WOW! - Creating Memorable Experiences for Your Guests

After you've gotten a handle on controlling inventory, training staff, cutting costs, ensuring sanitation, marketing, and engineering your menu with the deliberateness of a NASA scientist (whew!), there will still be that evangelist, poet and magician in you, hoping to create an experience in your restaurant akin to a kid's first trip to Disneyland. If you didn't seek "WOW" on some level, you would not have gotten into this business. But clearly if you don't seek it on some level, you might not be able to compete in this business with those who deliver it.

Your hope in opening a restaurant is that your customers will have fond memories of dining at your establishment. Fortunately, for most restaurateurs, the guests have brought their own fond memories with them. Perhaps they celebrated an anniversary, birthday, or productive business meeting. You provided the place, service and food, and they provided the WOW.

But how many of your guests leave with a genuine "high" just from the experience itself? Did you overwhelm them with an experience that far exceeded their expectations for a meal away from home? Do they speak about your restaurant to others in superlatives? Do they grab your hand to shake it as they walk out the door? That is WOW, my friend. And like everything involved in succeeding in this business -- including controlling inventory, training staff, cutting costs, ensuring sanitation, marketing, and engineering your menu -- you can create WOW with a little planning and forethought -- mixed with your own passion (of course).

. . . The experience is composed of the food, service and ambience. When you create some level of WOW factor in any of these variables, you have enhanced your chances of providing a memorable experience. -- Pat Morris

Excellence should not be "hit or miss" in your restaurant. It should not rely on the alignment of the planets, or whether you and your staff had a good day. It isn't about karma. You can build some WOW factors into your concept. Your staff doesn't have to be at the top of its game every day to deliver WOW, as long as your restaurant's ambience, menu offerings and operating support systems are designed to create a memorable experience when everyone is doing their job the way they were instructed. Walt Disney Company doesn't leave WOW to chance, so why should you?