mean, we all think, still to this day oh, what is it? Great taste, less filling, yeah, you know, and they've come back to it. I'll be darned if their market share isn't going up. All right, they were fantastic. Now, what you've seen Bud Light do is they came back to their original concept of we're just a good beer and we're here for everybody, haven't we? Not everybody, but we're for that guy that goes to the bar and watches the game. You know? Your dad's beer? Yeah, yeah, you know, and they're having a ball with it. Now they brought in some. Well, they paid a lot of money to bring in.
Speaker 2:I think it was Peyton Manning, for originally they brought him in and he was here.
Speaker 1:Hey, I'm drinking bud light. I can't remember the line he was using, but you know that wasn't cheap for them to do, but they had to do something pretty darn quick, yeah and um, you know it was.
Speaker 1:They learned their lesson. We learned it. Uh, we learned. You know, if you commoditize your product in that industry you could argue almost every industry it's a very dangerous game to play. You know. You got to carve your spot out with your specific industry and own it and, what most, to bring it back to the local area here. What a lot of companies in this market will do is they'll react to their market and I'll talk restaurants and bars and they listen to their market and they think this is what we're doing. Well, guess what? If they listen to the market, they're all going to wind up selling Michelob Ultra and showing SEC Sports all the time, which is fine. That's what the market wants. But you know what? You can carve out a really cool niche by doing something different and unique.
Speaker 1:And it takes time and most marketers and most business owners will not. They don't realize it takes a lot more time than normal. We have a saying it's the rule of threes. Everything costs three times as much, takes three times as long and it is three times as frustrating. And I got to tell you you over the course of my career, that's pretty much been the case. So if you're trying to teach a market to like, um, you know, craft beer that is grown, you know, or that is that is distilled within south louisiana only, and that's all we're going to serve yeah, it's going to take a while for people to find out and get accustomed to. That's what you serve.
Speaker 2:Right yeah, you can be chimes and attract people that want to do the beer around the world thing. Might have a lot of stale beer if that doesn't work out. Right, right.
Speaker 1:It's, it's, but it takes time. Like I said, it takes time to develop that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's interesting, all right. So let's segue from here. Just kind of we're taking things back, these grand scholastic marketing concepts and applying them locally. So Zachary is this bedroom community. You know we had Mayor Sharon Weston, mayor President Sharon Weston Broom on sitting in that chair right before you and she even mentioned it. Zachary is a bedroom community. That's busting at the seams and trying to figure out that identity, right? So how can we benefit from some of these larger concepts?
Speaker 1:Well, again, I go back. I always go back to the basics, concepts. Well, uh, again I go back. I always go back to the basics. But the place, the place to find folks that like your space, whether it's a restaurant or a community, what have you are in your restaurant or in your community. You get them to activate more. Yeah, imagine what it'll do for you. That's the easiest and cheapest way to drive value. And think about it For a restaurant if you brought back every single 50% of your client base one more time a year, what would that do to your revenue? You wouldn't have to spend money on acquisition tactics, bringing new customers in. You could just spend everything for that one guy sitting there. You know he comes here, you know, three times a month. Get them to come back four times a month. Yeah, you know how. How hard would that be? You do that with, you know, half of your customers, a quarter of your customers. Your revenues are going to go through the roof.
Speaker 1:So that's the same thing about, um, you know, bedroom communities. You look at it that way. Where do you find people that like your place? They're here, yeah, you get them to talk about it, you get them to do more, you get in, get more active in it, or you get just a fraction of them and you're going to do some good stuff. You know it's going to grow, as we call it, organically.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, um, you're the the breadth of your. Your career experience is kind of uh, it's hard to focus in on on one thing, but, um, maybe give us some examples of how you created Stark raving fans in, uh, in just one of those companies, cause I think that's what we're talking about is just taking your existing base and energizing that.
Speaker 1:Um, your existing base and energizing that. We're going to have to edit this cause I you're catching me on one, one of the best you know. Go going back to the casinos, and we really, in grand casinos position, we carved out a niche of putting casinos in places nobody would have thought you would have ever had. A casino In Minnesota, mille Lacs, the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. It's a tribal casino in the middle, absolutely nowhere, 90 minutes from Minneapolis-St Paul, yeah, and we had to get people up there. Well, we wound up employing the most people there, um, and we were good employers, I mean, we paid well, and to get people to experience it, we would do crazy promotions, just tactics, like crazy. One of the um, one of the local radio stations, was 101.5. It's country music station, and we garnered up 101 limousines, yeah, and we did a parade from twin cities up there. Um, what a sight, yeah, and it was, and you had the press out there.
