Before you get all excited and click happy. It has nothing to do with me wearing, or not wearing a kilt, skirt or other piece of provocative apparel. Now that that’s out of the way, if you are still interested in reading a lovely interview and article on me, Vigor, and restaurant branding, head on over to UNKILTED and be sure to comment.

Special thanks to Alex at UNKILTED for reaching out and putting it together.

I’ve worked with many clients in an outside of the restaurant industry. One thing that i’ve noticed is that the term “branding” gets thrown around more than a baseball without much understanding for what “branding” really entails. The fact is, it’s not about redesigning your logo. That’s not even the beginning, the end or the majority of what happens.

I had a client who’s restaurant was failing. When I say “failing,” I mean six figures failing and the year wasn’t even over. Their response to this failure was to rearrange the current menu, up the pricing, load it up with a bunch of new dishes and put it in front of an unsuspecting customer. The true failure here was not seeing the root of the problems: weak concept from start to finish; including the brand identity. They weren’t SERIOUS about their restaurant’s brand and what it meant. Heck, they didn’t even know what their restaurant’s brand was/is!

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Are you starting a new restaurant brand? Are you looking to turn “your ship” around after watching the electricity of a new concept wear off? The time is now.

Learn how to define your brand, then portray it visually through the power of restaurant branding with this short, but super sweet book.

Fire It Up covers the major topics and philosophies of branding a restaurant sprinkled with guidance, advise and case studies of successful restaurant brands from around the nation. Restaurants are hard enough to build. Not having the right brand in this highly competitive market is business suicide.

Fire It Up is now available for order at LuLu.com

Another restaurant has closed. This time it was the winner of America’s Next Great Restaurant. It just closed it’s New York City location leaving only it’s Minneapolis location left. Here’s what the PR team says:

The realities of running a restaurant are very difficult, more so with multiple locations in multiple cities. After a careful review of the business model and the performance of the restaurants, we have decided that our best opportunity for Soul Daddy’s success is to focus our efforts on establishing a solid footing in one location, building the brand, and developing the operations from there. We have decided to close our restaurants at Hollywood and Highland in Los Angeles and the South Street Seaport in New York, effective June 14, and focus on developing the best restaurant we can at the Mall of America restaurant in Bloomington, Minnesota. While it has certainly been a difficult decision, we believe this is the best approach as we work towards ongoing success for Soul Daddy.

I couldn’t agree more. Get your core location on its feet. Build the brand. Recruit loyalists and evangelists for your brand. Justify the expansion before opening locations across the country. This is restaurant 101.

You have your focus Soul Daddy, now get on it! FIRE IT UP!

It’s been a really fun ride putting together this handy dandy, super informative book. Now, after about 6 months of development it’s finally available for purchase. Currently available through LuLu.com, but will soon be available through Amazon and other online retailers.

FIRE IT UP: Building Restaurant Brands That Blaze is a culmination of 7 years in the branding and development of over 14 restaurant concepts. It’s a down-to-the-nitty-gritty, in-your-face, and bare bones approach to describing the process, ins and outs and all around theories on developing restaurant brands that actually work. No fluff here.

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I’m so pumped. I got the first 10 copies of the book in the mail this weekend. I took these quick shots with my iPhone. Although there are a couple production issues I need to get fixed, the book is nearly ready for prime time. I’ll be sending some out for review and finalizing the production issues this week. Click here to preorder »

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Fire It Up: Building Restaurant Brands That Blaze is finally out of editing and ready for publishing. The first 10 copies have been ordered for final review and preliminary reviews by some of the world’s most renowned chefs and restaurant related media outlets. I’m so pumped about the opportunity and can’t wait to get feedback from the media and, more importantly, the readers like you!

Pre-Order Now!

I just heard from both editors of the book. Editor No. 1 is halfway through and will be getting me notes by early next week. Editor No. 2 is underway and should have his notes to me by next weekend. I’m a little behind where I wanted to be, but it’s okay. We’re looking at an April publish date now instead of March. Genius takes time… or something like that.

If you want to get notified of when it’s published via email, use this form to signup.

Time to get this blog back in action. First order of business is about the forthcoming book, FIRE IT UP: A NO-NONSENSE GUIDE TO BUILDING A RESTAURANT BRAND THAT BLAZES LIKE WILDFIRE.

I’ve finished curating the books case studies from 9 other agencies that have phenomenal restaurant branding work. The last couple of agencies are nearly done sending in their information and files which means the book will be sent to the editor as early as Monday February 21st. Save any unfortunate amounts of edits, we could be publishing in early March 2011! Very exciting.