How to Make All Your Restaurant Business Dreams Come True

Hey there restaurant pros, it’s Dave Scott Peters and welcome to episode 41 of the Restaurant Prosperity Formula. I’ve been coaching restaurant owners since 2003 and the Restaurant Prosperity Formula is based on what the most successful restaurant owners I’ve worked with do on a daily basis to achieve their success. The basic premise of the formula centers around achieving prosperity, freedom from your restaurant and the financial freedom you deserve. To achieve prosperity, you have to follow a very specific formula made-up of leadership, systems, training, accountability, and taking action. Today’s topic centers around the importance of a coach and who would benefit from having a coach.
I’m not only going to share with you who would benefit from coaching, I’m going to share with you how coaches have changed my life for the better and ultimately what you should be looking for out of a coach. Let’s get started. Hey, restaurant pros. While you may already know who I am and what I do, I just wanted to take a brief second and introduce myself to my new listeners and followers. First of all, let me thank you all for subscribing and listening to my podcast. I greatly appreciate your support and participation. My name is David Scott Peters and as I stated in the episode’s introduction, I’m a restaurant coach and I’ve been doing so since 2003.
I’ve been helping restaurant owners change their lives and businesses through workshops and seminars to group and one-on-one coaching and even consulting. Heck, I was a restaurant coach before it was even the cool thing to do. In my almost 20 years of being a restaurant coach, I’ve learned not only what a restaurant owner’s challenges are, but how to help them change their lives and their businesses in a way that gets them restaurant prosperity, which is freedom from the restaurant and the financial freedom they deserve. Before I go into what restaurant coaches do, right, what does a restaurant coach do? Let me go into who would benefit from having a coach, just a coach.
The owner who would benefit from having a coach would have a growth mindset. Now, if you’ve been listening to me for any length of time, that mindset’s important to me. The fixed mindset people say, here are all my challenges, blame the government, blame the employees, blame the customers, the vendors, pricing, anything out of their control, blames them instead of looking internally and saying, you know, well, now look at all these challenges, I’m dead in the water. Where a growth mindset person says, I have those same challenges, but I can get past them. I can Find a way, learn, spend money, whatever it is, I can get around that challenge to be successful.
So someone who’s going to benefit from a coach must have a growth mindset. Otherwise, don’t spend your time or money. Somebody who’s going to benefit from coach, they want to do more with their business, get more out of their life. So if you’re satisfied with a status quo, a coach is not where you want to spend your time or money. A person who benefits from having a coach wants to have a life outside of their work. Because if your identity is only your work, when that’s taken away from you or when it starts to go down or has challenges, it affects you so personally because you identify that’s who you are.
You’ve got to have a life outside of your day-to-day running your restaurant, running a business, doing whatever your job may be. The truth of matter is, If you want to have a life outside of what you do, a coach can help you achieve that by seeing what changes you need to make in your life, your work life, to have a personal life. A person who would benefit from having a coach understands they don’t know what they don’t know. See, that’s probably one of the most successful traits of any great leader in their businesses and lives is that you don’t know what you don’t know, which means you have to go out there and search for something.
someone who has done it successfully before and follow their plan, which is really important. A person who is going to benefit from a coach has to be willing to follow their proven blueprint to success, right? Instead of figuring out the best way to do something through trial and error, which costs you time and money, you’ve got to be able to say, I’m about to invest in myself, whether money and time, mindset, that I’m going to buy in and not question why do I do this? Why do I do this? Why should I do this? Instead, if they have a proven system, a process, a way to get you to where you’re going, you have to buy in.
Someone who’s going to benefit from coaching wants someone to guide them and hold them accountable. See, all too often, many of us know exactly what to do, but we need someone to hold us accountable. Who holds us accountable as entrepreneurs? When we’re the boss, we’re the company, well, it’s helpful to have someone help hold you accountable to keep you on task. And last but not least, a person who’s going to benefit from coaching wants to speed up the process, technically wants to buy speed. You can learn everything through reading books and watching videos, going to seminars and workshops and reading magazine articles and so on, which you should do.
But the truth of the matter is, if you want to speed up the process, you find somebody who can take you there, knows the direct path from A to B instead of zigzagging all the way through. You can get there, but you want to get there faster. Let me share with you a little bit about my life. About literally from high school through today, how coaches have impacted my life. See, I put my money where my mouth is and it started in high school. I went to Atlantic City High School, graduated in 1984. Yes, I’m old. With that said, I started rowing. And what did rowing provide me? Well, I was in a back then was called a broken family. It meant my parents were divorced.
