On the eve of the GFC, Stevan Premutico quit his job as marketing director for Hilton Hotels and decided to start his own business. Shortly afterwards he turned down an offer from Richard Branson to head up the launch of V Australia. He had been well and truly bitten by the entrepreneurial bug.
“When it’s in your blood and you know you have to do something, you can’t even sleep, you just have to do it or you’ll always have an itch,” he says. And, while sleeping on a friend’s floor for the next year, online restaurant booking portal Dimmi (which means ‘tell me’ in Italian) was born.
Still just 30, Premutico’s background is largely in hospitality marketing. He launched the new Sydney Hilton in 2004, the brand’s most publicised launch in its history. While marketing Luke Mangan’s Glass Brasserie, which is inside the hotel, he became increasingly frustrated by the lack of cost-effective channels for restaurants to get bums on seats. “In 2005 I was being approached by Wotif and Lastminute.com to fill our hotel rooms but there was nothing like that to fill the restaurants.”
Sydney born Premutico then spent a couple of years in the UK, looking after the marketing for Hilton’s London hotels. “It became clear that the ability to fill hotel rooms using these online booking engines was one of the fastest growing parts of the industry. I sat down with my friend for a beer and told him what I was thinking of doing. I could see there was a big gap in the Australian market for online restaurant booking. A week later I quit my job, on the eve of the GFC.
From young exec to unemployed
“I spent the next year on my mate’s floor in London, researching the business. I always wanted to launch it in Australia because it’s home and it was always my intention to get experience overseas and bring it back here. I researched international models. During that time, I was offered a job by Branson to head up the launch of V Australia. I said no and decided to come back to Australia and start raising capital to launch Dimmi.”
Was he brave or just plain mad? “I knew Australian restaurants were starting to embrace technology and knew the Australian consumer was ready for it. It’s an amazing time on the Australian dining scene and there’s been a massive evolution. It’s easy for restaurants to be great in the kitchen but they now have to be great with their marketing and great with their online presence too. I hope Dimmi helps them become even more successful.”
On returning to Australia, it took Premutico just four weeks to raise his seed capital. He also drew together an extremely impressive board of online luminaries including Linked Australia’s managing director Cliff Rosenberg, Will Easton from Google and Ian Dresner, former owner of Sydney’s Wildfire restaurant and former CEO of Rebel Sport.
“I had an idea that was already internationally proven and had worked well in other verticals. I raised about $2 million from family, friends and colleagues; basically high net worth individuals. People loved the idea and jumped on the bandwagon. Every capital raising since has been relatively quick and the business’ valuation has increased significantly at each stage.”
Dimmi one year on
It has now been a year since Dimmi took its first restaurant booking and it has helped restaurants get more than 750,000 bums on seats in that time. Dimmi now has 20 employees and is responsible for one percent of all restaurant bookings in Australia. It might not sound much, but it’s a solid base from which to grow. There are now 2,000 restaurants, from “your local Thai” to prestigious eateries with chef’s hats, using the site. “We have a truly national footprint of restaurants,” says Premutico.
But it’s not just about getting people through the restaurant doors, it’s also about helping restaurants market themselves in a low-cost and effective way. Dimmi licensed its software model, which is cloud-based. Restaurateurs can use this to capture information about their diners and keep in touch with them, particularly via email.
“The way it works now, someone walks into a restaurant, eats, leaves and the restaurant owner knows nothing about them, what they thought of the food and service or how to contact them. It’s been too transactional for too long. Restaurateurs need to embrace their consumer and start a dialogue with them.
“Using our CRM they can create a profile on the customer that books online. It’ll tell them how many times they’ve dined there, what they ate, how they like their steak and things like that. It can give them a very important competitive edge. It’s no longer good enough to get customers through the door once, you have get them back again.”
He adds: “Restaurant owners don’t want technology or fixed infrastructure. They’re not IT savvy. But they do want a way to manage their bookings, to make life easier and to communicate with their customers.”
High profile partnerships
A huge key to Dimmi’s success so far as been online partnerships with high profile brands such as the The Good Food Guide, Fairfax and Time Out, which help them put their restaurants in front of a potential 5 million sets of eyeballs each month.
“We give restaurants an online presence and a way to drive business to them. When people are reading reviews on our partners’ sites they can just click straight through and make a booking using Dimmi. Choosing a restaurant can be a really complicated decision when you have so many factors to take into account. We leverage off all our partners to help people make more informed decisions on where to dine.”
It’s affordable for restaurants too. “It was always important to me to create something that was available for your small family owned restaurant right through to the top end. Restaurants pay zero up front and it’s all performance-based so they pay us $1 to $3 per person we get into their restaurant. There’s no additional cost for the entry level product. “
Restaurant owners can then choose to upgrade their package to start using the online booking system for all their customers, using the e-marketing options and building profiles on their customers, from $100 a month.
The board has been key to success
Premutico credits his board as being of crucial importance. “Some of the members are investors, some aren’t, but they all bring something different to the dynamic. It’s really easy to get involved in the day-to-day of your business so the monthly board meetings bring the focus back. The board has been key to our success.”
Then there’s the staff, who are either ex-restaurateurs or “massive foodies”. “We’re not a tech business, we’re a restaurant business, so that was always really important. The guy who looks after our VIP customers used to a run a two hat restaurant in Sydney. He loved what we were doing, packed up and came and worked for us!”
Premutico would like to see the majority of Australian restaurants using Dimmi within the next two years, but where he sees the biggest growth opportunity is in the number of consumers actually using the site to book tables. “Within the next five years we want to get that one percent to 50 percent of all bookings being made through us.” They’re not figures he’s plucked out of the air either. In San Francisco, which he says has a very similar demographic to Sydney, 50 percent of restaurant bookings are made online.
From employee to employer
The shift from employee of one of the world’s best known brands (Hilton) to small business owner has been huge for Premutico but he says he always knew he’d go out on his own eventually. “It was always a case of what, not if. Being an entrepreneur has always been in my blood.
“At Hilton there was so much opportunity and potential but it was like steering the Titanic. Everything took too long and had to go through too many people. I wanted to create my own business, which could be fluid, reactive and nimble and respond to the needs of customers and restaurateurs.”
Premutico says he wouldn’t have done anything differently thus far, not something many new business owners claim. “The shift from employee to employer is never easy but I’m fortunate I have an amazing team. Everyone knows they’re part of the bigger picture and that’s a beautiful thing.”
