Maria's Ristorante

Abstract

In an effort to save his business, Paul Marciano, the owner of Italian family restaurant Maria's Ristorante, runs a number of experiments focused on improving the customer experience around his target customer segment. These experiments lead to a better understanding about his business and cause him to make specific changes to his business model that ultimately improve things across the board. The experiments are based on research from the academic literature on the use of behavioral variables to manage customer perceptions. Excerpt UVA-OM-1536 May 28, 2015 Maria's Ristorante It still didn't seem real to Paul Marciano that his second Maria's Ristorante was operational. So much had gone into launching the flagship restaurant, only 10 miles away in Reston, Virginia, three years ago. Just as they had when preparing for the arrival of their first son, Marciano and his wife, Jackie, had stressed over every last detail leading up to the restaurant's launch. They had chosen their favorite plates and flatware and the interior design scheme “upscale cozy,” which included painting the walls yellow-green. They tested menu items themselves and trained the waitstaff for a week. Marciano smiled and shook his head at the memory as he drove toward the new location in Old Town Fairfax. How much they had learned! Almost as soon as they had opened the first restaurant, things had gone wrong. Foot traffic was slower than expected, and customers complained about everything from the menu to the lighting. Within two months, Maria's best servers started quitting to join higher-volume competitors. Waitstaff morale weakened due to lower tips on the slow nights, while cooks griped about not getting paid as well as the waitstaff on the good nights. The business was bleeding. After just four months, Maria's, named after Marciano's Sicilian grandmother, appeared to be just another restaurant in a death spiral. “We've got to do something radical, or we're not going to make it, Jackie,” Marciano had said. It was change or bust—change, or lose their life savings. Marciano knew that 60% of restaurants failed within the first three years, but he had still plunged into his venture, certain that Maria's would be one of the winners. It had been his lifelong dream to own a restaurant, and when the time came to quit his desk job, gather family recipes, and pool together the money needed to launch, Marciano jumped at the chance. It was going to be perfect—the first thing in his 37 years that he had really created himself. His fingerprints were on every decision. Whenever Jackie objected during the planning process, Marciano usually overruled her. This was his baby. And that was why it hurt even more when things started to go south, like a piece of himself was dying. “You know, Paul,” Jackie said one night. “We made a lot of our decisions based on gut—your gut. I wonder if there is a more scientific way to approach this.” . . .