And back in the early 80s, if you had a divorced family, you were kind of looked at kind of strange. It’s not what the norm is today. Right back then, it was like, oh my gosh, you’re in a divorced family. Well, the truth of the matter is a coach gave me the father figure I needed at that time in my age. He taught me about discipline and hard work, lessons I really needed to know. A coach in high school, my coach, by listening to him, I saw changes in who I was, both physically and mentally. before that, I was overweight. I used humor to overcome the fact that I didn’t have a lot of friends. I wasn’t in the in crowd.
And the coach pushed my buttons to get the most out of me to become the person I wanted to be and saw it materialize in front of my eyes. That coach taught me how to row and become the best athlete I could to a point where I had two scholarship offers. One to Temple University, which is a Dadvale college, and I enrolled, and the second from Northeastern University, a D1 school, which I enrolled and ultimately decided to go to. Without a coach, I would have never realized that dream and probably would have gone to a state school or a community college. And to me, I wanted the brass ring. I wanted to go big.
Now at Northeastern University where I ultimately went, I had several coaches there, but my head coach ultimately had the biggest impact on me. He was able to get the most out of me physically and mentally. I still had room to grow. I was still a young athlete at 18 years old and finishing at 21. I didn’t know all about myself, let alone how to get through the trials and errors of living alone and away from home and getting college courses done, practicing at a high level, getting my **** together. Well, coach helped me do that. He also helped me overcome any obstacles that presented themselves.
And I will tell you in college, I will not go into them, but there were many obstacles in my life. Some that were, well, life-changing. And I needed that. A coach helped me find who I was, not only become the best athlete, but the best person I could be. My coach, well, he taught me something that was very, very important that has stayed with me through life, whether work life, personal life. You are defined by your actions and your inactions. See, it’s about what you do. Don’t tell me you’re a good person. Show me you’re a good person. Don’t tell me you work hard. Show me you work hard. That’s the incredible part. You don’t tell somebody, you show them.
He also showed me that it’s not just hard work. I worked as hard as anybody else, if not harder than many. I was a scholarshipped athlete. And as I moved up in my years of rowing, I finally hit a plateau. I actually saw rowers go by me and I was a scholarshipped athlete. Now while some of that was physical, some of these guys were 6’5, 6’6, I’m 6’3 and being tall and rowing is an advantage. And while physically there’s a lot to do with it, there’s a lot to do mentally. And some of that is how you practice. in rowing, you make a small movement, a change in your handle height, speed up the slide. You can change how the boat moves. And it really isn’t about working hard.
And it’s not about practice makes perfect. See, coach taught me it’s perfect practice makes perfect. that I could work just as hard as anybody else, but because I had a flaw in my stroke, held my handle level at a certain spot, came up the last 6 inches of the slide a little too hard, a little too fast, and checked the boat, slowing it down. Little things like that could make it that another athlete could move a boat faster than me. So it’s not always about how hard you work. It’s not at all. It’s what you do well. And it really takes, it’s not practice makes perfect. That’s a lie. It’s perfect practice makes perfect.
So a coach did his very best to make sure I practice perfect, but it’s still up to me to make the change. Now, 30 some odd years later, I started rowing again at Rio Salada Rowing Club, as in the Masters, right? Old farts. And what was amazing for me is I’ve seen my life, my weight go up and down, my health go up and down. Hell, I’ve had a heart attack. And I got back to rowing. What I found is I needed a coach. See, I knew what to do to be fit. I know exactly what to do. I’ve done it. I’ve been a D1 athlete. What I needed is somebody to tell me what I needed to do, but to do it. I needed someone to tell me when to show up.
I needed someone to tell me everything I needed to do to make sure I do it. Yes, I’m an adult at 55 years old. I need another adult to tell me, do the work. And by making that commitment to somebody, the coach holds me accountable, which motivates me to please, motivates me to do. It motivates me to listen to criticism to change what I do incorrectly. So that I don’t follow the same suit I did in college of doing practice makes perfect instead Perfect practice makes perfect. So much so that the very first race I got back to because I had a coach, we took a bronze medal. And that’s a big deal to start racing again 35 years later. But I couldn’t have done it if I didn’t have a coach.
today in rowing, a coach has taught me to find my inner strength again, to dig deep and get the most out of myself. While I’ve done that in my professional career, it’s been forever as an athlete and I’ve changed my body again. I’ve changed my mindset. I’ve changed my health. I’m going to be around a much longer to help you, to help my family, to be here and present because I had a coach. Now in business, I’ve been using a coach since 2003, since being an entrepreneur, my old company and now my new. In the beginning, I used a coach to teach me, to teach me how to create a coaching business.
