Marketing Lessons From A Small Family-Owned Restaurant

I thought if I sold more sushi, I’d earn my dad’s respect.

On paper, offering to help with marketing for one of the family restaurants made sense: I knew the food. I knew marketing. And I was a millennial, so obviously I knew Instagram, #natch.

The upside potential was high. It was also a good way to give back to the family.

However, if I peel back all the layers of resume speak, the naked truth was much simpler:

I wanted to impress my dad. I wanted his approval. So I spent a lot of 2019 working on this, on the side.

If you have a family business, you can learn from my approach to marketing our family restaurant, what I experimented with, and why I failed.

Choosing the restaurant

I learned a lot from my dad the first 18 months after opening the first restaurant: how to treat customers so they come back, how to motivate your staff, the sheer number of hours it takes to keep a small business afloat.

I also learned a lot about Japanese food, from creating specials to making tempura and the intricate details of sushi rice.

But in 2010, it was time to leave, and I headed out to Los Angeles. For the most part, I put the family business out of my mind for the next 7 years.

Then when my wife and I decided to move back to Albany, and I brought up the idea of getting involved with the restaurants again to my dad. He’s not the type to bite hid tongue on an opinion, so when he didn’t shut down the idea I took it for a good sign.

We talked about different ways I could help, and what “being involved” could mean. For example, my cousin Will had been running one of the stores full-time, and he needed to OK whatever we decided. My dad was also closing in on retirement, and was trying to sell one of the restaurants — he just didn’t know which.

I also had a full-time job I loved, and I had no desire to leave.

Finally, we decided: I’d help with the marketing for the Japanese restaurant, Shogun. I’d do this on the side, in my own time. If my work helped, we could explore doing it for the Chinese restaurant, Rain, too.

Shogun made the most sense for two reasons:

• Generally, it’s easier for a Japanese restaurant to turn a profit than a Chinese restaurant: higher perceived, better margins, less overhead.
• My dad was actively looking for a buyer for the Chinese restaurant, because it was a bigger headache. See above.

The guardrails

If you’re interested in taking up a working on the marketing of your family business on the side, I’d recommend setting up a few guardrails, or rules, to follow before you start. This will help manage everyone’s expectations regarding the amount of energy and time you’ll put in.

Here are the guardrails I used:

First, it couldn’t affect my day job. I liked everything about Reforge: the people, the mission, the challenge of creating a new option for master’s level education. This couldn’t get in the way of that.

Second, I’d eat all the upfront costs (#punintended). No one asked me to do this, and I had something to prove. Only in success would I ask the business to pay for the experiment.

Third, I’d do this on a budget. I didn’t set a specific number, but like a bad episode of Flip or Flop, cheap-and-cheerful was the way.

Finally, I’d implement changes slowly and be respectful to everyone working in the restaurants.

Family-owned businesses get a bad rap for being terrible at marketing. That stereotype exists for the same reason stereotypes like bad Asian drivers and only white people go apple picking exists: it’s true.

When you’re running a family-owned restaurant, you’re dealing with existential crises from the moment you get out of bed to when you close batch on the credit card machine.

There’s no heat. The A/C broke. The cooler’s not cold and the ice machine is making water.

The noob bartender just chipped a glass in the well, your sushi chef just quit, and you can’t get the waiter to stop bickering with the hostess.

On top of all this, the supplier is 2 hours late, someone at A3 is asking to see the manager, and you haven’t even gotten out of the lunch shift.

So the last thing you want is someone — a millennial, probably — telling you your business is failing you’re going to die an ignominious death because you’re not engaging with your Facebook community.

Which is exactly what I was about to do.

I had to do it in a way that didn’t make me come across as a condescending know-it-all.

I decided to focus on these four areas:

• Rebuild the website
• Community management (Email, Facebook, Google, Yelp)
• Start running ads
• Do Instagram marketing

The fourth, Instagram marketing, was going to be the biggest lift and where I wanted to spend most of my resources. Not because I knew it could have the strongest impact (I didn’t) or because I was particularly good at it (I wasn’t).

I chose Instagram because it was the sexy platform of the day and I thought it’d be cool.

Besides, how hard could it be? (hahaha lolz)

To follow the guardrails, I needed to get some of the work off of my plate (#1 don’t affect the day job), but I needed to do at a low cost (#3 cheap and cheerful). I got a few quotes for a local photographer: $80/hour, plus a fee for lighting ($200). For each hour, I’d get licenses for 6 photos — if I wanted to purchase additional photos, it was $20/license.

Soup to nuts, 6 photos would cost me $360.

On the flip-side, I was confident I could find someone in Bangladesh or Pakistan to help edit photos and post to social media for like $15/hour.

That’s how I decided it was time to learn food photography.

