Welcome back to turning the Table. We've got another great show, episode 1 41 this week. I get the chance to chat with. A guy that I've been following for a couple of years here on multiple social channels. His name's Sean Walsh. You've probably heard of him. He's from Cali Barbecue Media somewhere in California I think, obviously. We're gonna have a good chat today about the digitization of the restaurant.
Industry, what's coming for the next year or two things to think about and a few things to implement in the restaurant this weekend. So we're gonna bring him on. And looking forward to having some good discussion about where we're headed. Welcome to Turning the Table, the Most Progressive Weekly podcast for today's food and beverage industry, featuring staff centric operating solutions for restaurants in the hashtag new hospitality culture.
Join Jim Taylor of Benchmark 60 and Adam Lamb as they turn the tables on the prevailing operating assumptions of running a Rick's local digital marketing push button. Easy for anyone. Empower your franchises with programs that automatically optimize performance and program spending. Across Google, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. All from one, easy to use collaborative marketing platform. To find out more, go to turning the table podcast.com/e vocalize. Sean, how you doing?
Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. How's the morning going? It's amazing. Are you okay, so Cali Barbecue, you're in San Diego, right? Yes. But right now it looks like you're in New York. My podcast studio. I am in San Diego, but right now it looks like you're in New York in the background. Yeah. all over the country. And next week you're in Chicago? Or this actually tomorrow. Tomorrow. Tomorrow I'll be flying National Restaurant Association Show.
I've never had the chance to attend. Obviously I'm the guy up here in Canada, so we go to the Toronto show, but I need to get to the NRA next year. But tell us about what, what's that experience gonna be like? So there's gonna be over 51,000 people, hospitality professionals from all over the globe, 112 countries, and I believe 11 football fields of vendors.
So if you sell something, if you have a product or a service, Anywhere in the hospitality or hospitality adjacent and you wanna get in front of restaurant owners. This is the Super Bowl. It's the Super Bowl of restaurant shows and I was fortunate to go there and speak last year and create a bunch of content. And this year we've got a lot of partners. We went from two, two partners at the show last year to, I believe we have 14 different places we're gonna be going and creating some.
Podcast content, blog content, TikTok content, LinkedIn, Instagram, you name it. A lot of these companies spend a lot of money to go to the show. And not everyone is able like you said, you're not able, schedules, conflict and yeah. The beautiful thing about content is if you get. Great people together in one place. If you have a video to record it and you're able to publish that, then someone might be able to go, Hey, that was important.
Maybe that piece of technology can transform my restaurant. That's a beautiful world that we live in. Yep. I know that I'm gonna do everything I can to consume as much of that content as possible. There'll be plenty Yeah. I I think me and Kyle and Sarah together we'll be, yeah I've gotta have a lot of cell phone charge and make sure we've got enough memory for all the stuff we're gonna be doing there. and because you film most of it on your phone, right?
So I have a media team rising Tides Creative Aaron Roberts. He's anytime that I'm doing like a full activation for one of my interviews for entrepreneur.com for restaurant influencers I'll have my camera team with me. But what I teach, anybody that's watching is don't look at that. that is where you want to get to. But where do you start? You start with the thing that you have in your pocket, and that is your smartphone. So you don't need an iPhone.
It can be an Android, but everyone has the internet on their phone and everyone has the camera app. You don't need permission to become your own media company. What I learned early on is that no one was coming to tell my story. If you realize that when you go on LinkedIn and you're scrolling and content about your industry or your profession or your career, you the person that's watching right now on LinkedIn or on YouTube or on Facebook, you have a unique position and you have a unique voice.
And the only way that you get better at sharing that voice is through publishing. And publishing is a scary thing to do. It is. It was scary for me. I know it was scary for you. Any podcaster out there will tell you. Most people stop podcasting after 10 episodes. They call it pod fade. But someone like you you've put the work in and you know that. Every day is an uncomfortable day. You have to build the habit.
