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Hands up if you remember the Yellow Pages?

I’m probably showing my age here, and if you’re under 30 there’s a fair chance you never used the Yellow Pages to find a plumber, a function room for your 21st birthday, or somewhere to order fish and chips from on a family road trip.

When we bought our first pub in 2004, the Yellow Pages were still going strong. Each year the local rep would roll in and we had to decide whether to spend a pretty painful amount of money on a crappy little classified ad in the categories we thought customers might look under. We almost always said yes, mostly out of fear. If we weren’t there, our competitors would be, and they might scoop up the business.

As with a lot of things in my early hospitality days, I was a slow learner. It took me a while to really think through what we were actually paying for and how we would get a return on that.

A customer had to pick up a book with more than a thousand pages, find the right category, scan a long list of businesses, spot our little ad, pick us over a bunch of others, and then decide to call to find out more or come in.

There was a small miracle happening every time someone actually found and contacted us. I remember talking this through with the team over a few sessions. We’d put all this time and money into this marketing for our function area, and a small miracle had to happen before a real customer got in touch. Once we followed that thread all the way to the end, things got a bit uncomfortable.

Because when we looked honestly at what happened next, it didn’t make much sense.

People weren’t always being greeted when they walked in the door.
The phone wasn’t always getting answered. And when they were greeted or the phone was answered, it was a bit of a lottery whether the person could actually help or point them in the right direction.

If someone asked about a function, it was pretty loose. No shared way of explaining it, no real process, no agreed steps. It depended who you got and what sort of day they were having. Some handled it well, some fumbled through it, some passed it on and hoped for the best.

Those were not especially comfortable chats to have as a group, but they were needed. Because once we traced the whole path from someone spotting our ad to actually dealing with us in person, it was obvious what we were doing made no sense. We were paying to create opportunities that we were then dropping the ball on. Waste of money.

We didn’t totally slam the brakes on marketing, but it did change how we looked at where the next dollar should go and how we prioritised where we put our time and effort.

Instead of automatically rolling it back into ads, we started putting more of that money into the team. Training them properly. Tightening up how the venue flowed. Writing down what good actually looked like for service. Putting simple guides in place and reminders up in team areas so expectations were clear and repeatable.

We made a deliberate call to back the customer experience first and the marketing second.

It wasn’t a quick fix. There was no big switch we flicked and suddenly everything ran smoothly. But the shift in priority changed where we put our energy day to day.

We got more deliberate about hiring instead of rushing it. We built a real induction instead of a quick handover. We stopped assuming people would just know how to handle bookings and functions and started giving them a clear way to do it.

Piece by piece, that turned into a proper, written selling and service playbook that covered how we looked after customers from the moment they walked in to the moment they left. (Not just how we booked functions.)

I’ve used function bookings as an example here because that’s where the gaps were most obvious for us at the time, but the same lesson applies across every type of hospitality venue and every kind of customer interaction.

It could be a walk in table, a phone enquiry, a large group booking, a regular at the bar, or a first time guest. The process changes, but the principle doesn’t.

You’ll get far more return from your marketing spend once you and your team can honestly look at your own operation and say the experience we deliver is up to our standards, it’s delivered consistently and we know we have a growing list of existing customers who genuinely love us.

Get that right first. Then pour fuel on the marketing.

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