Test of Thyme #22: Unleashing Your Brand Power: Marcus Reveals the Best Advice He Ever Received

hello everybody hi everybody Jamie and Marcus here welcome to test of time love passion and hustle in the restaurant business episode 22. excellent yeah 22. we've been here almost 22 years we've been here for 20 years 20 years yeah yeah 20 years so we have a lot of experience we want to bring our thoughts I ideas it's Koreans love passion everything stories uh to help you

grow your business and um live a better life yeah to love your restaurant love your restaurant and love love what you do yeah like the new picture in the background I do I noticed it the other day yeah yeah Mexico is Mexico has uh Valle de Guadalupe um that is um um one of the places we sleep when we go there absolutely a cute little six

room in all right so so we're gonna Jump Right In let's Jump Right In um so you know we've been talking a lot about giving advice and things like that so what is the best piece of advice that you have uh for other restaurant owners other business owners um in helping grow grow their business or what advice was given to me what advice was given to

you how do you want to how do you want to play it so do what advice would you give um to other business owners and then go into what advice have you been given over Okay so let's start let's start with we can do two videos we can do two let's let's talk with what start with what advice is given to me because then I can

spin it to other people okay how does that sound okay does that work sure okay all right yeah so best advice given to me so um so we opened in 2003 in 2004 2005 a good friend of mine from high school he told me to post a page a day on the internet he goes That's the strategy to get your brand out and your restaurant out

and your business out um he was doing SEO work for Carnival Cruise Lines uh vodka company a big box company and he shared this strategy with me on posting a page today so I was like okay so I went on a Blog and started posting and posting or I put a new web page up and just created an insane amount of content and this was before

social media social media or Facebook Facebook was just starting as the infancy then but it wasn't available to the public until I don't think 2008 or nine um Myspace was just coming around um I was like what is the social media thing that's funny because our son asked me today right what do you say he goes why do you post every day a picture I post

pictures of our grandson of our business of upcoming events of our daughter of like everything and so it's funny because that that's kind of a funny question because we're telling people to post things a day right it keeps people yeah it keeps people engaged engaged in what's going on in your lives and and they remember you right it's like let's go out to eat you know

I'm I know I've kind of interrupted you but you know we had a friend who happened to come in one night for a drink he's a guy we went to high school with he came in he sat at the bar and we gave him just some extra Wings remember that night we had extra wings and him and his wife have now been coming in for date

night um it's there they come in for burgers and wings now and like so you never know what the post is going to right going to trigger in somebody's mind right never enough you never know so anyway so back to the Social Media stuff so there wasn't much of that no there wasn't so it was posted YouTube wasn't out yet viddler was just coming up Fiddler

was one of the first YouTube was around but it was a dating site in the beginning yes you posted you posted dating videos and they created this infrastructure it was a private company they pray this infrastructure or a different company than Google now there's infrastructure the host videos and they become one of the largest video hosting platforms and that's when they switched over so yeah I

didn't know you post your profile on YouTube it's a good idea for dating um so I don't think they use it for that anymore um so um so I started posting a page today and he told me that the goal was so just to create an insane amount of content on you on the web which we did so you Google us now and stuff comes up

from oh my gosh for 15 years 20 years old pages and pages and Pages come up and and I look at my rankings all the time I look at our keywords all the time like ionized water like we rank in the like on the top 30 searches for ionized water I'm saving our business people are finding our restaurant by looking for ionized water and if I

showed you I look at the list every week the reports come to me and I look at everything I'm like wow we're showing up for this is because I posted content on it years ago and then when YouTube came out I started posting content on YouTube in 2009 up to 100 000 subscribers but here's where the advice comes in to other restaurants you need to be

and your legs and your abs and your shoulders and your back and yeah every social media platform is like a muscle that complements your whole business and granted you don't work your own are they intertwine together when you post the same video or the same picture people do people do but if you're taking a tick tock video and putting on YouTube on on um on Instagram

Instagram throttles it down because they want their own content it's not their own original content so it throttles it down so but like I will make a video like this video that we're doing here this podcast will then get broken down into three or four segments that goes on the tick tock and a separate video and its form goes on to Instagram or into a YouTube

shorts for a minute so this whole 20 minutes that we're talking will get broken up by our video editor and put through different through different phases so work all your muscles you don't work every muscle every day so you know sometimes you don't need to things like your legs you can like your calves certain things every day every day every day every day every day that's

like your Tick Tock every day every day your blog doesn't need to go up every day right your um uh press releases those are like oh you know like when you go out and run a 5k every every two months you don't want to send one you know right right like you go and run a 5k every couple of months you know to run a race

that's your blog post every month or two I'm sorry your press releases press releases blog posts short videos um all kinds of things you lump everything that those are the muscles you work um there might be a platform that's not good for you we have to just kind of figure that out for your business okay um I know I'm very bad at posting on Tick Tock

for our business I'm terrible at it I really need help I need to ask for help and have somebody I didn't have somebody take over on Tick Tock I can create the content they need to post it and edit it and all that kind of stuff um so all of that's very important to create now why are you doing this is what I would tell or

explain to a client you're doing this coaching Kleiner please you're doing to build a brand not only to get business but to actually build a brand so we've built a brand for ourselves and you and I are the faces behind our restaurant some people don't want their face behind the restaurant then that's fine but when you build a personal brand you take your personal brand with

you wherever you go the restaurant fails the restaurant sold um you could close up you lose the lease or something the restaurant burns down you have your brand and that goes with you and that helps you open up your next restaurant your next location helps you with a book deal it helps you with a TV deal it helps you with all kinds of things that um

that'll help you with your business so and your personal life so so build a brand you don't want to build a brand keep building your restaurant build your resume some people some people open restaurants because they know they're going to sell them I'm going to open it up I'll run it five years six years I'll build it up and then I'll dump it and I'll sell

it I have a friend that's the strategy several times in Colorado he knew what he was doing this was before any social media or even when websites are just coming up that was his strategy get a business run it for five years get it going and then sell it and enjoy that process over again so you have to depend on what your end goal is like

our end goal here was to create a restaurant for our long term um income right for we were here 20 years we're gonna be here another who knows how long right but if we're not here we're going to be somewhere else in our brand with our brand with our brand with us so yeah so you need to build your brand if you're going to build your

brand build your brand focus on that and your restaurant everything else will follow that brand and that's that's good for any business yeah so yeah so yeah great so that was quick to the point that was good yep so posts work out all those muscles and build a brand wonderful no there's no I believe there's a lot of other advice that I have but you can

go to restaurant growth Secrets University check out a lot of videos I've created there to our YouTube channel you can watch other episodes listen other episodes of this podcast for more advice you can drop me a question send me an email help at 50mistakes.com five zero mistakes.com and I'll be happy to drop an email back Facebook Instagram wherever and ask away awesome that's it all right

thanks for watching or listening to tests of time love passion and hustle and the restaurant business yep all right have a great day everybody