You have to build the habit of publishing content on the internet, but understanding that if you do, you never know who's watching. You don't need to have hundreds of views, thousands of views, hundreds of thousands of views you need. One person takes one. takes one. That's that one investor, that's that one business partner. That's that one vendor that you've been trying to get in front of.
It's that one executive you're trying to bring to your team if they see your content, follow your content to be game changing for your business. So what do you the sort of, the theme of our discussion today was gonna be based around the digitization of the industry, the restaurant industry. Sure. But. I am curious what you say about, okay, I'm a small multi-unit restaurant operator. I own two restaurants in middle America or in a medium marketing in the Canadian. Market.
So telling your story, telling what do you, what are you telling people to do specifically? Or is it take pictures of food? Is it video your team? Is it selfie type stuff? Because I think a lot of people are wondering, they go, I realize I need to do this, but I don't even know where to start. So we're gonna start at the easiest place to start, and that's right here.
For those of you listening on a podcast, I'm holding up my iPhone and the reason why I'm holding up my iPhone is because this is where the four Cs. Converge. And those four Cs are commerce, content, communication, and community. Commerce, content, communication, and community. Every single business, especially in the restaurant business, we have to be focused on technology that will help us with all of those things. Yep. All of those things is the secret sauce.
That's the sauce that Amazon puts out there. That's the Nike sauce, that's the apple sauce. That is the magic of how do you build a business that can grow into the future? And for us, when you think of technology, restaurants, if you don't have commerce, If you don't think that you are an e-commerce company, if you don't think about how do I sell something online, that is immediately where you have to start in your tech stack.
So if you don't have a point of sale partner, that allows you to easily sell things on your website, easily sell things through a smartphone. Every person that walks into any restaurant has a point of sale in their pocket. Yeah. The question is, if you are a restaurant and you own two restaurants, 10 restaurants, 300 restaurants, how easy is it for somebody to order ahead of time? They literally want to give you money. Who wants to wait in line? I don't.
No. People don't even wanna go to the store anymore. No, it's true. and especially as a dad that has a a five-year-old son and a three-year-old daughter, we are always looking for the most convenient ways to order from the places that we love You know what's funny about that? My wife and daughter and I, so I have an eight month old daughter, and we went out for dinner the other day, and we immediately did the, we couldn't order online in advance.
Yep. And so we sat down and the server came over and we were almost frantic. We said, we're gonna order everything right now. yes, we wanna get in and out as fast as possible and still try to enjoy a glass of wine while we do it. But you're right, order in advance that gets to the heart of the most important thing that we can do in hospitality is give people time and give them the option. We talk about for our barbecue business here in San Diego is slow food fast. We have the craft of barbecue.
Barbecue takes time and it takes expertise. It's taken us 15 years every single day. We're learning how to make better brisket, better ribs, better pork, better tri-tip, better mac and cheese, better peach cobbler. We have to do that really well, but our job is to leverage technology into our business so that I can use a company like toast, our primary technology partner to sell more barbecue to more people.
The easier I make buying barbecue if I can get to the Amazon of barbecue, where literally people can just go and reorder something that they've already ordered, come down to the restaurant. It's ready for Jim and his family right when you come to the window. Hey, Jim, thanks for coming in. We appreciate you. You've, we've already seen you three times this month. We really appreciate it. Have a great rest of your time.
Here's some extra jalapeno barbecue sauce because we know you love that so much. Yeah That's the Oh shit. Experience. That's the memorable moment. So what made you realize the value of that? I think it's just life, right? I don't think the, for me it's, I. I'm so excited to have these conversations with somebody that is a leader and candidate. You're publishing content on the internet.
You are, you're an industry leader all over the globe because you're willing to be uncomfortable and share your thoughts and expertise and have conversations. For me, every business has to be digital first. Sure. And especially the brick and mortar businesses. We are living at a crazy time where the internet is young. We don't realize how young the internet is. We're talking 30 years old. Yeah. But we act like we've had it forever.