Chris becomes a food photographer

Based on a recommendation, I picked up a used Nikon D90 Digital SLR and a 35mm lens from KEH Camera. The kit cost $277.

I haven’t shot on anything more advanced that an iPhone in years, so I watched a bunch of YouTube videos. When Grubuhb sent a photographer to take photos for their online menu, I tagged along like an annoying kid brother and asked questions about lighting and composition. I lassoed my cousin Brian into shooting some photos for me when he was visiting from the city.

A week later, I started doing my own shoots. Shooting was fun, and I quickly discovered my photos of sushi were at best, very mediocre and always slightly out-of-focused.

And with that, my food photography education was complete.

You may be mentally tsk tsk’ing here and thinking of the ole adage: “You get what you pay for.” This is a fair point, but let’s not forget the complementary and equally important adage:

“You pay what you can afford.”

In my opinion, it made a lot more sense to do the photos myself and pay for social media help by the hour when I was carefully watching the budget — at least until I proved out I could increase revenue.

Both adages are true. For your marketing efforts, you’ll have to find the appropriate balance.

Chris becomes an Instagram marketer

I hired a virtual assistant to help with editing photos and posting to social media. Here were the five steps to kick that off:

1. Hire a VA

I wrote the job description and posted it to Upwork. If you decide to hire a VA, feel free to swipe the copy:

We are a restaurant that’s been in business for 8 years with a solid customer base looking to do more digital marketing. Our goal is to build our social accounts (IG, FB, Google local) with content

We’re searching for a designer to help us create content. Please see our Instagram for types of posts we’ve been doing: http://instagram.com/shogunalbany

Deliverables needed:

- 10 images created a week

Other skills needed for this project:

- Canva

- ContentCal (for posting)

- Square Fit

In your proposal, please provide a one- or two-paragraph summary of your experience, including samples of your work.

I received about 8–10 responses to the post. From there I whittled it down to 2–3 candidates, based on reviewing their portfolio, reviews from past hires, and their response.

The best way to evaluate whether a candidate can do the job is to have them do the job. So I hired all the candidates for a paid test assignment. I shared a folder of old photos and asked them to create potential Instagram images on Canva for me to review.

Ultimately, one of the candidates did a great job. He also worked with another Japanese restaurant in Serbia, and he could do short video posts as well, so I hired him to produce 10 images a week for me.

2. Pick your stack

Your “stack” arethe tools you’ll use to complete a project. The stack the VA and I chose was a simple one, based on a combination of tools we used before and recommendations.

If this is your first time working with many of these tools, you’ll probably go through some trial and error before landing on the stack that works best for you:

Camera for photos: Nikon D90 Digital SLR and a 35mm lens (KEH Camera, $277)

Photo transfer: FA-STAR SD Card Reader (Amazon, $12). This plugs directly into your phone, so you can edit, upload, post to social, and anything else, without using a computer.

File storage and sharing: Dropbox (Free). Easy ways for the VA and me to share files back and forth. Dropbox is freemium product, and I used a limited time offer to temporarily upgrade to the pro version.

Editing: Canva and Square Fit (Both free). Canva is terrific for creating any type of social media asset. Square Fit is better if you have specific edits or text you want to add (see below). Both have pro versions, neither of which I used.

Social media scheduling: ContentCal (Free). There are a bunch of tools for scheduling, but I found ContentCal’s UX the most intuitive. You can do a ton with the free version, and we upgraded to pro after a few months to tap into some of the extra features.

Asynchronous communication: Upwork (Free). We used the built-in messenger app in Upwork to communicate with each other. Not the greatest but it worked.

Notes and feedback: Google Docs (Free). I’m a big docs user — it’s not the best when working with a lot of images, but my habits were strong so I didn’t deviate to a new tool.

3. Find the cadence

With your stack in place, I’d recommend determining your cadence, then execute on that for at least a month. Afterwards, evaluate both the process and the results, and make tweaks as necessary.

One small example of tweaking the process I made: 1 pm was an ideal time to post photos, but I kept forgetting because that’s when I worked out. So I pushed this back an hour, even though it wasn’t a “best practice” — but at least then I knew I’d post.

We settled on the following cadence:

• Scheduling. The VA would send images on Thursday or Friday. I’d review and send back feedback over the weekend. By Monday he’d schedule the posts. I wrote the captions for many of the posts. A week’s worth of posts would be ready to go by Tuesday.
• Posting. Adding posts 2–3 times a day: morning, afternoon, early evening. Note that the way ContentCal works, it sends you a notification to remind you to post — it doesn’t post automatically for you.
• Stories. At least 2 stories a day: 11am and early evening
• Photo shoots. Every month or every other month
• Engagement. At least 2 times a day: I’d take 10 minutes and engage with followers and people I followed. More on this below.

4. Engaging with the community

It was important to me to build a brand that communicated and listened to customers and not just another dormant Facebook page that randomly shared photos.

