Sponsored by Yelp
On March 15, 2020, my life changed forever. The closure of my restaurant coincided with a statewide COVID mandate and, at 40 years old with a wife and two-year-old daughter, I filed for unemployment for the first time. Losing a job is sad. Losing a business is tragic. But watching an industry you’ve dedicated your life to struggle is catastrophic.
After weeks of trying, I realized I couldn’t blame the pandemic for the loss of my restaurant. COVID-19 didn’t create my problems. It just accelerated their impact at a pace I wasn’t prepared to handle.
I was always one bad month away from closure, and I refused to speak up. The fundamentals of the game we were playing were broken and I knew it. My prices were too low, my labor was too high, and the market was saturated. Publicly, I had it all. Every social media post and interview told the story of how well my restaurant was doing. Privately, we struggled financially and operationally every single day. I was part of the problem and it was time for me to step up.
Not too long after March 15th, a well-known company was coming to a similar realization. If you’re a restaurant owner or operator, you likely have an opinion about Yelp. I’d been working with them as a restauranteur for years and knew them well. But I didn’t know we were working towards the same goal. They were watching an industry they’d been deeply connected to struggle and wanted to help. In July 2020, that desire to do more resulted in something new: A team of people completely dedicated to supporting and building tools for the next phase of our industry called Yelp for Restaurants.
A friend and fellow restaurant operator introduced me to the people leading the new team – most were hospitality professionals, all of them had a firm understanding of what would be required to build trust in our community. We both knew that while the pandemic wasn’t responsible for our industry’s issues, it would be responsible for changing the way our customers behave. They could sense it coming and created Yelp for Restaurants to address it. I saw it happening and wanted to build a way to share the collective knowledge of our industry’s leaders. In my conversations with the people at Yelp for Restaurants, I realized they cared about our industry as much as I did.
Our first project together was a podcast called Full Comp.The goal was to start a conversation we should have had a decade ago. We needed to talk more openly, hear from people experiencing failure as much as they’d achieved success, and share insights from those well-equipped to deal and those who weren’t. I was amazed at the tidal wave of support that followed. Industry titans like Jon Taffer agreed to be on the show, as did thought leaders from outside the industry like Seth Godin. Our message resonated. We had hard conversations about our past and laid the plans for a more secure future.
Our next project is even more ambitious. Our goal is to build the largest community of restaurateurs helping restaurateurs in the industry, to give operators a platform to share their expertise with others, and to make the brightest minds in hospitality more accessible than ever before. We’re doing this by building a media platform run by restaurateurs to share what we know and solve what we don’t for the future of restaurants. This effort will take all of us. If you work in hospitality and have a story or advice to share, we’re giving you the platform.
Though an unconventional pairing, I’m working with Yelp for Restaurants to serve a higher purpose: Giving restaurateurs a place to share and learn so we can all turn the page and make the industry stronger than when we found it.
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Here’s how to get involved:
Share the story of how you dealt with 2020 in Restaurant Influencers: The Playbook. Send us an email with your story, we’ll schedule an interview, and turn it into an article on the Yelp for Restaurants website.
Register for Monthly Town Halls to ask questions and get answers from people like Jet Tila, Sam Marvin, the co-founders of Death & Co, and others.
Subscribe to our latest podcast called Restaurant Marketing School featuring famed digital marketer, Eric Siu. The goal is to give an actionable marketing tip every day.
One of Josh Kopel's many roles is a Yelp for Restaurants independent contractor working on content creation.