Everything has exponentially changed, especially in the last 15 years from when this first device came out. This going from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. All of a sudden all of these things have changed our lives. I'm a media company. a barbecue media company. Yeah. I literally don't ask for permission to become a media company. I just started publishing content and establishing relationships, making a bunch of mistakes, and then figuring out, Hey, nobody else is doing this.
Other people are tuning in to podcasts, to clubhouse, to TikTok videos and going, Hey, I have this same problem in my restaurant. Yeah. How did you solve it? If I'm willing to do that day in, day out, then all of a sudden you can build these connections and then every business has to be in the hospitality business. That's why I talk about digital hospitality. It's not, has nothing to do with my show. This is just a thesis of life. Like literally, that's what Amazon does.
That's what all of these great companies do, is that they understand that. what we do as restaurant owners in real life, making a magical moment, making somebody feel special, turning a stranger into a friend. How do you do that online? You do that online through communication. You do that online through building loyalty, through building community. If you're able to do those things, I want to do more business with you. And not only that, but I want to go and tell everyone else about you.
On Instagram, on Facebook, on Yelp, on Google. because I'm so impressed with Jim and his restaurant and their restaurant group and what they do, and I have to go tell my local my kid's school, I've gotta go tell the local little league. I've gotta go tell everybody because I'm so impressed. And all it is doing the little things. Yeah. The little things that we already do really well.
And the th the thing that talking to people, and you're right about showing up in front of an audience every day, whether it's like this with video, whether it's just in text, whether it's, whatever it might be, and your comment about the internet it's just starting to get to a maturity point. Who knows where it's gonna go, right?
But I think whether it's a, somebody like you or I that's trying to help the industry move forward, whether it's a restaurant owner or operator, whatever they might be imposter syndrome is a big part of keeping people from jumping in. and that I'd never heard that term pod fade before. I, I actually thought that it was less than 10 episodes was the average.
But, so if there's somebody who's listening right now, whether it's on a podcast or they're live right now on one of the channels and they're going, okay I gotta get into this. I think the advice would start with, your phone is really good. I think the advice would be a media company in one way or another. If not if, maybe that's even gonna be what drives, do you know? How do you know how to become a media company? You just gotta start. it start. It starts with you. Yeah. You have to decide.
It's the same way you decide to be a runner. If you've never ran before in your life, you're not, I want to be a runner. I want to run, no, I am a runner. I am a media company. You don't need to ask for permission, and most importantly is you have to remove your ego. because we all have subjective feelings towards these platforms that don't mean anything. We don't even know how we, why we feel the way we feel about Facebook.
Why do we feel the way we feel about Twitter or TikTok or podcasting or any app that's on your phone? What we do is we talk, it's just internet storytelling. You already tell stories in real life, phenomenal. You couldn't be where you are in your career, in your business, in your marriage, if you weren't great in real life. But when it comes to talking to the internet, all of a sudden you're worried.
You're worried that it's gonna be there forever, that you're gonna lose your job, you're gonna lose your career, you're gonna lose your marriage. You're gonna lose all the things that you've built. Why? all you need to do is publish. We're talking about documenting what you do. Versus creating. The problem that people have is they we break it down to four P's. It's plan, produce, publish, promote, recycle, plan, produce, publish, promote.
everybody can come up with a plan of what they want their personal brand to look like or what they want their restaurant to look like. Producing the content. That's hard to do. Yep. But the real scary part is publishing. That's shipping your work as Seth Godin says, shipping your work. And that's when, what if nobody cares? What if I post this on LinkedIn and nobody likes it? Yeah. Not even my employees. Not even my best friend. And I'm here to tell you, none of that matters.
The only thing that matters is the craft of storytelling, the craft. You know what, I think when I first started, and sorry to just chime in on that's a an interesting point. When I first started producing content, and I don't produce nearly as much as you do, but you're getting there. I'm working on it. But when I first started producing content, the first. The thing that got me, not so much will anyone like it. It was, which I know was in my mind.
The one that got me was every time someone said, you post a lot, you're you, every time I go on that platform, you're there. Yes. You post a, why do you post so much? Yes. And at first I tried to find a way to, to. Justify Yes. Why I was doing that.