Speaker 1:You had people you know, lining the sideway so we gave away four seats per limousine, so we had 400 seats now. Now we're driving people up there and blah yeah all of stuff.
Speaker 1:So we would do crazy things like that. And, um, you know, in the millennial we had a uh, what was it? 2000? Hot air balloons on the Gulf coast. That was just one of our, our, our deals down there, yeah, and we carved out a niche of, uh, creating these unbelievably well put together, well-designed casinos in the middle of nowhere. I mean, you've got Marksville here. It's now Paragon Casino, yeah, but it was Grand Casino Marksville. You've got Cushata, which they just advertised, I think, on the Saints game, as being the largest casino in Louisiana, and it is. It's a monster over there. Is that part of the Grand?
Speaker 2:Casino show. It was ours, oh really, over there is, is that part of the grand casino? It was ours, it was ours, yeah, oh really yeah, yeah, I mean we've.
Speaker 1:We have sold it. We sold grand casino back to caesars yeah and uh, the tribes now have the casinos.
Speaker 1:In some cases they change the names, in other cases gotcha, not, yeah, um, and grand casino gulfport and biloxi went to harrah's, so did tunica, and I believe they closed tunica. Stratosphere we sold off as its own entity, yeah, so uh, but all of them had their own unique design element that did attract them and it created something for people to come back to. But if you want to talk about creating raving fans, another perfect example of that is at disney, where, um, you know it literally was that stage presence, and Disney had a wonderful way of every year they were creating something new. So every time you came back, you had a new experience. So, again, where do you find people that like it? Oh, there, you get them to advocate for you and you get them to come back once more. Now we're giving them a compelling reason to come back by creating something new. And at the casinos, we had promotions all the time, yeah, and they wound up loving us. It was really, it was fun and it was new at the time. Let's, let's face it, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, let's talk about marketing spend. So I think we could, all you know, point to a large marketing agency that that you know, if we had 75 grand, we could probably get our foot in the door over there and start spending some money and seeing some results as a small business. But social media most powerful tool on marketing earth right now. How can local hospitality businesses leverage it effectively to boost their brand and connect with the community?
Speaker 1:Well, there's a ton of tactical elements that get people to sign up for a post on behalf of advocate for use, hashtags, those kinds of things and you can come up with some really fun, creative ways of doing that. One of the best ones I saw I was in oh gosh, I can't remember, I think it was Memphis and they you would take a selfie, you would put a hashtag and they would print it out and put it up on a wall, like a wall of folks that were there, and underneath it it would say what their favorite dish was, what they did. So it not only created the social.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, it was very personal. It also created a database for them, because all this was digitized and they had a database of what those people liked and they also had a picture of them so when they came back in they could identify them. They could say hey, mike, come on in, I know you liked xyz. Yeah, guess what? I got another one for you to try. Yeah, you know, and what's more personal than that? I think that's just you know. Fantastic. Yeah, so you can build that. Of course you want to. But marketing spend in that area, let me tell you, it's getting just as expensive, expensive as over the top you know, uh, five thousand a month on, that is just scratching the surface for
Speaker 1:some of these, these organizations, yeah, but you got to be at it. You got to stay at it consistently. Um, if you're doing it and not spending money, um, you know, you literally have to stay on it and try to get creative and keep going. Once you think you're tired of it, let me tell you you've only scratched the surface out there, because you need to stay at it 10 times more Because when you think, oh, my gosh, everybody's heard it. No, no, they haven't. Because again, you're competing against all kinds of other messages out there. So you've got to stay at it. And if you think you're tired of it or the market's tired of it, they're not barely heard it.
Speaker 2:I love that back in my commercial real estate days. It's weird to say that now. You know there's there was this debate. Do you make cold calls or not? You know, is it good to people hate it? You know I always like to call them warming up calls. But the people that did it really well they, they kind of brought a mentality to the market that if you exist in this market you're going to get a call from me. You just will at least one touch point. And if you really think about that, you know we're. We're all probably wasting a lot of time not getting out there, right we're. We're missing a lot of shots because we're all probably wasting a lot of time not getting out there, right, we're missing a lot of shots because we're not taking them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I call it the top of the funnel and the old marketing adage.
Speaker 2:You know, the funnel Get awareness up there and you go all the way down to the decision.