So twice a day, I carved out time to engage with the community: liking their photos, leaving comments, and replying to my comments. I’d also do this sporadically throughout the day: while waiting in line, in between calls, etc.

This was the best part of the project. Customers were delighted when you re-posted their photos or talked to them about the food they were eating.

This was a new habit for me, and keeping notifications turned on was extremely helpful in maintaining a high cadence for engagement. It’s pretty obvious but worth calling out specifically for those who default to notifications off for their apps. I turned on notifications for incoming comments, replies, and new followers.

I also turned on notifications from local brands and influencers, so I’d know exactly when they posted something new.

One of the longer term projects I kicked off was developing a local influencer strategy but never executed on it.

5. Experiments

I ran some experiments during this time. After engaging with customers, this was the second best part.

I ran contests where followers had to correctly identify the fish to win a gift card.

I wanted to find out more about people’s habits around ordering take out and delivery (how often? Did they use apps? Which ones?) so I collaborated with a local Mom’s group and did a survey.

I also played with Instagram ads (which I’ll talk more about in a separate post).

The results (and why I shut it down)

The entire project lasted 6 months, followed by a 1–2 month period where it was essentially a zombie (I scheduled out the last remaining posts but wasn’t actively engaged).

We posted 258 times and around 150–200 stories. We had under 500 followers at the peak, and there was strong engagement with the regular customers and local Instagram lurkers.

The services for the VA cost $1,116. All in, I spent about $2,000 on the project, which does not include an hourly rate for myself. I spent a lot of hours on this.

Many things went well: the process for creating assets and posting was solid and it worked. The guardrails I put in at the beginning of the project were respected.

Customers and people around the area noticed and liked the activity and engagement coming out of all the restaurant’s social media channels.

Finally (this is a bit hand-wavey but here goes): this was good for my soul. Over the last 11 years, the restaurants created a level of financial security and comfort my family wouldn’t have been able to achieve otherwise. Trying to do this, regardless of how the results turned out, felt like a small way of giving back.

Okay, the touchy-feely moment is over. Let’s look at what didn’t go well:

Building a following was harder than I thought. I thought it would have been a helluva lot easier. Clocking the first 250 followers was simple enough, but after that, I felt like I was fighting for every additional follower.

I didn’t love food photography. I thought I’d enjoy photography more. Because I didn’t, I didn’t prioritize making time to capture new assets, which in turn limited the creativity of the VA and the raw materials he had to work with. The end result: we had to do more with less, which led to a subpar product.

I didn’t have a clear vision for the brand. This showed in the content that we were putting out. To be clear, I think my approach was right: you’re better off getting started and letting the brand organically take shape than pre-planning for months before creating a single post. But as we rolled into the second or third month, I could have been more process-oriented and done a better job of molding what the end vision looked like.

Finally, I wasn’t moving the needle on the metric that mattered. We got about 500 Followers before I quit, but Followers is a distant proxy for the metric that mattered: revenue.

MoM revenue had been on a downward slide 18 months before I picked up the marketing efforts. Did I expect to turn the whole business around with pretty pictures of sushi?

No, I didn’t.

My hypothesis was that by creating brand awareness and engaging with customers, I could, however, staunch the bleeding after a few months. If I did that, then I was onto something and should continue to double-down efforts.

But after six months, the freefall continued. It seemed that all the posting and engagement looked and felt good, but did not impact revenue.

I don’t blame the effort or the process for not being able to turn this around. In my opinion, the biggest culprit was sequencing, not execution. There were many operational issues that needed addressing, issues that were a higher priority than marketing.

Looking back on it now:

I could have done everything right, but because the order of operations was off, it limited the impact of the work.

If I could do it all again, I’d do more to bake my marketing efforts into the culture of the restaurant, versus doing it all on my own and “tacking it on.” This would mean getting early results, sharing the results with the front of staff and building momentum to make the marketing a team effort.

Epilogue

The plan around my dad’s retirement and the succession of the restaurants evolved, as plans do.

As I mentioned at the start, we believed the likeliest outcome would be selling the Chinese restaurant. But struck by a formidable cocktail of health issues, timing, and luck, my dad instead sold Shogun to the head sushi chef, Michael.

Michael is an OG of Shogun. He’s been a part of the operation during the halcyon days of the Delmar store. We couldn’t be more thrilled for him.

My cousin Will will take over the day-to-day operations of the other restaurant. My dad is one move closer to closing this chapter of his life, which he’s been writing since he was 17-years-old and waiting tables at Chinese restaurants across upstate New York.

As for me, I tried, I failed, I moved on.

It was a fun ride.

If you’re helping with a family business, I’d love to hear from you: What kind of business? What are your challenges? Let me know.

A version of this article originally appeared on my blog.