You know my answer now when people say that to me, cuz I, and I'm sure you get it too, if you're talking to somebody that doesn't really understand or know the thing that I say to them now is that there is nothing that I do in my daily or weekly routine that creates more opportunity than that. It's why we believe in what we believe. It's why we teach.
What we teach is there's never been a greater gift given to business owners and business leaders than the internet and the ability to publish content, the ability to share your unique perspective, and the only way you get better. at sharing your unique perspective is by doing it, by failing, by stuttering in a video, by making a video with bad lighting, by making a bad podcast with bad audio, by asking bad questions, stupid questions, it will never be perfect.
We talk about the equation for the internet for content creation. How do you make a quality video? How do you make a quality podcast? How do you make a quality blog post? The answer is quantity. Plus speed plus consistency equals quality, quantity, speed, consistency. But the problem is we all want quality first, right? We want to come out the gates. We want a commercial for our business. We want a commercial for our brand. We say be the show, not the commercial. Nobody wants a commercial.
No, you have an eight. You have an eight month old. Wait till they get old enough to watch content on the internet. My, my daughter at three knew what the skip button was on YouTube. Skip, skip. She doesn't want her content interrupted. She's watching her story. She doesn't wanna watch commercials. She doesn't wanna watch commercials. But she'll watch an integrated sponsorship of a creator talking about a Barbie doll. Yeah. Or a princess that she loves. And guess what?
She's gonna come and tell dad and mom, I really want this princess dress for my birthday. Or I want to go to Disneyland because this creator was in Disney. Be the show, not the commercial document. If you think about commercials when someone's watching a show, if they still have cable tv. Correct. When someone's watching a show on cable, when the commercial comes on, they pick up their phone. Exactly. Yeah, you're right. We've we're so well trained to know when we're getting advertised too.
and it's not that we don't want to be advertised to, and it's not that we don't want to be educated on new products and services. We just need people to do better work and that's what we honestly, that's what we do to help other hospitality brands. Is we help them understand that all the answers to the things that they want to do in marketing and sales. Restaurant owners are on the internet. Shh. They're on Facebook. They're on Instagram. Yeah, they're on LinkedIn. They listen to podcasts.
There's a reason why these apps are the most downloaded apps on the internet. It's true. Which one do you, if I'm a restaurant owner and going back to that, thinking about what can I do this weekend? Which platform do you suggest people start on? So for me, I would say which platform? So the most important app that anyone has on their phone is the camera app, and video right now is the most important thing you can do.
Understanding how do I tell a story in less than 60 seconds would be where I would start. So how do I tell a story? How do I speak? How does a person from my restaurant, a bartender, a server, a general manager, how do I talk to a vendor? How do I get them to share a story within 60 seconds? And if I do that, I can publish that on Instagram reels. I can publish that on Facebook reels. I can start a TikTok account.
One video per day, one 62nd video per day will teach you the art of smartphone storytelling. Then you can have data. after you post 100 videos in 100 days and you can look back, but don't look while you're doing it. Don't go, oh, I only got five views on this video, or a hundred views and I've done 10 videos and I've only gotten 75 people to, to look at the video. Two comments. What's the roi? What's the ROI of not doing it?
What's the return on investment do you think in two years from now, we're gonna be talking less about the internet or more. Yeah. Yeah. I tell people that all the time too. The vanity side of social media is not where to spend your time and energy in terms of looking at there's so much data in terms of growth, opportunity and audience and like you're saying all of those things.
So it's interesting that you say a hundred days, we usually encourage people to generate content every day for 90 days, and then let's have a conversation with what's happening. Yeah, exactly. 90 days every day. Every day minimum lunch you, but you have to build the skillset of doing that because you have to be, it's uncomfortable. I was uncomfortable. I'm still uncomfortable. Yeah, me too. Like I literally, last night went and spoke to 50 small business owners in my local community.
