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HOW TO GET YOUR PRODUCT INTO A HOTEL CHAIN

A discussion with Clifford Smith

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John DeBevoise:Greetings everyone and welcome to another serving of Bizness Soup Talk Radio. If it’s in business, it’s Bizness Soup. I’m your host John DeBevoise. Today we are going to be speaking again with Cliff Smith from the Cookie Club of America. Cliff has an extensive entrepreneurial background and food service industries through the major hotels and we’re going to talk about how to get your product into a hotel. Got a great concept, great product? well listen in because Cliff Smith is going to share the tips, tools and techniques of getting into the hotel chain of your choice.

John DeBevoise:What does it take to get into, say a hotel or restaurant? You have a product and how do you get distribution? And as you all know, distribution is the most important part of a business because without it you’ve got nothing. Cliff’s background is in the hotel, restaurant arena. Cliff, if I wanted to get a product into one of these hotels, how would I go about doing it?

Cliff Smith:John that’s a great question and I’ve got to tell you, the patience thing that I spoke about before, it certainly comes into play here. But there are paths in which you can take and I’ll utilize Marriott as an example because it’s a very well known brand. They are the largest hotel company on the planet currently and I’ve got nothing but great things to say about them. But I will tell you if you have a new product you want to get it into Marriott’s hands, it is not an easy road to travel.

Cliff Smith:What I try to tell people, I say, “Look, if you want to get into Marriott, my first recommendation is find yourself a trial property. Find somebody close by that you can monitor and try to befriend the food and beverage director.” Because we’re talking about food. The director of food and beverage is the person you want to make sure that you meet with. Then if he or she likes what you’ve got, they will introduce you to the chef. At that point you’ll do an on property tasting of what you have. You can either bring finished product or you can bring the raw product, or let the chef’s kitchen staff work with it. But that is your number one way to do it. Start small. Gain the confidence locally of a local hotel and of course you want to go to a full service Marriott hotel because the higher up the food chain you can be, because Marriott owns so many different brands, the better likelihood you’re going to have of getting in at all.

Cliff Smith:Okay. That’s just with Marriott in general. But there’s a couple of other paths that people may or may not know and I want to share those. The International Hotel, Motel and Restaurant Show happens once a year in New York City at the Jacob Javits Center. It is an international show, so every hotel chain is represented at that event. Marriott is certainly there as well as Hyatt and Hilton and all the other ones as well as overseas. Also every major restaurant chain is there. A recommendation would be to say, “Look, stake your ground, get a spot at that show. It’s a little bit difficult dealing with New York City and bringing a lot of things in because it’s a city and it’s a very busy one.” But this show will give you the best exposure.

Cliff Smith:Let’s just say you want to get into Marriott but you say, “I know Marriott is going to be there, but there’s also going to be a lot of these other people there.” That’s your opportunity to get in there and to try to get some business that might be lower hanging fruit so to speak. Because Marriott’s going to take you a while. They’re going to put you through a process. There’s trial and error, there’s financial requirements that they’re going to have and it’s very difficult for them to work with a brand new startup at a large level because their requirements for food and they’re kind of quantities they’re going to need are going to surprise most entrepreneurs. Until then you can go to the International Hotel, Motel, Restaurant Association Show and you can certainly find some smaller properties that will help you cut your teeth in the industry.

Cliff Smith:Now there’s one other event that I found, Oh this is some years ago and they’ve grown tremendously. It’s called ECRM, stands for Effective Collaborative Retail Marketing. Now those people basically have a different kind of trade show. Your typical trade show, like the restaurant show I just spoke about is you set up a booth, you bring all of your stuff, your displays, and you hope the right people are going to walk by. Well that’s kind of a needle in a haystack thing and it leaves a lot to circumstance. But at the ECRM events, where they have them, you can bring in and there’s so many different planning sessions and events that they do around the country. They are three day events where basically all you bring are your sales sheets and a couple of product samples. You don’t need to bring a trade show booth, anything. And they put you in a nice resort for three days and two nights.

Cliff Smith:The buyers that are there are the actual buyers. They can bring their assistants but if the actual buyer’s not there, the assistant cannot take their place. If your intent is to meet the buyers of Marriott, you need to go to those shows because they’re going to be there. What happens is they give you 20 minute planning sessions. Over those three days you will meet about 60 different buyers and you get a chance to meet and mingle with them with guaranteed appointments. They are probably the best form of a trade show that I’ve ever seen. And they added a space for food service.

