1-888-353-5012
For 20 years, our Royalty Rewards® customers have been a driving force—working hard, learning, and growing stronger every year. We wouldn’t be here without them.
As we continue to celebrate our 20-year anniversary milestone, we sat down with one of our top-performing Royalty Rewards® Merchants, Tom Beckmann of Sluggo’s Sports Pub & Grill in Brookfield, WI. Tom has been a member of our Platinum Elite Program since 2015 and a Royalty Rewards® Merchant since 2014.
We asked him to pull back the curtain on his best-kept secrets, the tips, strategies, and lessons he’s used to consistently win. Whether you’re a new Royalty Rewards® Merchant or ready to level up, these insights are gold.
Royalty Rewards® was created to give Owners like you a proven, comprehensive, and professional marketing solution in a cost-effective way, and to make sure you have the support and tools to put proven strategies into action.
As a Royalty Rewards® Merchant, you have access to your Royalty Rewards® Coach and real-world examples from peers who are already succeeding. Tom shows exactly how to turn the program into a year-round, repeatable marketing plan, and your Coach is here to help you do the same.
In this economy, you can’t afford to treat marketing as “nice to have.” Tom puts it plainly: it’s as critical as hiring and recruiting, food and labor cost control, and customer service—because without a steady flow of the right customers, nothing else holds. The good news? Your Royalty Rewards® database and the marketing solutions at your fingertips already set you miles apart from competitors.
Check out the highlights from our sit down with Tom, and if you’re interested in meeting more Independent Business Owners like him and learning more about what happens at a Platinum Elite Meeting, call your Coach at 1-888-353-5012.
From $500K to $2.3M:
How Tom Beckmann Grew & Transformed His Business
Q&A with Tom Beckmann of Sluggo’s Sports Pub & Grill in Brookfield, WI, a long-time Royalty Rewards® Merchant and success story.
Can you tell us how your journey as an Independent Business Owner began?
Forty-nine years ago, a couple of my rugby player buddies and I decided that we would buy a bar. None of us had any money, so we had to scramble, but we were able to borrow enough money to get started. Our original plan was to do it for about three years. We thought it would be fun. We didn’t look at it as a career. None of us were terribly excited about anything else as a job or career. In fact, we had all tried things that just didn’t capture our enthusiasm. So, we thought we would do this, and it turned out to be tremendously successful right off the bat. We were having too much success to leave it behind, and it sort of evolved from there.
What are the TOP lessons you’ve learned along the way?
First of all, owning an independent business (for me, a restaurant) is a 24/7 operation. You never get away from it. Second, it’s almost impossible to live a stress-free life while owning a seven day a week business. And the third lesson is that the goals and motivations of your employees bear no resemblance to what we are trying to accomplish as a Business Owner. It took me too long to understand that, but it’s important that anybody who owns a small business, especially a restaurant, understands that everyone who works for them has totally different motivation in life than you do as an Owner. Not one single person of my 35 member staff is interested in owning the business. They’re doing what they want to do. They’re good at what they do. They want to go home at the end of the day, and they don’t want to think about Sluggos until the minute they’ve shown up at work.
What CRITICAL turning points shaped your journey? Without question a critical turning point was joining Royalty Rewards®. A marketing and loyalty program is the number one factor that has driven us. In just a little over 10 years, we went from making $500,000 a year to almost $2.5 Million… in a sports bar with only 2,000 square feet. Loyalty is what made it happen. With Royalty Rewards®, I can identify my customers and market to them. It’s number one above everything else. Without loyalty, our business wouldn’t be where it is today. 90% of our customers who walk in the front door at Sluggos are Rewards Members. We count on them. We bring them back with our loyalty program. Everything is so easy for me. Award certificates are very much appreciated by our customers because they’ve earned something from us, but also the birthday campaign and the various seasonal things. Loyalty is the answer.
My other critical turning point has been something I learned by being a Platinum Elite Member. And it sounds simple, but it was hard to start: Do the most important things first every day.
For me personally, that means spending my first hour of my workday doing things that are focused on growing my business. It could be monitoring marketing, a staff incentive, a promotion. Spend the first hour doing something that is significant. After that, if I don’t accomplish anything else for the rest of the day, I’ve still had a successful day.
What has been your biggest driver of sales most recently? We give away a lot of premiums, free gifts, logo and sports-related items to our local teams, but also Sluggos branded items. Everybody likes free stuff. It has worked well for us. Giving away something that we don’t sell brings people in. The key is putting a minimum spend on their ability to get the items. Generally, we ask for a $20 purchase and then they get a free item. We average over $40 a transaction by the people who come in to get the free items. So, they’re spending twice as much as the minimum on average. It works for us. Everybody likes free.
What are the biggest benefits of Royalty Rewards®? First and foremost, it’s a tremendous benefit to our guests, because they’re being rewarded for coming in and spending dollars. So that’s a big benefit. The benefit for me is that award certificates, birthdays, seasonal postcards, is all automated. It’s all done for me. I don’t have to do any work. And it’s fantastic. Promotions and marketing keep people coming back.
Do you have a favorite campaign you’ve done with great results? The tax rebate campaign is amazing. Its success is based on the uniqueness of the promotion, not on the amount that we give. We only offer a little more than $7 on our tax rebate, it’s less than an award certificate. It’s far less than our birthday offer, which is a free pizza, and yet it has the highest redemption. It’s just such a unique campaign and the customers love it.
What do you do to stay involved or stay top of mind in your community? We donate to everything: schools, churches, charities, fundraisers, golf outings, you name it. Everybody who asks for a donation, we give it. And that donation might be in the form of a gift certificate. It might be in the form of logoed items appropriate for golf outings. It might be bottles of liquor that we got from our supplier that we have no chance of selling anyway. We get a lot from suppliers, you buy a case of something, and they send you something, so I stash it all and use it for donations.
We understand you are thinking about retiring, what does that look like for you? How will Royalty Rewards® allow you to step away? I talk more about retiring than I intend to do it. My wife and I already spend five to six months away from the business and have done so for over five years. If I pay close attention to having a great staff, I don’t need to be here. The business hums along at the same pace, so I don’t really need to retire. I refer to it as semi-retirement. I’m not needed daily. My marketing is automated. I hire good, honest, nice people, a sense of humor is a plus, and I truly trust them with my business. If they can’t be trusted to perform their job the way it needs to be performed, then I replace them. And I’ve come to grips with that.
