It’s the Monday after the clocks fall back. The dining room of a chef-owned restaurant is dark except for one table near the kitchen pass, where the chef, Teresa, and her business partner, Sam, have spread out three things: last winter’s reservation book, a stack of supplier invoices, and a printed list of ideas they’ve collected since September. The list is long. A discount for weeknights. A push on a delivery app. A holiday prix fixe. A new cocktail menu. Paid social ads. A loyalty card. A collaboration dinner with a winery. Posting every day.
Every item on the list is reasonable. Together, they are a plan to do eight things halfway through the slowest stretch of the year with a kitchen that already runs at capacity on weekends.
What Teresa and Sam need is not another idea. They need a decision about which few things to do, in what order, for whom, and what they will deliberately leave alone. This piece is about how a strategy session produces that decision, and why, for a restaurant like theirs, the strongest plan for the winter puts gratitude at the center of growth rather than at the end of it.
The restaurant and its people are invented for this piece. The planning problem is real for almost every independent restaurant heading into the months between the holidays and spring.
Most restaurant plans for a slow season are built from anxiety. Covers drop, the owners feel it, and the response is to do more of everything: more offers, more posts, more channels. The trouble is not effort. The trouble is that activity without a sequence produces noise rather than return.
Discounts teach the wrong lesson. A weeknight discount fills seats with people who came for the discount. Some of them will return. Many will wait for the next one. Meanwhile, the regulars who would have come anyway now pay less for the same meal, and the kitchen works harder for thinner margins.
New diners get all the attention. Almost every tactic on the list is aimed at strangers. The people who already love the restaurant, the ones who book the same table every few weeks, who bring their parents for birthdays, who send their friends, are treated as a given. They get no plan at all.
Spending is timed to the owner’s worry, not the guest’s decision. Seasonal businesses often spend when the dining room feels empty rather than when guests are actually deciding where to go. The money goes out at the wrong moment, and nobody can say afterward which part of it worked.
The staff are left out of the strategy. The servers and line cooks who create the experience regulars return for rarely hear the plan, and they almost never hear what is working. They are asked to execute, not thanked for what they already do.
None of this is a failure of talent. It is the absence of a decision that someone could write down and hand to the rest of the team.
Teresa and Sam had sat through proposal meetings before. A vendor arrives with a deck, presents a set of services, and leaves a price. The conversation is about what the vendor sells.
A strategy session is about what the business has to decide. It starts with the restaurant’s own facts, and it ends when four things are on paper:
And one more thing, which is often the most valuable line in the plan: a short list of what the restaurant will not do this season.
A proposal meeting adds options. A session removes them until the remaining ones can be done well.
Early in the session, Teresa and Sam were asked a simple question: who keeps this restaurant open in February?
They knew the answer without looking. The regulars: a core of guests who come back on their own schedule, bring others, and forgive a slow ticket on a busy night because they know the kitchen. Behind them, the staff who make those guests feel known. Behind the staff, the farmers, the baker, and the fish supplier whose names Teresa says out loud when she describes a dish. Around all of them, the neighborhood, which is where the restaurant’s reputation actually lives.
Then the second question: which of the eight ideas on the list is for those people?
Almost none of them. The plan they had been building was a plan to court strangers while taking their supporters for granted.
That is where gratitude entered the strategy. Not as a holiday card or a sentiment on a chalkboard, but as the organizing principle of the season. The restaurant’s growth would come first from the people who already sustain it, by recognizing them in specific ways, making it easy for them to return and bring others, and treating their loyalty as the asset it is.
It is reasonable to ask whether gratitude is a strategy or a nicety. The research on how gratitude works suggests it is closer to the former, because it changes how people behave toward you.
In a series of studies published in 2010, Adam Grant and Francesca Gino found that receiving a brief expression of gratitude made people more willing to help again, including helping someone other than the person who thanked them. The effect ran through a feeling of social worth: being thanked made people feel valued. In one of their studies, a field experiment, a manager’s expression of thanks to university fundraisers increased the number of calls they made.
For a restaurant, the obvious application is the staff. A server who hears specifically what a guest said about her table, or a dishwasher who is thanked by name at family meal for the night the machine broke and he kept the line moving, is being told that his work is seen. The research suggests that feeling is part of what makes people go further the next time.
Sara Algoe, Jonathan Haidt, and Shelly Gable studied gratitude as it occurred naturally among new and existing members of a group during a week of gift-giving. They found that how responsive a giver seemed predicted how grateful the recipient felt, and that gratitude predicted how the relationship developed afterward. In their words, gratitude may function to promote relationship formation and maintenance.
The important word is responsive. What made people grateful was not the size of a gift but the sense that the giver understood them. That is a useful standard for a restaurant. A regular does not need a free entree. A regular wants evidence that the restaurant knows them: the table they prefer, the wine they ordered last time, the fact that their daughter is home from college this month. Recognition that shows understanding is what turns a satisfied guest into a relationship.
Desire, for a strategy plan, is relief. Teresa and Sam don’t want more ideas. They want to stop feeling that they should be doing everything. The moment the plan becomes something they can hand to their floor manager without explaining it twice, the scattered list stops weighing on them. Putting gratitude at the center creates that relief because it gives every decision a test: does this recognize the people who keep us open, or does it ignore them?
Here is the plan as it appeared at the end of the session, simplified. It is illustrative, not a template, and every restaurant’s version will differ.