Again, back in 2003, coaching was, there were life coaches, but there weren’t really many business coaches, especially not in the restaurant business. So I used coaching to teach me what I didn’t know. I used coaches on how to build and market software. In my old company, things changed so quickly that I eventually became a software company. Yes, still a restaurant training and coaching company, but I didn’t know **** about software. I’m a restaurant guy. So I needed coaches every step of the way, not only how to build software, to work with your programmers and the challenges that go through that. But how to market it? Well, I’ve had multiple, multiple, multiple coaches on marketing.
I bet you have too. Like, I’m not a marketer. Sure, it looks like I am. But why? Because I’ve had a coach. I’m currently paying a coach right now to help me improve how I can get my name out there to find people like you that might be looking for a coach to come to me as a possibility. I’m not the right guy for everybody. I just like to think so. But the truth is the only way people know about you is to market. I’m paying a coach right now and I probably have paid a coach every other year in the last 20 for marketing specifically because it changes so often.
I’ve had Coaches just recently when I restarted my business, I sold my last business in 2018 and I restarted my coaching practice from scratch without software and I wanted to be the best thing possible. I had a coach on how to create the best coaching program knowing what I know today and what has changed in the coaching industry to deliver you the best program possible. I had a coach on how to write a book. Yeah, I wrote a book, Restaurant Prosperity Formula, What Successful Restauranteurs Do. You can find it on Amazon or anywhere that sells books and so much more.
See, I believe that coaches are so important to help me be successful that I invest almost every year, if not once or twice with coaches every, every time I want to learn something I don’t know. I want you to think about this. I want you to remember this when we talk about coaches. For old people like me, Tiger Woods, maybe newer, Steph Curry. How about older people like me and newer people, Serena Williams, or Neely Korda, brand new, right top of her golf game. With all of them, their success in large part is due to their coaches. See, they know what to do, But you and me, often need somebody to help them with the fine-tuning, to push them and nudge them forward.
See, a coach is someone who teaches you exactly what you need to do to be successful. A coach helps you set expectations for success, for getting the work done, what’s expected from you, what you need to do. A coach helps you get the most out of anyone on your team. because you’re only as good as your team around you. A coach is going to show you where you spend your time and your energy, not just waste it because time is a commodity that we cannot get back. So they tell you exactly where you’re going to get the best results if you spend your time. And finally, a coach, well, they’re going to show you how to measure your success. See, without measurement, there is no success.
But if you measure the wrong things, You may think you have success, but you really haven’t moved the business or yourself forward. This is what a coach can do for you. Now I will be very clear. A coach is not your savior. You don’t get a coach to change you. What do I mean by that? They don’t have a magic fairy wand. I don’t have a magic fairy wand. You have to take responsibility. If you invest in a coach, you’re investing in yourself. And while a coach should be nurturing and supportive, They should also be willing to be hard on you, expect more from you, and help you make changes in your life and business, not actually do the work for you. Listen to what I’m saying.
You want a consultant? They do the work for you. And oh, by the way, when they go away, nobody has buy-in, it’s gone. A coach does not do the work for you. They teach you how to do it. They make it a part of your day-to-day. They make it a part of who you are. They help change your company culture to make it something that stays because exactly how to do it, how well it should be done, more importantly by when. So how does a restaurant coach help you in your restaurant? Well, number one, they should teach you restaurant systems you need to put in place to make money you deserve.
The systems that allow you to be able to impose your will without being there, systems that allow managers to be there, and do things your way, especially when you’re not there every single day. Number 2, a restaurant coach is going to help you and your team stay on course. You and your team. A good coach isn’t just going to guess what should work in your restaurant. Instead, a good coach is going to help you create a budget. See, your budget is a proactive plan based on your where you’re located, your price point, your style of service, your Core values. So you can’t use national averages. You run away from anybody who goes, well, the national average for food cost is 34%.
