No matter where it is, it's important that your restaurant has curb appeal.
Your 'curb' could be a waterway, a beach, a forest or, more commonly, your parking lot, but whatever is outside your restaurant needs to reflect what's inside your restaurant.
But it's amazing how often this is ignored - see the quote at the bottom of this page.
What is the state of your parking lot? Do you have a member of staff who is detailed to clean your parking lot at the beginning of the day? Is a member of staff designated to keep their eye on the cleanliness of the parking lot during opening hours? Has your parking lot recently been blacktopped? Does its condition reflect the interior of your restaurant or are there fallen leaves and old bits of newspaper blowing about?
I have spent many, many evenings in unfamiliar cities driving round looking for somewhere to eat. Would I go into a restaurant with an empty parking lot? No, I wouldn't. That would be a strong negative for me. If you're in danger of having an empty parking lot, encourage staff - the ones with decent cars - to park there, preferably ensuring that there is somewhere for them to move their cars to when you're really busy.
I said 'decent' cars, and I know that this is awfully British and snooty, but I once rejected a restaurant simply because all the vehicles parked outside were pickups. I have nothing whatsoever against pickups (as long as I don't have to own one) but a parking lot full of them didn't indicate the sort of restaurant I was looking for that evening.
But think about it - would your old mum (or your granny) really go into a place with nothing but Harleys parked outside? No, or not unless she was as eccentric as my old mum used to be, anyway!
I once heard about two competing restaurants. Every day, each owner would get into his car and go and check the number of cars in his competitor's parking lot. If the competitor had more cars, they'd commandeer the use of their wife's car, offer free car storage to friends and so on just to make sure that they were winning the full-parking-lot war.
A waste of valuable time? Yes. A little bit childish? Yes. In fact, pretty obsessive? Yep. But still.....
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. . . The other night, my wife and I decided to try a new restaurant. But when we turned down its street, we just kept on driving, never even getting out of the car. It was the sign that gave us pause. It was simply a flat, translucent panel with an amateurish, one-color logo slapped on — the kind of sign you would see on a check-cashing operation in a seedy strip mall. The sign was of low quality and in bad taste — imagery not well associated with a fine-dining establishment. With plenty of other good choices we simply didn’t want to take the risk of spoiling our dinner date.
For all I know, the food would have been amazing and the chef an undiscovered gem, but the restaurant never got the chance to prove it because we naturally assumed the experience would be as unprofessional as the sign. As a result, we passed ...
–Steve McKee, Business Week, Smart Answers : All Together Now “Marketing Is Everything,” February 10, 2006
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