About every other year, Eat’n Park redoes its salad bar, its No. 1 selling item, Broadhurst says.
“You can’t rest on your laurels. It’s easy to do that,” he says. “We could say OK, our salad bar is our No. 1 selling item, let’s focus on other things. But that’s the last thing we can do.
“We’ve got to make sure that every single time someone comes in to get a salad bar, they’re compelled to come back tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”
You also have to make sure you’re constantly trying new things. That’s where Eat’n Park will utilize its other restaurant brands or college and university dining contracts as a platform to test something new with a certain market segment.
In addition, Broadhurst believes that copying the competition is not innovation.
Some of these ideas aren’t going to work, but you can learn from that, he says. In fact, if you’re not failing, then you’re not innovating fast enough. The key is to fail faster, which a lot easier to see in hindsight.
With the influx of take-out in restaurants today, Eat’n Park tried curbside service, hoping that it would help build new business.
“That was our first entry into trying to make the product that we serve in the boxes more convenient,” Broadhurst says. “We tried curbside, and we rolled it out to three, four, five restaurants (and) saw no impact. It was very difficult to manage.”
When he looks back, he realizes they should have abandoned the idea more quickly, instead of letting it drag on.
Now, 45 of the 69 restaurants have pick-up windows, which has changed the box, the restaurant, to make it more convenient for guests, Broadhurst says. This in turn has attracted parents who have small kids in the car, senior citizens and people who are in a hurry but don’t want a fast food product.
“We should have shut the test down quickly and continued to move forward, because we would have been into pick-up windows quicker,” he says.
Broadhurst has spent the past few years reminding people again and again that failure is OK. When you’re the project leader or embedded in the project, you want it to succeed so much that sometimes it’s hard to let go.