Bring regulars back more often between the New Year and spring, and make it easy for them to bring someone new.
That is the whole priority. It is stated in terms of guests the restaurant already has, and the “someone new” comes through them, not through ads.
The kitchen can handle one special event a month on a weeknight, not one a week. Teresa can spend her Monday afternoons on guest notes and supplier calls, and nothing else in the plan can depend on more of her time. Sam owns the guest records. The floor manager owns the staff recognition piece. Nothing in the plan requires a new hire.
Three channels, and only three:
Everything else on the original list was set aside for this season.
Regulars. A monthly “kitchen table” weeknight dinner for regulars, by invitation, cooked from what the farms are bringing in. Guests can bring one person who hasn’t been before. Teresa introduces each course with the name of the grower. It is not discounted. It is a thank-you in the form of access and attention, which regulars value more than a coupon.
Staff. The floor manager collects specific praise from guest comments and reviews every week and reads it at family meal, by name. Once a month, a staff member chooses a dish for the kitchen table dinner, and their name goes on the menu card.
Suppliers. Each month’s email and kitchen table menu names the farms and makers behind the food, with their permission and with accurate descriptions of what they do. Teresa sends each supplier a copy of the menu card and a note about how guests responded.
Neighbors. The restaurant arranges to donate surplus prepared food to a nearby pantry or shelter on a regular schedule. The U.S. Department of Agriculture notes that the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act provides liability protection for good-faith donations of apparently wholesome food to nonprofit organizations that distribute it to people in need, and that 2023 amendments added protections for restaurants and certain other businesses that donate directly to people in need at no cost. The USDA also advises checking with the local health department about safely donating perishable food. This is general information, not legal advice; confirm the details with counsel and your health department before starting.
The team chose measures they could read from records they already keep:
None of these measures comes with a target the restaurant invented. The point of the first month is to establish where things stand. The second month is for comparing against the first.
Sam and Teresa look at the measures every other Monday, and the whole plan once a month, with one question: are we recognizing the people who keep us open, specifically and on time?
The plan is the decision. The package is how it gets carried out. For Teresa and Sam, the package that followed was deliberately small: a four-month calendar with the kitchen table dates and the monthly email dates on it; a standing draft of each email, written in Teresa’s voice and approved by her before it goes out; a short guide for review replies, including which details to mention and which never to share; a one-page brief for the staff that explains the plan in plain language; and a monthly review note that records what the measures showed and what changed as a result.
Nothing in the package adds a channel the session ruled out. That is the test of a good package: it protects the decisions instead of quietly reopening them.
Trust, in a strategy engagement, is the difference between a deck and a decision. Teresa and Sam trusted this plan for three reasons.
It reflected their own facts. The priority came from their answer to “who keeps you open in February?”, not from a framework applied from outside.
It said what it would not do. A plan that says no to five reasonable ideas is a plan that has actually made choices. The “not this season” list was the part they showed their staff first.
It could be handed off. The floor manager could read it and know her role. A new server could understand the kitchen table dinner in one sentence. A plan that only its authors understand is a deck, not a decision.
There is also trust on the other side of the plan: the guests’. Gratitude only builds trust when it is sincere and consistent. A restaurant that sends a warm email in November and a hard-sell discount in January teaches its regulars that the warmth was a tactic. The plan protects against that by making the “no discount codes” line explicit.
The same principle applies very differently in a financial advisory firm. A firm that wants to grow through gratitude to existing clients faces rules a restaurant does not. Gifts to clients may have limits under the firm’s compliance policies and industry rules. Public testimonials and endorsements are regulated. Even a thank-you that mentions a referral can raise questions that the firm’s compliance team must answer before anything goes out.
So a session for an advisory firm produces a different plan with the same shape: a priority built around existing clients, a capacity limit set by advisors’ time, channels the compliance team has approved, and a measure the firm can stand behind. The “what we will not say in public” list is longer. Gratitude still sits at the center. It is expressed through attention and service: a call on a client’s birthday, a review meeting that starts with what the client cares about, a handwritten note that thanks without promising anything.
If you are preparing for a strategy session of your own, these are the decisions a finished plan should contain:
Teresa and Sam brought last winter’s reservation book, supplier invoices, and their list of ideas. That was a good start. A complete set would also include:
By the end of the session, the list of eight ideas had a line through most of it. In its place was one page: a priority, a limit, three channels, five things the restaurant wouldn’t do, four measures, and a monthly dinner for the people who keep the lights on in February.
Teresa said the page made her feel lighter, which is the right outcome. A good plan does not add work so much as remove the guilt of everything left undone.
If you’d like to build a plan like that for your own business, one that starts with the people who already keep you going, start a conversation with WeKinnect about a strategy session. We’ll begin with your facts and end with a page your team can follow.
Photo by Tomas Anton Escobar on Unsplash
Written By
Darlene Gagnon is the founder of WeKinnect Global Branding Agency. Guided by the core value of Service before Self, she works with entrepreneurs and family-owned legacy businesses. She focuses especially on restaurants, arts, and travel and tourism. Darlene writes on Branding, Positioning, Marketing Strategy, Public Relations, Storytelling, and Entrepreneurship. WeKinnect serves entrepreneurs and family-owned legacy businesses across restaurants, arts, travel and tourism, banking, home services, nonprofits, and the pet industry, and Darlene brings that same spirit of service to every piece she writes.
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