They asked me to come speak the mayor of our city, 300,000 people in our city. He spoke before me. So I had to go and make my own video. I'm literally getting asked to go speak about smartphone storytelling, about all the things I believe in, and they're asking me to come and present, but yet I still have to do what I do, which is document, not create document. The fact that I was there, that this was an opportunity and this opportunity can lead to other opportunities.
You and I wouldn't be talking if you didn't have the courage and I didn't have the courage to look stupid and sound stupid. Yeah, it's true. whoever's listening to this, you have to know your first posts are gonna suck. Yeah. But that can't discourage you from posting more. All it is learning how to tell your story on the internet and doing it on a consistent basis.
And back to what you said about posting too much, I have people still to this day that see all the brands that are now paying us money to do content for 'em. to help them with content. That still goes shun. I can't believe you have so many shows. Why are you posting so much? I'm like posting so much now. Wait till you see me in two years. Yeah, Yeah. And you know the six shows that we do, the interesting byproduct too. A lot of people tell me this when.
Because I I try to give a lot of people the nudge start just sharing content. Oh, I don't nudge, I shove We work with a lot of restaurant operations teams, but we also work with a lot of other. I'll use the term consultant loosely because our industry is afraid of that word, but service providers, right? And helping them, underst service providers understand Yeah. What's, how to generate content in order to help the industry, right?
Whether that's generate business or make new connections or whatever. And quite often we, we try to make sure that they understand the b the positive byproduct of generate content, of talk about your niche every day, of all of those things. And every single person tells me the same thing. They go, I'm more confident talking about it in person now because I generate content every day, right? Because in their head they're practicing it every day. What are we good at? What am I good at?
What am I the best at? What's my niche? All of these things, right? So the same, I think the same applies whether you're a service provider or you're a restaurant operator. Getting better at explaining your profession, your niche, your specialization, your product, whatever it might be, right? If you think that you're being too repetitive, the chances are 100% you're not. You need to get better at whatever your story is.
Whatever your why is, why you get up in the morning, why you care about what you do, you need to better articulate that every single day in audio, video, words, and images, because that's what the internet is. And what I always think back to is comedians, Jerry Seinfeld, Kevin Hart, Chris Rock. How many times do you think they have told the same joke before they get in front of a stadium? Before they get in front of 50,000 people, 80,000 people for their Netflix special?
How many times have they told that same joke and iterated on that joke and figured out, this is where I need to pause. This is where I need to lean in, or I need a better detail. That's gonna bring the audience to a certain place, right? Business owners. Who do you think raises the most money? People that pitch. Why? Because they're good at getting rejected. Yeah. And they're good at refining the pitch. Yeah. They have no problem raising money.
They have no problem saying, telling someone, tell 'em no, because they have the, they are very skillful at putting themselves in an awkward position, but also learning how to better articulate the value of what they're providing. so there's so much good stuff here. Coup. Two things that I want you to touch on still and respectful of time. We've got maybe another five minutes or so here. We can maybe try and get a couple really good ones from you.
Can you repeat again the, I think it was four Cs and maybe it was four Ps? Yeah. Can you re repeat those? Yeah. So the four Cs for your smartphone, where everybody is content commerce, communication. and community, right? That's the intersection of all the beautiful things that makes up life in the digital space. Content, commerce, community and communication, and the better that you get at putting your business where people are through those things.
For me, I want to figure out how do I go live on TikTok and have toast, sell a brisket to somebody that's watching locally in my area? and I'll continue to do that, and I'll continue to work with TikTok and Toast and Instagram and whoever, so that the path of least resistance is there. I wanna make it as easy as possible to buy barbecue. The four Ps are plan, produce, publish, and then promote. So if you publish content onto the internet, it's not done.
you can't post and ghost if you post on LinkedIn and somebody comments on LinkedIn. That's your opportunity to build a friendship like Jim and I have now. Engage. Ask a question, ask a follow up, learn about their business. This is the chance to promote who you are and what you do. And if you're not understanding how to promote, you start to get better at telling the story.
