Before the agency I ran restaurants in Mumbai. That is the honest reason I understand this business better than a marketer who has only ever advertised one.
Outside an Indian bistro in France. Most of this work happens on the pavement, not in a deck.
Indian restaurants abroad are frequently priced and perceived as cheap food, regardless of what is actually coming out of the kitchen. That is a positioning problem long before it is a marketing problem, and it is fixable, but not with a discount and a new logo. It gets fixed with what you photograph, what you name things, what you charge, and who you are seen next to.
Usually three places. Aggregator commission on orders that would have come direct. A Google Business Profile that is incomplete while a competitor two streets away is fully filled in. And a room that is full on Friday and empty on Tuesday with no attempt to shift that. None of these are glamorous and all of them pay back quickly.
Most of your customers decide within about two kilometres and about ninety seconds. Photographs, hours, reviews, menu, and how fast the page loads on a phone in a street will move more covers than any campaign. I start there before I spend anything on ads.
Margins, wastage, what a bad Saturday does to a week, and the fact that a marketing plan which ignores kitchen capacity is a plan to give people a bad first visit. I will ask about covers and prep before I ask about your Instagram.
A guest decides roughly what your food is worth from the photographs, on a phone, before they have read a single word. If those pictures were taken on a Tuesday afternoon under the house lights, you are arguing uphill for the rest of the visit.
My crew shoots food and rooms properly, and there is enough of it that we are not reusing the same six images for a year. That is usually the single cheapest change with the largest effect on what you can charge.
Four Indian rooms in Lyon and Paris that my crew shoots and runs the content for.
Bollynaan, Lyon
Deb's Bistro Indien, Lyon
Deb's Street Food, Paris
Rang, Paris
The food is not the problem. The week is. Most of the work is filling the quiet days without discounting the busy ones, and that is a marketing problem before it is a menu problem.
Everything that was in the founder's head has to become something a second team can follow. Positioning, photography, the listings, the review routine, the offers calendar. Written down once, so it travels.
Ratings move slowly and then all at once. Usually it is one service issue plus a year of not asking happy customers to say anything. Both are fixable, and neither is fixed by advertising.
Covers, spend, cost per cover, the delivery split, and where the reviews sit. One page, in plain language, with the one thing I am worried about at the bottom.
Restaurants get sold dashboards constantly. This is the opposite: the five numbers that decide whether next month is comfortable, and what is being done about the one that is off.
Running a permanent offer trains your regulars to wait for it. If price is the only reason someone comes, the next place with a coupon takes them.
Some rooms are made for it and some are not. I would rather spend the first month on your listings, your photography and your review flow, which compound, than on a night of stories that does not.
Capacity, margin per cover, the delivery mix and the quiet days all decide what is realistic. Anyone quoting you a figure before that is selling, not planning.
No, but this is the food business I have actually operated in, so it is where I can be most useful fastest.
Yes, mostly by reducing how dependent you are on them while keeping the volume they bring.
No. A single strong room is often easier to move than a chain, because you can change the menu, the pictures and the pricing in the same week and see the result by the weekend.
One call, no deck. I will tell you whether I am the right person for it.
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