Free Beans and Chili Every Day Since 1983

There is a place in Longview where the beans and the chili are free.

Not free on Tuesdays. Not free with purchase of two entrees. Free.

The Butcher Shop on Lehigh Street is a family owned restaurant, bakery and meat market. Their own About page says they have been open since 1983 and family owned and operated ever since.

That is more than forty years. Same family. Same town.

Read how they describe themselves

Most businesses describe themselves with adjectives. Premier. Trusted. Award winning. Words anybody can type about anybody.

Here is how The Butcher Shop describes itself. On its own About page, under what people say about them, it lists this:

"free beans and chili everyday"

"best burgers in town"

"gotta go for the Thursday Night Special!"

Read that again.

Those are not slogans somebody wrote in a conference room. Those are sentences customers said, printed back as the description of the business.

They let the regulars write the About page.

The sentence that gives away the whole business

Also from that About page:

"If you get up early enough you can smell our fresh baked bread being cooked and maybe even run into some of our daily regular coffee drinkers that have been coming in for years!"

Daily regular coffee drinkers. That have been coming in for years.

Sit with that.

They are not bragging about volume. They are not bragging about awards. They are bragging that the same people keep walking through the same door before daylight, and that the building smells like bread when they do.

That is the metric. Not reach. Not impressions. The same faces, on purpose, for years.

Nothing changed and that is the point

Their About page again:

"Though our menu has grown since then, we still prepare everything the same way now as we did back then! From our made from scratch bakery items, our daily ground beef, hand cut fries, all the way down to our fried chicken breading."

They grind and cut all their meats fresh daily.

Every one of those is a decision to do the harder version. Somebody sells pre-ground beef. Somebody sells frozen fries. Somebody sells breading in a bag. All of it is cheaper and all of it is faster and every single day for forty plus years this family said no.

Free beans and chili is not a marketing plan

Here is where most people get it wrong.

A marketer looks at free beans and chili and sees a promotion. A funnel. A loss leader with a conversion rate attached to it.

That is not what it is.

You cannot run a promotion for forty years. A promotion has an end date. This does not have an end date. It has been free the whole time, every day, to everybody, including the people who were never going to spend another dollar.

That is not a campaign. That is a decision about how you treat people who walk in your door.

And the proof it works is that customers say it back. Nobody at that restaurant had to teach anyone the phrase free beans and chili everyday. The customers brought it.

Read that again. The best line in their marketing was written by somebody who ate there.

What every business forgot

Somewhere along the way we replaced hospitality with acquisition.

We got very good at getting people in the door and completely stopped caring what happened to them once they were standing there.

A restaurant that has run more than forty years on the same family and the same recipes did not do it with a growth strategy. It did it by being worth coming back to on a Tuesday when nothing special was happening.

Nobody claps for that. It works anyway.

The regulars test, written out

Use this on your own business this week. Nine questions. Answer them honestly and you will know exactly where you stand.

1. What do your regulars say about you when you are not in the room? Write down their actual words, not yours.
2. Could you build your homepage out of their sentences instead of your adjectives? If not, why not?
3. What do you give away with no strings and no end date? Not a discount. A gift.
4. Which part of your work do you still do the harder way on purpose, and can a customer tell?
5. How many customers could you name right now, first name, without opening a file?
6. What time of day are your loyal people there, and are you there then too?
7. If you removed every promotion tomorrow, what would still bring somebody back?
8. What do you do the exact same way you did it on day one? Is that a rut or is that the recipe?
9. When somebody walks in who is clearly not buying today, how are they treated?

Number nine is the whole test. The rest is commentary.

If you want to go see it

Their menus are online, they run weekly specials, they do catering, and they take cake inquiries.

Go early. That is when the bread is.

What is the one thing your business gives away that you would never put an end date on?

And which East Texas business should get the next spotlight? Tell me who takes care of people out here, and tell me what they do that nobody else does.