Speaker 1:Everyone's in the funnel, yeah yeah, and I remember doing a presentation for our board once and I went through the whole database process.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And you, you know they come in the door, they sign up, they do this. We spend this much back on them, or we call it investment and they come back and they do their whatever behavior we wanted them to do and we just kept that cycle going dead silent. The chairman stood up and said rob, I know exactly where you're missing the boat here. Getting them in the front door, the top of the funnel, is what he was talking about. It's creating awareness for us, because once they get in the door, he goes. I know you'll get them Once we get in the door. I know you got them, but get them in the front door is the biggest thing. And if you look at and I talk about casinos now they all play the locals game.
Speaker 1:They all continue to feed on the people that are in there, Got it? And a lot of restaurants are the same thing. They live and breathe by the locals. Yeah Well, how many new people are coming in the door and how much are you spending? How much time and investment are you spending in getting those new people in the door?
Speaker 2:introducing new people.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's a very common thing to see, especially with small one-off shops here and it's a fantastic problem to have, because if you're existing on your locals and on your consistent customers, that's great.
Speaker 2:All right. So here's the toughest question that I'm going to hit you with. You knew it was coming already, but I prefaced this a little bit before the interview. We've got this thing called Rants and Raves, and, zachary, I think I talk about it every week. I hope I'm not driving people to Rants and Raves by talking about it, but maybe I am. Maybe I'm the problem. No, but no. When we have new businesses in town, especially these poor restaurants, they get beat up. It's like they can't do anything right. If the food's not hot, if they I don't know, if any of the accommodations aren't right, if somebody doesn't get water on time, if somebody has a criminal record at the restaurant, we're all going to know about it. And so what I'm witnessing happen is Everybody is on rants. There's a few people that speak on rants, but most people are just watching the show and never commenting. How do we get in front?
Speaker 1:of this I mean because it's driving businesses out of this town.
Speaker 2:Yeah, is it really? It's actually putting businesses out and it's almost kind of like to the level where do we need a lawyer on this? You know, like if, if you're the business owner, do you actually need to show up with a lawyer, cause it's that.
Speaker 1:Well, there's a difference between encouraging good feedback and a positive or negative view of that kind of stuff versus doing harm. And in my opinion, you know, complaining is the easiest damn thing to do. Excuse my language, it takes no skill to do that.
Speaker 1:It takes extreme skill to complain and then come up with a suggestion yeah and um or discipline right yeah, yeah, more discipline in their thing, and a lot of people like to hide behind the keyboard, which I think is is a. You know it's a cop-out when they do that level of damage. Yeah, um, but I think feedback can be great. How do you get out in front of it? You know that's, that's the, the million dollar question. Um, but you have to by controlling the narrative. You give a story to talk about, you know, and that sometimes takes, um, you know, it's, it's kind of tough to do, and I'll give you an example of what we did. Or you can turn it into a positive again, sometimes difficult.
Speaker 1:We had a casino that, um, the big, you know, early on in the casino days, emerging markets, the big, uh, rant and rave, if you will, was, you know, we're stealing everybody's money, blah, blah, blah. And uh, look in the back parking lot there there's all these cars for sale and all this stuff. They're repossessing cars and selling them and all the you know, and they take their money and they put it in a plane and fly out. And we had a plane and we fly ourselves out. Right, right, right, you know me being the smart aleck I said, no, we wire our money out which that got all over the newspapers, which was stupid, but what we wound up doing?
Speaker 1:is. Uh. We turned around we said, okay, look, we don't possess stuff. That's not what we're in the business of doing. If you want your property, you think you've been possessed, you know repossessed, or you know we've taken anything to settle a debt. Why don't you come here on a Tuesday afternoon at two o'clock? We'll give it back Press. You're invited here. We are.
Speaker 1:Tuesday at two o'clock, by the way, was our slowest day part. So we had all these people show up. We served them drinks. We said hey, here you are. So who's lost their thing? What are all those cars in the back that are for sale? Oh, those are the employees. They're selling their car because they're upgrading, and if you want to go buy one, I'm sure they'd be happy to do that. So we turned that bit of negative into a positive. We also bought the dinner to all the people who wrote into the paper that complained. We bought them dinner and said come on in. We were in a position to do that, sure. So we got out, kind of in front of that kind of stuff. Yep, we did another one at Rainforest. I don't know if you want me to talk about this one enough. Yeah, rainforest.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you want me to talk about this one? Enough, but it's Rainforest we had when we first started Rainforest Cafe. We had live parrots out in front. Every Rainforest Cafe had a curator in the back and let me tell you, mike, these parrots were treated better than my kids are.
