In the last installment, I compared the restaurant manufacturing operation with real estate. In this installment, we’ll look at a restaurant as a sales organization. While the back of the house (the kitchen) is all about manufacturing, the front of the house (the dining room) is all about sales. Meeting customers, setting expectations and exceeding them, and attention to detail are crucial elements in any sales organization. A restaurant is no exception. Everything is important — from the elegant music, to the dress code of the staff, to the words in your script, to the carefully choreographed service. That’s why our company has carefully selected background music, decor, and office location to help create the right environment to facilitate transactions.

Harvey Mackay, best selling author of Swim With The Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive, once wrote that sales is really about creating the right setting so that the customer sells himself. In a restaurant, up-selling and suggestive selling, building the sale, and properly presenting options are important to your success. As real estate professionals, we have the opportunity to do all of that as well. Up-selling and suggestive selling is much like finding bargain properties for investors, 1031 exchanges for those who have recently sold and need to find a new place to invest their proceeds to save on taxes. Building the sale in a restaurant is much like our finding creative ways to help customers purchase more real estate, whether quantity (more properties), or quality (bigger and better single purchase). We build the sale by educating our customers, like properly explaining the leverage value of real estate investing, higher rates of returns on certain higher priced properties, finding our clients incredible opportunities, and so on.

At one time or another, we’ve all been to an empty or nearly empty restaurant. What did we think? Maybe other people know something we don’t. Maybe there’s a reason it’s empty. When the waiter spoke to us, he sounded desperate. So it is in real estate. One of the most pathetic sights is an agent without enough customers. He or she becomes desperate, and generally pushy. And somehow customers and clients can sense the desperation, and either leave or become more demanding. Before I discovered how to generate hundreds of new customers every month, I was a desperate agent too. Part of being a successful salesman is having enough customers that you can relax and focus on providing good service.

And of course, we all know how important it is to present our services in the best light. Whether that means properly staging a listing, cleaning up our offices, dressing properly, washing our cars, or a myriad of other seemingly small things we do to increase sales. The restaurant business is very similar. Appearance is critical — from the plating of the courses, to the presentation of the food at the table, to the proper method of opening a bottle of wine and presenting it to a guest, to the dress and hygiene of the staff, everything is important in making the sale.

In my next installment, I��ll discuss how it’s easier to start something that it is to stop it. More to come��