Liz Einhorn grew up in restaurants. Today, she shows restaurants how to grow.
Liz is the founder of Experience Threee. The three “e’s” stand for explore, educate and engage. And these are the three principles that Liz uses as a brand management and growth strategy consultant.
With a focus on restaurants, hospitality and airport concessions, Liz has seen this business from every imaginable angle. She’s seen what works. She’s seen what doesn’t work. She understands the patterns that contribute to success and the mistakes that end in failure.
That’s why her consulting business is built around the idea of helping clients think more intentionally about each and every decision from logistics and location to menu and marketing.
We wanted to share some of Liz’s wisdom with you so we invited her in for a chat with co-hosts Claudia Saric and Spencer Michiel on the most recent episode of So You Want To Run a Restaurant.
At the Intersection of Food and Community
In a sense, Liz has been in the food business her entire life. The Philly native said that her first actual paying gig besides babysitting was scooping ice cream at the Jersey shore when she was just 13. But it goes back even further than that. Liz explained, “My grandparents on my dad's side had fruit and vegetable stores.”
It was also at this young age that Liz began to appreciate just how fundamental a role food can play in creating connections. Anybody who grew up in the Philadelphia area can tell you that the corner produce stores are staple institutions in their neighborhoods.
“And on my mom's side, my grandparents were really involved in something called Cook For Friends,” Liz told us. “So I was always at this intersection of food and community.”
Pints and Ports
Still, Liz took what she describes as a somewhat atypical career path into hospitality. She began her professional path at Johnson & Johnson, where she did pharmaceutical sales. As a fun side hustle, she did some promo work for beverage distributor Diageo. Ultimately and quite unexpectedly, her work in the beverage biz ended up bearing professional fruit.
“Through a friend of a friend, I heard about a job with Sam Adams,” Liz told us. She assumed the work would be similar to the marketing job she’d done with Diageo. “And they were like, ‘No, it’s a sales job.’”
At the time, Liz admits, she had no idea you could actually work full-time in beverage sales. She jumped at the chance, and ultimately spent 10 years there. In fact, her willingness to venture boldly into unchartered territory would truly come to define Liz’s career.
As she explained, “Opportunity presented itself to call on the airport, and I raised my hand. They were like, ‘What do you know about airports?’ And I was like, ‘There are airplanes at the airport.’”
Five Takeaways From Our Chat With Liz
Liz ultimately learned her way around this unique sector of food services, helping Sam Adams reshape branding and concession opportunities in airports throughout the U.S. From there, she also began working closely with chains around the U.S., from national brands like Applebee’s and Buffalo Wild Wings to Philadelphia-based groups like Stephen Starr Restaurants.
“Between that and the airport space and growing the brand,” Liz explained, “I just fell in love with brand and business development.”
She took that love and used it to launch her own consulting firm. Today, nearly a decade later, Experience Threee works “with brands, chefs, and restaurants, all within the hospitality space, helping them figure out their growth strategies. And a lot of that work is in the airports.”
There’s actually a whole lot that goes into opening and running a restaurant in the airport. For the nitty gritty details, check out the whole episode above, and for some of our favorite moments, read on.
1. Fly at Your Own Risk
If you think getting through security is a pain, you should see what airport restaurants have to do just to manage their inventory, Liz said. The reality is, owners that want to see their brand placed in an airport have to jump through a lot of very industry-specific hoops.
“For one thing, you need to be comfortable with licensing the brand, and there's so much that falls under that,” Liz explained. “How reliant is the concept on its founder? Can it operate without the founder being there? What is the sense of the brand itself? We're going to treat every brand differently.”
That’s because your brand has to meet quite a few criteria just to consider this type of venture. As Liz told us, “There is no room for error in airports. You're in such small, condensed spaces. So you need to be thinking about whether you can operate in a self contained unit, without a commissary or a ton of extra storage space. You need to think about whether this is something you’re going to be able to do from a supply chain perspective. The process of just getting a tomato into the airport is harder than getting a person through TSA, truly.”
