Five years ago we decided it would be a good idea for me to record phone calls with customers who wanted to share why they liked using Schedulefly and how it helped their restaurant. We posted the recordings on our blog, and they were fine for a while but after about ten we realized that our blog was mostly read by customers, who didn’t need to hear other customers praise our app. Plus, it got a bit old putting up content that was sorta the same message over and over… “I really like Schedulefly a lot!”

So, rather than focus on ourselves, we decided to put the emphasis on our customers. We thought it would be cool to speak to independent restaurant owners and have them share their stories, their advice, lessons they had learned, and so on.

We were right. I mean, I don’t know how many people listened to the interviews, but I do know that we realized quickly that we had some INCREDIBLE content on our hands. These were people who had figured out how to succeed in a very tough industry, and they were readily sharing what they had learned along the way. The do’s. The don’t do’s. The secret traps you can fall into. The unconventional things they tried that had big payoffs. It was just amazing content, and it inspired us to publish our book, Restaurant Owners Uncorked. The book was published four years ago this month – it continues to sell well on Amazon to this day. And the book inspired us to create the Restaurant Owners Uncorked video series, which has been a fun, inspiring project. We’ve been so incredibly lucky that all of these owners have shared so freely with us, whether on paper or in front of a video camera.

So now we’re excited to come full circle, with the introduction of our Restaurant Owners Uncorked podcast series. It’s in iTunes here, and we have two episodes up now. We plan to do about 50-75 episodes this year, so if you are into this sort of stuff, make sure to subscribe to the podcast to get new episodes as we release them.

I’ll occasionally write posts based on what I learned from speaking to an owner. The first two podcasts are Tad Peelen from Joe’s Real BBQ and Joe’s Farm Grill in Gilbert, AZ, and Mat Frey of Bub’s Burgers & Ice Cream and Bub’s Cafe in Carmel, IN. These guys were both in our book and our video series and discussed similar content, so I won’t post summaries here, but I hope you’ll listen. They are both very sharp owners who have proven to know what it takes to succeed in the indie restaurant world.

Thanks,
Wil