The best people, the best business owners, the best restaurant owners, tech founders are publishing, building in public literally every single day. Vlogging, blogging, whatever you want to call it, but they're tagging the companies that they work with. Most people think I need a commercial. Back to the commercial for my restaurant. If you go to my page, you're not gonna see me saying, Hey, Jim, buy barbecue. Buy barbecue. Oh, did you want, guess what? You want brisket today?
Do you want ribs today? No. I'm publishing content B to be content, business to business content. about the technology that we use in our restaurant. Why we use something like Ovation for guest feedback. Why we use something like Marquee to help us with 82 different platforms and search engine optimization so that we can publish one time about our business information and that goes to Google Maps and it goes to Facebook and I can respond to Yelp.
I'd published content about that because I know other restaurant owners are watching and I know because they engage with me. And that's how you build community. So good. And so we talked a little bit about for the weekend. Yes. Just start actually documenting, publishing, whatever that might be. The, yeah I'll leave you the takeaways. Always stay curious, get involved, ask for help. If you're watching this, you're a curious person.
If you're listening on podcasts, if you're watching live, however, you're consuming it. You are a, you're a person that wants to level up. You're playing the game within the game. Hundred percent. But then you actually have to get involved. You have to make you. the person listening has to make a hundred videos. I don't care if you have a social media team. I don't care if you have a social media person, an agency, they will appreciate you, ma.
There's not enough content for any social media agency, but the answer is you. You have to get uncomfortable. You have to ask for help. You have to ask your team, is anybody good at TikTok? Is anybody good at short form video? Does anyone, can anyone show me how to use this app? I want to uncomfortably publish, but you have to have a conversation with your leadership team and prioritize. If you don't care about it, how do you think the rest of your team's gonna care about it? So true.
So get involved is the advice, and then finally ask for help. Jim is a master of his craft. Jim is weirdly available just as I am. You can reach out to me on any social platform at Sean p Welche, S H A W N P W A L C H E F. But there's so many. There is an abundance. of hospitality professionals that are all trying to figure this thing out. Yeah. And anybody that tells you they have it figured out, I would be, I'd be very weird weary of them because everything changes so quickly.
Yeah. Tomorrow the algorithm will change and so weirdly available. That's what you said, right? Yeah. I stole that from Ryan. I stole that from Ryan Reynolds. You said it in a, you said it in an interview for entrepreneur, yeah, weirdly available for anyone who's listening and hopefully this maybe, hopefully it does f flood your inbox or mine, but I think I need to just, you and I were talking about this a little bit before we jumped on.
So when I first started producing content three years ago, I sent you a message randomly. I had seen your content and I just sent you a message. I think it was on LinkedIn and Yeah. I have, for anyone who's listening, weirdly available. I gotta give Sean credit cuz his response was, here's my number, call me. And that I think that right there, I knew right away that you were somebody who cared, wanted to help, wants to move things forward, right?
So my version of weirdly available is just never say no to a conversation. Yep. With anyone. For anyone who's listening let's get that conversation going. And Sean, I can't thank you enough for joining. I know you're headed to NRA tomorrow and you've probably got a million things going on oh, it's all good. If any, if anybody's been, if anyone's in Chicago that's listening like I said, weirdly available, so let me know.
And if you follow, I'm sure we'll be posting where we'll be when we'll be, where we love to meet up. Enjoy the show. Tell Kyle and Jensen I said hi. I will. And thanks for your time and the four C's and the four P's. I think those are gonna go a long way for people. If I don't see you in, if I don't see you in Canada, I'll see you in Chicago or San Diego sometime soon. We're gonna make that sounds good. Sean. Thanks again, Richard.
Yep. Thanks for joining us on this episode of Turning the Table with me, Adam Lamb and Jim Taylor. We're on a mission to change the food and beverage industry for the better by focusing on staff mental health, physical and emotional wellbeing, by proactively measuring and managing staff workloads. Join other hospitality professionals co-creating the hashtag new hospitality culture by subscribing to our weekly newsletter at ww dot. Turning the table podcast.com/news.
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