Speaker 2:It's a Disney parrot right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they were live parrots and we only had four on stage at a time. We probably had 20 were live parrots and we had. We only had four on stage at a time. Yeah, we probably had 20 25 parrots per property, but most of them are in the back in their own little aviary and they had showers every other day like mike the tiger level accommodation exactly at every single one of our restaurants.
Speaker 2:Yeah and well pita people for the ethical treatment I was just going to say if you belong to p PETA, please just hold your ears.
Speaker 1:Well, no, they had a great, you're mistreating it. They just weren't informed. Yeah, so they came and they had a demonstration in front of our place at the Mall of America. Well, our parrots got pretty freaked out and they flew down the mall. No, they're not wing clipped at all, they're flying because they're concerned here. And, by the way, you guys want to come on in the back, we'll show you everything we did. They became really good advocates and, uh, really, peta, you flipped PETA. Well, not completely flipped, but they were like okay, you're doing it right. Wow, you know, yeah, and uh, we had, uh, at the time, we had license to handle endangered species. We had black macaws and everything.
Speaker 1:Wow it was phenomenal Gorge animals, but you know, it's one of those situations. It's a case of where you have a bad situation, yeah, and again we had the resources and creativity to turn it around a little bit. Yeah, and deal with them and show them the facts. Wow, and that was good. And we had a cooperating media as well. Yes, in this channel of online complaining, you know, um, you know, the only thing I'd say to some of these people who complain is what would you do about it? You know what? What suggestions do you have on the other side? And there's no way you could predict all of the complaints right now, because people like you said water didn't come on time. Well, you know what it was? A. They're probably right. Sorry, come on in, we'll give you free water.
Speaker 2:I'm kidding, probably a straw man argument. Anyway, I mean it's, you know, it's always like yeah, it's something to complain about.
Speaker 1:But um, yeah, it's a tough one. I like the more um offensive approach to where you give them a good story to talk about. Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's good advice. So, yeah, my core question is do you respond or do you not respond? And so the offensive approach better? Yeah, maybe you DM them and offer them a chance to re-experience the amenity? Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. You want to do what's called service recovery? Okay, and you know we always want to have those folks turn into advocates. If you're complaining about something, you have to get to them quickly. You have to get to them personally. The response has got to be exactly unique to them. It can't be boilerplate. You know, I see it all the time it drives me crazy them. It can't be boilerplate. You know you go to. You know I see it all the time it drives me crazy. And the advice I give um, the management, management companies on this is they'll, they'll put out on social media the same boilerplate response to all of these. Response you know things. Yes, you can't do that. There is a formula, you know timely response, acknowledge their concern. You know all of those. There's steps you go through, yeah, uh, but you got to make it unique to them. You got to make it, you know, relevant to them and address that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Excellent and, by the way, it does take time to do that. It can be a full-time job doing that.
Speaker 2:Oh, just responding alone.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I know it makes me feel for these, these little, these smaller businesses that just aren't staffed up enough to even handle that right. And then, uh, the recovery part is expensive as well, isn't it?
Speaker 1:just to earn back customer yeah and it's, it's, um, it's funny there, my father who's in the restaurant business, he's. Back in the day we had comment cards and now we have, you know, digital tattoos, which are, you know, comments online yeah um, he would respond to every single comment card or make sure somebody did, and he would go back and check.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, we did the same thing in the casino business. Everyone who wrote in something we would respond to and we would check it. Yeah, um, that they would respond, and every different everyone, every response, got a unique answer. To the point of where we had some consistent ones, we'd invite them in. Come on in, come back in the kitchen. Yeah, and let me show you what's going on here you know, and we had the product to prove what was going on.
Speaker 1:So we made them part of the solution. Yeah, made the complainer part of the solution.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, yeah, cool, um, one of the the the greatest parts about zachary is it. There is a. It's weighted more towards a younger audience. So I say we're graduating some of the smartest and finest minds out of the schools here. You know, whether they choose to come back is a matter of what metric, and I the best answer I have for it is how can I, as a local, create nostalgia for them, something to come back to, and so tying that into hospitality businesses, restaurants, how can local businesses create nostalgic experiences for the youth? Uh, one example, kind of help with this. Uh, I was just at a burger King when I was little and for some reason the manager was like hey, kid you look, you looked at my mom, do you? Do you want to come back with him and I'll give you all a tour of the kitchen. And I had a tour of the kitchen at Burger King and I just felt and they gave me the crown and I was like I'm locked in. I still go king over mcdonald's.
Speaker 1:It's just locked in yeah, yeah, they hit you at that time frame. No, you felt important yeah, um, you know, and that's that's. You know, a lesson we can take from the casino business. They well-run casinos make you feel important. Yeah and uh, you feel like a whale when you walk out of there, even though if you spent 20 bucks and uh um, you know you can do that.