The national average for labor cost is 33%. Who said that was your plan? And oh, by the way, that puts your prime cost too high and we need to lower it because we’ve got so many challenges today in the restaurant industry, so many people taking money out of our back pocket. So we create your plan for success. How does anyone help you and your business if we don’t have a plan for success, a budget? I don’t think it can be done. A restaurant coach is going to help you define your core values. They’re going to help you understand what you need to do to be the leader your restaurant needs. Think about it. A good restaurant coach needs to understand your challenges, what you’re doing well.
what you’re not doing well, where you need to improve, what systems you already have in place and what systems you’re not using. Because that’s going to lead you down to what new systems need to put in place. Remember, there’s a system, a process, a way to doing anything and everything in your business. A good coach is not only going to help you create your systems, but provide you the blueprint of successful systems to change your business. A restaurant coach is not only going to help you down the path towards success, but they’re going to give you that path, right? Not just assist you, say, this is the direction, this is exactly what you need to do to be successful.
And that plan is going to make you money. That plan is going to help you have a life. Number 3. A good restaurant coach isn’t going to accept excuses for why you’re not getting success out of your business, why you can’t leave your business. A good restaurant coach gives you the solutions and teaches you and your team and then holds you accountable to those solutions. Isn’t that what we’re ultimately wanting? We want the coach to get the most out of us, give us that plan for success. Teach us, coddle, train, kick us in the pants. I want you to think about this way. If you’re thinking coaching is right for you, you’ve gotten this far in listening to me.
I want you to think about when selecting a coach, look for somebody who fits your personality. For instance, I’m not everybody’s cup of tea. I think I can help anyone and everyone. But quite honestly, my personality is not a perfect fit for everyone. I am loud. I am energetic. I am in your face. I am willing to be there with you all the way through slogging, but I’m not going to take excuses. I’m not going to allow you to stay dead still. Yes, you may be able to fall behind, but as long as you move forward, as long as you keep doing something, I’m in your corner, but I’m not going to sit back and go, oh, oh, you were busy?
Because you’ve never had that as an excuse to stop you dead in your tracks. So I’m not the right fit for everybody. So make sure when you pick a coach, they fit your personality. They need to be someone who ticks off all the boxes and doesn’t do the work for you. Again, ultimately, if they do the work for you, you’re not building buy-in on your team. Nobody understands what’s going on, learns the systems that you implemented. And it doesn’t change your company culture because ultimately you as the leader, by implementing those systems, holding people accountable, taking action, are really changing your company culture to move forward.
Plus, if somebody does the work for you, it goes away when that coach is gone. See, a good restaurant coach teaches you the systems and skill sets to become the leader your restaurant needs. If you want to push yourself, push your business, and to get to where you have restaurant prosperity, which is freedom of your restaurant and the financial freedom you deserve, a restaurant coach is exactly what you need. So as we’ve gone over what a coach does, who would benefit from a coach, the truth of the matter is we’d all benefit from a coach. You do have to have a growth mindset. You cannot listen and work with a coach if you’re going to fight the process.
But if you’re open to learning, understanding you don’t know what you don’t know, if you’re open to following somebody else’s system, process, way, that is a proven path to success, if you’re willing to be held accountable, pushed, and not allow excuses stop you dead in your tracks, then I would tell you, it’s time for you to find a restaurant coach. Do I hope it’s me? Hell yes, I hope it’s me. But I’m not everybody’s cup of tea. So ask yourself, are you ready for change? com. In the upper right-hand corner, click on book a discovery call with me today. I will give you an hour of my time, no strings attached.
Learn more about you and your business, your challenges, your obstacles, what’s holding you back, and I will tell you what you need to do to move your business and your life forward. No matter what, you won’t be able to unhear what I share with you. I’m going to shine a light on what your challenges are and tell you exactly what you need to do to change. And then if you want to learn about my coaching program, we’ll go into it. And at the end of that, you can say, no, it’s not right for me and that’s okay. Or, who knows? Maybe you’ll sign up with me. and you might just change your life. Hey, that was an awesome episode.
I want to thank you for taking the time to take action on building a better, more prosperous restaurant. Before you go, I want to give you these three thoughts. One, by combining leadership and taking action with systems and training, being checked by accountability, you are on your way to creating prosperity for you and your restaurant. Two, I have something I need from you. Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you happen to listen to podcasts. By leaving us a review, other restaurant pros seeking out this information are able to find it. I read the reviews and hearing how this information has benefited you does wonders for me.
And three, if you find any of the discussions helpful, share them. The more restaurant pros who have access to them, the better we become as an industry. com. Be passionate about what you’re doing. Be persistent, but more importantly, become better and help everyone around you become better and your restaurant is going to kick some ***.