2. Seize Your Captive Audience
So if making the leap to airport concessions is such a challenge, why do it? Liz explained that when brands actually succeed, the value of this placement is immeasurable. As she noted, “With airports, it's not just about it being a revenue driver. It's a brand machine. When it's done the right way, there’s no better billboard than an airport restaurant.”
Your terminal likely brings in travelers from all over the U.S. and all over the world. Your brand is enjoying a kind of direct visibility and exposure that is truly unique to this type of space. And of course, people aren’t just passing by. In many cases, they have no choice but to remain in this space, and sometimes for extended durations.
“There's a captive audience. You don't have to worry about the foot traffic. They're there, and more often than not, they're delayed. So they're hungry and they're annoyed, and they want their salty snack, their sweet treat, or their Bloody Mary,” Liz explained.
Brands that deliver on that expectation, that offset that hunger and irritation, will ultimately pull in strong revenue and strong reviews.
3. Finding Your Place at the Airport
This is not to suggest that success is guaranteed if you land an airport lease. As Liz told us, there is still a lot of thought and planning that must go into your target market and your placement. Observing that there is a growing push for more airport terminals to showcase local brands, Liz suggested that there must still be some level of balance.
“The best concession programs that I see out there are the ones that have the balance of national, local, regional vendors,” she noted. “Because as much as people want to taste local, planes and flying can be anxiety-producing experiences for folks. So sometimes they want the comfort of something that they know.”
That’s why you tend to see a healthy mix of both local brands and national chains in many modern airports. But even beyond that, Liz stressed the importance of matching the placement of a given restaurant with the type of traveler who is most likely to hurry past your business on the way to their gate.
For instance, Liz explained, “What brand is going to work in a terminal that's run by Delta or United? It might be different than a brand that's going to be successful in the Spirit or Southwest terminal. It doesn't mean one is good and one is bad. It's just thinking about your audience.”
4. Understand Your Own Concept
This may sound like an obvious one, but as Liz explained “This is where a lot of operators miss the mark. They don't have a fully defined sense of who they are as a brand or a concept, and, as a result, they don't know how to create a menu that is geared towards their audience.”
Not only that, but Liz observed that many of the brands she has worked with are also not necessarily thinking realistically about the logistics and limitations of working in this type of space.
“Something that we work with brands on a lot is thinking about back of house and thinking operationally,” Liz explained. “You need to know that airports weren't necessarily designed for restaurants. Sometimes the people that are writing the bids are not restaurateurs. My personal favorite is when I see a bid for a hamburger concept, for example, but it has no fryer, so I'm like, “Okay, so we're not gonna do french fries?”
5. Set It and Forget It
Even after you navigate the logistics, the location, and the concept, you still need to create an operational blueprint. Whether you’re just looking to launch a single successful airport location or you’re planning for placement in airports around the country, “You need to have systems in place so that you can walk away for an evening and enjoy your life, or go on vacation and nothing changes,” Liz observed.
Obviously, effective and consistent training can play a big part in achieving this goal. But you also need to create clear standard operating procedures, a streamlined workflow, and measures of accountability. After all, in an industry where high turnover rates are already a persistent challenge, the issue is even more pronounced in an airport setting. You need to anticipate and prepare for this turnover with operational consistency.
“There are going to be some transient employees at airports going in and out,” explained Liz. “So it has to be plug and play. Your cook, your server, your bartender — they have to be able just to slot into a space where you can say, “Do this. Here's how we function.”
Creating Consistency With the Right Tools
One thing is pretty clear. While there’s a lot of opportunity in airport concessions, you really need to have your ducks in a row to pull it off. Fortunately, there are all kinds of tech-based solutions that can help, from tools for mapping out your inventory strategy and engineering the right menu for your audience to whole systems that can help streamline your workflow.
Not sure where to start? For all the tools and tech you’ll need to help your business take flight, schedule your free, personalized consultation with one of our in-house restaurant tech experts and we’ll figure it out together.