Speaker 1:Making those people feel give them a reason to be tied to it, yeah, uh, as opposed to all the reasons not to be tied to something. You know we're running away. It does not help that this region gets all the negative press, you know how is it happening?
Speaker 1:I mean, you can't open a paper without stumbling across. You know we're last in this, last in that, yeah, and that's a shame because we've got a lot of good things going on. But you've got to make it personal. Yeah, your example was perfect because they made that a personal. It was personal to you and imagine if we did that to every graduating senior you know, that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:So, or I'd ask the seniors what would you do to make this you know your legacy, place your heritage here? What would you do to? What are you going to think of here and how can you think positively about that? Um, I wouldn't phrase it that way, but I'd, you know, make sure they have something, an input into you know their memory here. Yeah, as opposed to just saying, oh, you got to remember this, you gotta. No, no, they'll do it, it'll be, it'll. Let them create it. I have a lot of faith in our kids.
Speaker 1:I think they are you know, teaching. I've got roughly 200 students, 200 and change.
Speaker 2:LSU or Arkansas, arkansas.
Speaker 1:And uh, oh, man, they're fantastic. They are just some of the sharpest I have seen in a long time, and every year they are they still amaze me different than when I went to school, but different is good, and they learn differently and they express themselves differently. But boy, they are sharp, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And they'll come up with it. So if you put it in their shoes, in their hands, I'm sure they'll come up.
Speaker 2:I think the adults and and you know, I don't know our generation who shoot, are a little bit more open with the kids. These days just kind of sharing the dirty truths. Sometimes I look at my kids and I'm like do y'all have the answers? Because I don't. But they're digital natives. I wasn't, you know. I had to learn to type an essay as opposed to writing it.
Speaker 1:My students all take their exams on their phone. Amazing, yeah, it drives me nuts and I'm like well, hey, if you want to do that. That's great.
Speaker 2:I had to adopt. They're texting an essay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, pretty much Incredible when they text it. I have to push it back because, no, this is not text language. You've got to learn how to do it properly here, but it's, I think they're fantastic, crazy yeah, well, I think that's a good place to segue out.
Speaker 2:Um, why don't you give us a huge shout out to cardinal capital and everything that you're doing there, and and how can you help local businesses, uh, through that channel?
Speaker 1:appreciate that when I yeah, when I came back here um gosh, it's almost 10 years ago um, I came back here. By the way, like a lot of us that are boomerangs, come back for family reasons.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Spend time with my dad. I came back and my gosh, this place did not have any money, you know.
Speaker 2:I left 25 years ago.
Speaker 1:Right and some, you know, some just firing your belly kind of companies are going all over the place raising money, going public, yeah, with these two companies and just having a ball. And I came back here and it's like, wait, nothing's changed. So the way we raised money was using a service like Cardinal Capital, which is, in essence, a commercial loan broker, and we go out and find money for a business. We don't work for a bank or anything like that, although we work unbelievably well with banks to help them, help their customers. That's why we're buddies.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and if you guys have got some stuff that's on your books, that's hey, this guy's got a problem or a unique challenge, we'll go. How do we help them? And we go all over the planet well, all over North America and find money and deploy it for our clients yeah, and we are agnostic in terms of category. We'll help them all. I'm the marketing guy. I tell bad jokes and my two business partners are savants with this stuff. They know this stuff and can think so fast on their feet. And I'm the guy who says wait, here's an opportunity, here's a solution. I have no idea how we're going to get them together, but we can and we will find it out. And that's what Cardinal Capital does. We work with businesses to connect them to the money and show them how to finance their endeavors and reach their goals. And it's fun. Yeah, it's fun, you know it's. It's fantastic, it's fun, you know it's. It's fantastic.
Speaker 2:Thanks, thank you for the opportunity absolutely absolutely yeah all right, that is it for this week's episode of pnp. Catch us on all local newsstands or on the worldwide web at porchandparishcom. Immense thanks to all our sponsors, who make this content free to you, so please go out and support them. And why don't you, uh, give us some contact information if you're open to it? Look, if you're a small to mid-sized local business and you need some help. I have a feeling like this is a good resource and a great opportunity.
Speaker 1:I'd be happy to help At Cardinal Cap. It's rob at cardinalcapnet or rp RP025 at UARKedu. That's my um University of Arkansas email address or 612-805-8601. I don't mind giving myself a number.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, excellent, all right, thank you. Thank you so much, yep. Talk to y'all next week.
