5 Steps for Writing Your Bio (for Restaurant Owners)

Kitchen Nightmares with Gordon Ramsay is a guilty pleasure of mine to watch every week. One of my big takeaways from it is that running a restaurant is a lot harder than it looks.

Restaurant owners are often stuck, are often in the thick of running the day-to-day business. There’s a lot of variables with a restaurant and a lot of spinning plates to keep going.

What Kitchen Nightmares does so well though, and one of the reasons I keep watching season after season, is they tell the story of the the owner so well: their financial struggles, what’s going wrong in the kitchen, what’s going wrong in the front of house with customer service, and what they can’t fix that’s been a problem for a long time. Even though the restaurant is in debt, has bad food, has mismanagement, etc., the show really brings out the owner’s character and personality. Gordon gets to the heart of why they started their business, what they love about food, and digs deep to try to find that spark to help keep them going.

A great bio starts with these same things that Gordon looks to reawaken in restaurant owners. He knows that even though there’s the stress and pressure of bills and slim profit margins, it’s the passion that keeps an owner going. Sharing that passion with other people is the spark that keeps customers coming in. That’s what will inspire people to keep walking through those doors time after time.

An Opportunity to Share Who You Are

What if I told you about a passive way to get more customers, boost business credibility, reputation in the local community, and increase profits for years to come that can be done in less than a week?

This is of course your bio. That might be written or in video format on your website, social profile like LinkedIn, or as a YouTube video.

80% of profits at restaurants come from regulars, and a bio is a great way to attract them. I believe the biggest challenge for any restaurant is finding these customers, the ones who will come back again and again, who are the backbone, the foundation of any business.

These are people who heard about your restaurant through word of mouth in your local community, or maybe you put a coupon in the local mailer. They decided to try your restaurant. Maybe they’ve gone to your website and read more about you there or they’ve checked out your Instagram and watched a video of you talking about you and your food.

They come, enjoy their meal, walk away happy. We’ve connected and cultivated our audience, and added someone as a fan. Hopefully they come back again and again. They become a regular. And even if they don’t, let’s say they’re a tourist from out of town, they could write a review or tell someone else back at their hotel who goes the next night, or maybe they tell a friend or family member back home who’s planning to visit the same place.

There’s a lot of things people can do that can really benefit and promote your restaurant even if they don’t become a regular. But the bio was one of the starting points for that. They looked us up online or they watched one of our videos. They knew more about us and feel more connected to us because of the online presence and social presence we’ve put out.

A bio really helps to fully fill out our personality, our personability and it really cuts through that business aspect of being a restaurant, that day-to-day grind.

My Five-Step Process for Creating a Great Bio

In my last newsletter, I talked about a five-step process for creating an awesome LinkedIn bio. We can use that same process, condensed and tailored of course, to create your awesome bio as a restaurant owner.

These steps are:

1. Identifying motives and passions for your restaurant
2. Visualize your career
3. Who’s our audience?
4. Pick out the essentials and write
5. Publish and Update

Step 1 is to identity why you started and what you love about your restaurant. Write a sentence for each of these. Then, we move to the Step 2, developing a visual of our career through a visual timeline or bubble chart. We mark important points of experience, accomplishments and milestones from Point A, where you started in the restaurant industry, to where are you now in your career.

After doing this prep work, we can move to Step 3, identifying our audience for our bio. Is it for a website (200-250 words), professional profile like LinkedIn (100-150 words), or is it a short introduction video (1-3 min.)?

Now that you know how long your bio needs to be, move to Step 4: telling your story in that container. Start with a strong hook, one of those sentences from step one that speaks to your passion for food and what inspired you, why you started your business. Then, narrate your job experience and career from this lens of, “what drives you?” Your bio now won’t tell people who you are, but show them how you have impacted and supported people, and how that’s made you into the restaurant owner you are today.

Step 5 is keeping your bio up-to-date.

Bonus Points for Sharing

After we publish our bio, it’s important that we just don’t let it sit there. We also want to share that bio on social media. This can be done a number of different ways.

We can break our bio into short written posts with an intro letting people know about our new bio, and a CTA at the end inviting people to follow or come to our establishment.

Vertical videos are also great for attracting and cultivating audiences, especially if this comes directly from the owner, it can be particularly impactful. And I would recommend these videos be around 20-30 seconds for you. They will be a really personable and direct way for you to potentially connect with a customer.

Done for You Bio Writing at MP Storytelling

At MP Storytelling, I love helping business owners and leaders create great bios that share not just their experience and credentials, but their whole self, their personality.

Now, I’m not an international TV icon and global restauranteur like Gordon Ramsay, but I do love restaurants. I love helping small, local businesses be successful, bringing customers who will love your food and hospitality into your doors.

If you’re a restaurant owner and don’t have a bio on your website or LinkedIn profile, or you want a better one, I’m the guy for you.

I offer done for you bio writing services and packages. Let’s create a clean, crisp picture of who you are to inspire others and give you the best possible spotlight for your restaurant or small business.

Book your free discovery call with Matthew. Let’s get started on your bio or storytelling project together.