Cliff Smith:Like I talked about the International Hotel Restaurant Show, the ECRM basically has an event specific to food service that will sell into schools and hospitals and hotels and so on. You may find by going to a couple of these events that there are other avenues for you to introduce your product to before the whole culmination of say, Marriott Hotels comes to you or the Hyatt or the Hilton because those are going to be far longer sales processes. I just want to make sure people understand there are other options out there.

John DeBevoise:When you talk about attending these meetings, what should you be bringing?

Cliff Smith:Well, real simple, it’s not one of those shows where you have to set up a big booth. You save a lot of money by number one, you don’t even have to buy a booth. You’re bringing samples, if you’ve got finished, finished product is what they want to see, especially if you’re going to talk to retailers. In terms of food service, food service gets things in basic bulk packages. There’s nothing fancy about them. But you want to have all your ducks in a row so you have to bring packaging, whether it be bulk packaging or whether it be retail packaging, they want to see a finished product. These are seasoned buyers with very large brands behind them or retail chains.

Cliff Smith:They’re not going to take a chance on a brand new entity just by you showing them a mockup. They’ll be like, “Cliff, we love what you have but until you can show us an actual finished product, we can’t do business with you.” And they’re trying to protect their own reputations because these people are responsible for very large amounts of money. You have to understand that going in. Make sure you have your ducks in a row. You need your samples, you need your pricing structure and bring a good attitude and also some throat lozenges because you’re going to be talking a lot. A lot. You actually have breakfast, lunch and dinner with these people.

John DeBevoise:What you have and their reputation and such is that they have to protect that because they can’t say you all take your product and then have you fail to deliver on the quantities that you said you could do because you wanted to do it. Doesn’t mean that you can do it.

Cliff Smith:Exactly.

John DeBevoise:And know your limitations and only shoot for those at the beginning so that you can get your feet wet and understand how the production, distribution and consumption and payment structures happen.

Cliff Smith:That is correct. You have to be very careful because these guys are very seasoned, whether it be women or men, they’re very seasoned buyers and so they understand what they’re looking for. The last thing you want to do is over promise and under deliver. I think everybody’s probably heard that phrase before. If you take small bites, you’ll get through the apple a little bit slower, but it will be complete because once you damage your reputation, especially in the food service space, believe me the word gets around pretty quickly and that’s the last thing you want to do.

John DeBevoise:Now we’re talking with Cliff Smith about getting a product into a large entity such as he gave the example Marriott. There’s a litany of other food service areas that you can get a product in as we’ve been talking about with the Cookie Club, but it really doesn’t matter what the product is, you have to be prepared and we happen to have what we call our five points of getting through the door that Cliff has provided us. And if you’d like a copy of that as well as listen to this show or read the transcript, go to bizsoup.com, the one source for business. What are the other points that you have on your five points there?

Cliff Smith:Well we already covered our five points John, because we had the quality over quantity, the patience piece we took on early on, the Hotel, Motel, Restaurant Show, a trial property. Convince one before you do it, whether that be a hotel or a restaurant. You have lots of restaurant chains, you might want to pick one. And then of course ECRM is an avenue that will help you get into both retail and food service. Those are kind of the five pieces.

Cliff Smith:And then I guess if you want to talk about a sixth one that you can interchange one of those trade shows for the financing piece is key. Make sure you have a real clear financial path where you can afford to wait for the sometimes 90 days that it takes to get paid.

John DeBevoise:Yes, that rotation and oftentimes you’ve got to produce your second or third delivery while you’re still waiting on the first one.

Cliff Smith:That is correct.

John DeBevoise:In the fuel service business that I used to be in, it was a, called it a third load rotate. When the third load came in, we paid the first one, but sometimes that would be on a daily basis. You’d be writing multiple checks depending upon your volume. Nevertheless, we have our five points. It’s the idea, the plan, the people, the execution, and the solution. Cliff, this kind of information is invaluable to the audience. You could save them six months of the process of getting your product to market. Cliff, thanks for joining us on this serving of Bizness Soup.

Cliff Smith:My pleasure John. Thank you very much for having me.