He Held Client Churn to 1.9% While Scaling Past 300 Restaurants

Where He Started

Matt Plapp got into radio advertising in 1999, trained by a father he calls “the Michael Jordan of sales.” Six months in, he and his family opened a side hustle boat and RV dealership with a $5,000 loan. Matt taught himself to build the website because nobody else in the family could, and within three years the dealership was doing about six million dollars in sales, eventually growing to fifteen million across three locations.

The SEO came by accident. An employee was found visiting boating and camping forums on the clock, which led Matt to sponsor those same chat rooms and forums under the dealership’s name. Within six months the business ranked first on Google for anything boat related, and a Yamaha executive asked him what he was doing to earn all those backlinks. That was Matt’s introduction to digital marketing.

By 2007 the family business was over-leveraged with the banks and everyone involved, Matt included, was burned out. He and his dad and brother agreed to go separate ways, and Matt built his own marketing agency starting in 2008 with a $150,000-a-year contract from the Cincinnati Reds and Bengals as his bridge. For the next several years he stayed a generalist, working with 34 clients across 31 industries.

The Pivot to Restaurants (and the Year It Cost Him)

The turning point came in April 2015. One client, who ran nine connected restaurants and was skeptical of digital spend, challenged Matt to prove Facebook worked better than the roughly $1.2 million a year he was already spending on radio, TV, and sponsorships. Matt ran a National Pretzel Day promotion: three Facebook ads and three emails for fifty dollars. It generated eighteen thousand dollars in trackable sales in a single day.

That result sent Matt down a two-year rabbit hole building what he later learned to call funnels. He discovered Billy Gene’s training in 2016, bought the course, and met Josh Nelson in person at Traffic and Conversion in February 2017. Looking at his client list, he noticed restaurants and golf courses were the verticals people came back to again and again, unlike a boat or car that gets bought once every few years. He picked restaurants, golf, and boats to specialize in, then eventually dropped everything but restaurants.

Here is the honest part. For the first eighteen months of running the restaurant-only agency, Matt was still personally the decision maker for the nine restaurants that got him started, which meant the pitch he brought to other restaurant owners did not translate. “It put behind about a year,” he says, because prospects who were not Matt Plapp himself did not yet value what he was selling. He had to rebuild the pitch from scratch before it worked on strangers.

Doubling Down When Everyone Else Pulled Back

The core offer today is $1,250 a month per restaurant location, plus a $500 startup fee, plus ad spend and software, run through ManyChat today and a proprietary platform Matt is building through a sister company called Database Dynamite. The client owns the account and the data outright.

That line describes the biggest gap Matt saw before COVID: restaurants were sitting on tens of thousands of collected emails and phone numbers and never sending anything. When the pandemic hit in March 2020, the agency lost only two clients and less than 0.05 percent of its revenue, though it still absorbed a 28 percent revenue dip because clients could not pay their bills. Matt told every client to keep the service running for free until they could pay again, and told his own team their paychecks were safe. His staff spent the shutdown finally using the databases that had been sitting idle, sending daily emails and texts segmented by customer type. One barbecue client, down to zero dine-in business, told Matt his sales were still up 18 percent because of it.

Coming out of COVID, Matt put more money into growth, not less, investing $150,000 in four months chasing visibility. That included buying a wrapped Mercedes Sprinter van as a mobile office and studio to physically tour restaurants nationwide under a media brand called America’s Best Restaurants, filming featured segments with owners in exchange for access to run their marketing. He built the relationship with food distributor Sysco the same way: by showing up with something distinctive rather than pitching. He also used the “Dream 100” approach from Russell Brunson’s Expert Secrets, hiring an intern named Gabe to identify and interview every author and podcaster in the restaurant space, leading with value and never pitching until the relationship was already built.

Where the Business Is Now

Restaurant Marketing That Works now serves upwards of 300 restaurant locations across roughly 40 brands, runs at a 38 percent profit margin, and through the first half of 2021 had lost only 1.9 percent of revenue to churn, a number Matt’s own banker told him should be closer to 30 to 40 percent for the industry. Matt credits the retention to the content and account management team using the database on the client’s behalf rather than leaving it to sit unused, plus welcome boxes, branded apparel, and direct access to account managers.

Matt says the goal now is not seven figures, it is a hundred million dollar company within five years, built on the same principle that got him this far: pick one niche, go deep, and stop chasing the next shiny thing.