ShareThisBy DICK YOUNGBLOOD
Friday, November 03, 2006
Dave Ostlund has two passions: food and travel. That means all foods, said the onetime chef and self-described "food freak," including the chicken feet, fish eyes and snake innards he sampled on a recent trip to China.
But it was his quest for more conventional fare on his trips around the United States that inspired an unusual company that is expected to gross $475,000 this year by helping Twin Cities visitors find the kind of restaurants they want.
Ostlund and business partner Chad Erpelding are founders of Direct Line Services (DLS), a 4-year-old Minneapolis company that designs color brochures describing area restaurants and places them in hotels and a handful of office buildings in the metro area.
"As I traveled around the country, I was amazed at the bad advice I kept getting from hotel personnel when I asked for restaurant suggestions," Ostlund said. That experience was duplicated as he and Erpelding tested their business concept by asking for eatery advice at local hotels and office buildings.
"We asked the desk clerk at one downtown Minneapolis hotel for directions to a restaurant that was just around the corner, and he didn't know where it was," Ostlund said.
And at a nearby office building, they asked a concierge to suggest a sushi bar, and the response was, "What's sushi?"
In short, "we saw there was a need," Erpelding said. And hotel managers, who were getting unneighborly feedback from misdirected guests, apparently agreed: "They helped us design the product," he said.
The brochures are pocket-sized tri-folds that contain the name and type of restaurant, an abbreviated menu of signature dishes and color pictures and text to convey the ambience. Most important, there's also a map and driving instructions to each restaurant from each hotel or office building participating in the program.
Ostlund guarantees the accuracy of those directions, by the way, having driven each route to make sure.
The brochures are displayed in the lobbies in wooden racks that DLS provides. The racks are installed at 34 locations in the downtown Minneapolis area and at 31 in the south metro area, with visitors taking nearly 30,000 brochures a year, Erpelding said.
The cost to the restaurants: $1,850 a year to create, print and replenish the brochures, plus $375 a month that goes to DLS to service the displays weekly. Clients also provide $100 a month in gift certificates, which are distributed as incentives among hotels that display the brochures.
Is it worth it? Mark Schiller, general manager of the Ichiban Japanese Steak House, attributes 15 percent of his weekday business to the DLS connection. That's a critical figure given the fact that "for an upscale restaurant in downtown Minneapolis, bringing in guests during the week is paramount to having a successful establishment," Schiller said.
"It would be very safe to say that this is our most important piece of advertising," he said.
Richard D'Amico, CEO of D'Amico and Partners, agreed: "Direct Line Services offers a great vehicle to assist hotel concierges in (recommending) our varied concepts," he said. The DLS brochures "offer exactly what guests are looking for in a small, easy-to-carry flier."
Because of the steep cost of printing the brochures, however, DLS so far has limited the placement of display racks to the largest and busiest hotels in the metro area, Erpelding said. But that doesn't mean the company's reach is limited to those 65 locations.
DLS also publishes a thick, glossy "menu directory" that offers two-page color spreads as a free perk for its brochure clients and as an additional revenue source from 30 other restaurants that pay $1,250 a year for the exposure. The menu books are placed at registration and concierge desks in about 135 hotels in the metro area to assist employees who are asked for restaurant recommendations.
So what's next for DLS? Ostlund and Erpelding recently started a separate company to market generic versions of the tri-fold brochures for restaurants around the country to use as marketing tools.
These brochures, which would be offered to guests at the restaurants, would include sample menus, photos and text similar to the DLS version, but with maps and driving directions that would pinpoint the restaurant's location from every part of a city.
The company, National Restaurant Marketing, is being launched this fall. It would charge clients $1,750 for 10,000 brochures, a price the founders regard as a bargain made possible by the high-volume printing jobs they hope to generate.
"We think it costs an individual restaurant more than that for promotional materials that are less effective," Ostlund said.
(Reach Dick Youngblood at 612-673-4439 or yblood(at)startribune.com )
