PlateWe don’t sell tactics because they exist.
Most restaurants do not have a marketing problem. They have four half-built things that were bought at different times by different people and were never connected to each other. Before we build anything, we work out what you already have, what is quietly costing you, and what is genuinely worth doing next.
What we look at before we build.
Every one of these is a real question with a real answer, and most of them can be checked from the outside in an afternoon. You get the answers whether or not you hire us for what comes next.
What is out of date. Hours, prices, a menu item you stopped making, a page for a location that closed, a copyright line from a decade ago.
What is disconnected. A signup form going nowhere. Ads pointing at a homepage. An ordering system your site never links to. A listing pointing at a dead page.
What is being neglected. The channel someone set up and abandoned. The catering page with no form. The review that has sat unanswered for a year.
Where the customer data is sitting. POS, online ordering, reservations, catering enquiries, an old email tool. How many people, and how many you are actually allowed to contact.
Whether the website supports the business. Can a stranger read the menu, find your hours and place an order on a phone in under a minute? We do it and time it.
Whether you are communicating at all. Date of the last post. Date of the last email. Whether anything at all reaches a past customer without you doing it by hand.
Whether your listings agree with each other. Your site, Google, delivery apps and third-party menus, compared line by line. Price and hour mismatches are common and they cost you today.
How offers and promotions currently work. Where they are announced, whether they end when they should, and whether anyone can tell afterwards if one worked.
Which channels are actually worth your money. Given your neighbourhood, your price point, your kind of food and how much time you have. Usually fewer than you have been told.
What you are paying for and not using. Subscriptions, a scheduler nobody logs into, a listing service, a site on a plan three times what it needs to be.
Five steps. In this order.
The order is the point. Most restaurants get sold step two by someone who skipped step one, and nobody ever gets to step three.
Audit
Everything above, written down plainly. What is broken, what it is costing, and what we would leave alone for now.
Build
Only the pieces the audit justified. Website, campaigns, offers, creative, landing pages — whatever is actually the constraint.
Connect
The step almost nobody does. Site into list, list into email and text, offers into everything, all of it into Plate.
Launch
It goes live, you are shown around it once in plain language, and it starts running without needing you.
Improve
What worked gets more budget. What did not gets cut early. Seasons, menus and hours change — the system stays current.
A plan you could hand to somebody else.
We would rather you hired us. But an audit you cannot act on without us is not an audit, it is a sales document — so it is written to be useful either way.
What is wrong, ranked by what it costs
Not a list of forty findings. The three or four things that are actually losing you orders, and why they come in that order.
What to fix first, and what to ignore
Including the parts that are fine. If your site is good and your problem is that nobody has emailed your list in two years, we are not going to sell you a website.
Which channels fit this restaurant
And which do not. A neighbourhood lunch spot and a destination dinner restaurant do not have the same answer, and neither one should be running everything.
How the pieces should connect
Written as a system, so whoever builds it — us, your nephew, or the next agency — can see where each part is meant to hand off to the next.
What it would take to run
Honestly. How much of it needs a person every week, how much can run itself, and which parts you should not attempt in-house during service.
Questions we get.
Do I have to buy anything after the audit?
No. Plenty of restaurants take the findings and fix things themselves, or hand them to whoever already does their website. That is a fine outcome. If we thought the only way to get value out of an audit was to buy the build, we would not offer it separately.
What if the answer is that I shouldn’t spend money on marketing right now?
Then that is what we will tell you. Some restaurants are better off putting the money into staff, or fixing the ordering system, or just being open more hours. Selling a restaurant a campaign it cannot support is how you lose a client in ninety days — we would rather have the conversation up front.
Do you need access to my accounts?
Not for the audit — most of it is done from the outside, the same way a customer sees you. For the build we need access to the things we are actually changing, and those accounts stay in your name throughout.
We already have an agency. Is this worth doing?
Sometimes, yes — particularly if you are not sure what they are doing or why. The audit looks at outcomes rather than effort, and it is deliberately written so you could hand it to them instead of to us.
How long does it take?
The audit is days, not weeks. What comes after depends entirely on what it finds — a website is a defined project, whereas ongoing marketing is exactly that, ongoing. We will give you the timeline before you commit to anything.
Start with an honest look at what you already have.
No obligation to build anything with us. If the answer is that your site is fine and you should spend the money on staff, that is what we will tell you.