I had made a mistake of monumental proportions, and this began to erode my self-confidence. I was not ready to give up yet, but with a tarnished ego, I looked disaster in the face.
My typical day started by getting up at 5:00 a.m. so that I could be at the restaurant by 6:00 a.m. I cooked the breakfast and typed the luncheon and dinner menus during the morning hours. Acting as the host, I would seat customers during meal hours. As manager, I ordered the food and trained the employees. After the restaurant closed at 9:00 p.m., I stayed alone to mop the floors and wash pots, pans, and kitchen utensils before driving home because I couldn’t afford to hire anyone to do these jobs. The high point of my day was relaxing on the screened-in porch of our little house, enjoying a bottle of beer, and talking with Nancy about her day and the children, whom I rarely saw. I was able to relieve some of the pressure by talking to Nancy about anything that came to mind, but mainly sharing my concerns about the restaurant and the problems we were facing. We needed to talk things out, as we were in this together and our survival as a family business was very much on the line. These quiet but late evenings together gave us the chance to do that.
It was the same routine every day, seven days a week. I didn’t take a day off for over a year and a half while I was struggling to make the restaurant a success. Nancy told me that our neighbors thought she was a young divorcée with two small children because they never saw a man around the house. The good news was that, although the Brickell Bridge was losing money steadily, we still had the Colonial Inn making enough money to keep us going. Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out a strategy that would stimulate sales and get us on the road to profitability.
Every day we offered two luncheon specials—one we sold for sixty-five cents, and the other for ninety cents. In each case the customer had a choice of soup or juice, an entrée, two vegetables, rolls, butter, and a beverage. I learned that the price was a big factor in attracting new business, and I did my best to offer reasonable prices and innovative menu ideas. At dinner, the menu had items such as “Golden-Fried Jumbo Key West Shrimp,” and “Succulent Fresh Gulfstream Pompano, Broiled to Perfection,” which I insisted should be as good as the menu promised they would be. The restaurant was always kept immaculately clean, and I spent hours training waitresses in the subtleties of providing the right kind of service. I did all the purchasing and worked closely with the chef on all aspects of food preparation. The dinner menu was changed daily. The highest price for a complete dinner, which included dessert and beverage, was only $1.80. A large fresh-shrimp cocktail with four jumbo shrimp cost only forty cents when it was ordered à la carte, and for only fifteen cents extra it could be included when a customer ordered a complete dinner. The value was there but new customers were slow in coming in.
The “season” arrived December of 1951; it brought in the first wave of our long- and eagerly awaited tourist traffic. It lasted through the month of February and brought with it some badly needed sales and profits to help shore up my sagging balance sheet. This was just enough financial support to get me through the winter and into the spring and summer months. When April and May of 1952 arrived, I was faced with the same low sales and the same devastating results that I experienced when I first opened. The summer business was simply terrible, and I began losing money all over again at a rate I could ill afford. I had to do something soon.
That something arrived in the form of a little boy named Charlie Cooper. Since opening the restaurant in August of the previous year, I employed a young boy named Henry Cooper as a dishwasher. Henry was about fourteen or fifteen years old, and I probably paid him no more than the minimum wage, which was around fifty cents an hour. Henry was a very industrious and dedicated employee who had an eleven- or twelve-year-old kid brother named Charlie who accompanied him to work every night. Charlie had an engaging way of approaching me. He usually began with a big smile, tugging at my sleeve trying to coax me into giving him a job. My only response was usually “I can hardly afford to pay your brother, Charlie. I’m terribly sorry but I just don’t have anything for you to do.” Invariably, Charlie would come back the next day and every following day inquiring if I had found a job for him to do.
One evening when Charlie walked into the restaurant, I called him over and said, “Charlie, I think I have a job for you. I’m going to give you a clean starched-white chef’s uniform, a tall chef’s hat to go with it, and a dinner bell. I want you to get out on Brickell Avenue, right in front of this restaurant, and ring this bell.” I didn’t stop there. “Be sure to smile at everybody going by. I want you to ring that dinner bell as loud as you can. I want people to hear it ring.” I told Charlie that I was going to shine two spotlights on him so that everyone passing by would see him. This brought out a big grin that lit up his face. Charlie was delighted to get this job even though I could only afford to pay him fifty cents an hour.
He came every night, got into his white chef’s uniform, and with that wonderful smile of his, rang his dinner bell for several hours in front of the restaurant. “Dinner Bell Charlie” became a happening in Miami. He was such a charming, delightful little personality, and the concept was so unique that thousands of people going home at night took notice of the Brickell Bridge Restaurant and this wonderfully new and unique little boy with a big smile ringing the dinner bell. I had finally come up with a clever idea to get the public’s attention, but the question was, would this build traffic? I decided to advertise a bargain steak dinner.
I ran a series of advertisements in the Miami Herald featuring a picture of “Dinner Bell Charlie” ringing his bell outside of the restaurant. The advertisement read:
JUST A REMINDER
Little Charlie is still ringing the Dinner Bell to welcome you to Miami’s greatest steak value.
A full pound PRIME SIRLOIN STEAK for just $1.95
Other Complete Dinners from $1.40
Join the crowd—watch for
LITTLE CHARLIE WITH THE DINNER BELL
BRICKELL BRIDGE RESTAURANT
550 Building
550 Brickell Avenue
Dinner Served from 5 until 9, 7 days a week
PLENTY OF FREE PARKING SPACE BEHIND BUILDING
The price of $1.95 for tender, top-quality steak served with a baked Idaho potato, salad, and beverage just represented my cost. I would be able to do nothing more than break even on each sale. The steak was absolutely first class, and although I knew I couldn’t make a profit selling it, I did feel that I could build traffic, which was the most pressing problem. My plan was to train our waitresses to suggest other items such as lobster thermidor, veal parmigiana, fried shrimp, calf’s liver, or whatever else I had on the menu, because these other menu items were profitable. With Charlie and our advertising pitching our big-value steak dinner, sales and traffic increased dramatically.
This unique promotion created another phenomenon in Miami. Often at dinnertime, we would have lines of people standing outside our restaurant even during the summer months when many other restaurants were closed and boarded up. The success of this extraordinary promotion even surprised me. The pressure came off when I finally realized that I had a good chance of making it after all. I had turned a losing proposition around by coming up with an innovative marketing idea. I was on the winning side once again and it felt great.
The marketing success was one of the great learning experiences of my business career, and it served me well in helping build the Burger King business. The lesson was a bit of marketing wisdom. You can read about things like this, but you really have to experience them if you want the learning to be indelible. The message and the lesson learned was very simple: If you bring a product or service to market, it needs to be done in a way that attaches a unique, highly individualistic message along with it. The great steak dinner at a rock-bottom price was appealing,
