Find out how to use tech to make your chefs’ lives easier with the Founder and CEO of Meez.
Give An Ovation is the podcast where we interview restaurant owners, operators, and experts, to get their strategies and tactics so that youi can deliver a 5-star guest experience. Available on all major podcasting sites.
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Josh Sharkey is the Founder and CEO of Meez, a software that organizes your recipes so you can document, cost, scale, train, collaborate and prep like never before. Josh has touched every part of restaurant business in his career, as he’s been a line cook, a restaurant owner, and a COO, among other positions. He dropped some wisdom on this episode!
Here’s one of our highlights from this episode and Josh’s answers to some of our questions:
Featured Takeaway: Great food and service is table stakes
“You have to have an incredible product, right? That’s just table stakes. Don’t go into the business if you don’t want to do that, if you don’t want to be dedicated to that. I love creating great food and great products. But absent of a really good plan of how you’re going to communicate that product to people, it doesn’t really matter…
You need a really good product, but you also need to deploy a really tactical marketing plan to help people understand why it’s good and why it’s different…One doesn’t happen without the other.”
What’s the most important aspect of the guest experience nowadays? (12:24)
Consistency and connection.
Consistency: “You have to have this trust that when you have something at this place that you know that you’re going to go back and have the same thing again. You get really scared if you don’t.”
Connection: “You can’t just have a product absent of some sort of experience that goes along with it. And digitally, that’s the case as well. So even if you’re not going into a restaurant, and sitting down, and talking to a server, and hearing the music, and smelling the food, and feeling the vibes… digitally the same thing applies, right? And we’re still at the tip of the iceberg of what that means.”
What’s something successful you’ve seen restaurants try lately? (16:37)
“Restaurants are embracing multiple revenue streams, right? They understand that a four-wall box is limiting. And one day part is very limiting. We’re paying for 24 hours of space here. What is every way that we can extract value out of what we’re doing?”
Who is someone in the industry that deserves an Ovation? (18:14)
“Anybody running a restaurant deserves an ovation.”
“There are some great technologies coming out that I think are really cool and that are helping people operate better. Blanket — they’re really changing the game, making it so easy to manage tasks and manage consistency.”
For more, you can visit getmeez.com, or find @getmeez on social media.
Thanks for reading! Make sure to check out the whole episode, as well as other interviews with restaurant gurus by checking out “Give an Ovation: A Podcast For Restaurants” on ovationup.com/podcast or your favorite place to listen to podcasts.
