We recently connected with Geoff Russell and have shared our conversation below.

Geoff, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Do you think folks should manage their own social media or hire a professional? What do you do?

I have managed our social media accounts personally so far. We have looked into various marketing firms and have found that for our small family run business, they are typically out of our price range. Though they bring valuable insights, teams of people that specialize in various marketing aspects and innovative ways to monitor the online health of the business, we’re making a go of it on our own for the time being.

One thing I’ve learned from doing things like our TikTok account is that you can’t be afraid to utilize the apps. Once you start, you realize it’s really not that difficult and with a bit of creativity, can be quite easy to advance your business’ exposure to a broader audience.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Our family moved away from the Chicagoland area to start fresh, and raise our family in what we found to be a better environment overall. The only issue was the food. We couldn’t find the varieties of food that we grew up with in the Chicagoland area. Namely, italian beef sandwiches, Chicago Hotdogs, italian pasta dishes, and pizza. We would have family members bring car loads of food down for us monthly. However, when those family members decided to relocate to this area themselves, we found ourselves without our food connection. That’s when My mother in=law, Debbie and her husband Rob decided to open Campione’s back in 2008. I myself worked in sales while my wife worked for her mom at the restaurant with no pay until her mom could afford to pay her.

About 5 years ago, Debbie and Rob decided to retire. So myself, and my wife Jessica have taken over ownership of the restaurant and we have expanded on what they started to make it one of the best Chicago style restaurants in the greater Nashville area. Our brand has become very well known, won many “best of” awards and any new Chicagoans that move to the area are quickly directed to visit our restaurant.

This November, we achieved a milestone that is highly coveted by hotdog stands all throughout the Chicagoland area. We were inducted into the Vienna Beef Hotdog Hall of Fame! We are the first restaurant to earn this designation in the state of Tennessee and we’ve received an amazing response from the community with the help of our local news.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

The founders, my in-laws, took everything they had to start the business. After moving from Chicago, my mother in-law Debbie had a job lined up working for Sears, however it didn’t turn out to be the job she was expecting. After months of frustration with them, she decided she wanted to open the restaurant. Her husband Rob took a job at Lowes to supplement their income while they took out of savings, home equity, and I believe some of Rob’s 401k to put down the money to start the restaurant. We used as much free family labor to build out the restaurant as possible, but with equipment costs and construction build outs they were in debt around $150k to start the business.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

We started slowly, only utilizing Facebook, which was still in it’s infancy back then. we’ve grown organically with Facebook because the community was always asking for places to eat near them. The only marketing we did back then was word of mouth. I was in outside sales, so literally on every sales call, I found a way to bring up conversation about our restaurant, and directed them to Facebook to help grow our presence.

Since my in-laws weren’t very tech savvy, I took it upon myself to start an instagram account, which I linked to our Facebook page. Though I didn’t post very often, I kept it up to date with vacations, happenings, and the occasional picture of one of our dishes. It wasn’t until my wife and I took over the business 5 years ago that I really dove in to running our social media accounts as a means of marketing. I joined all of the local foodie groups I could find, I searched any local restaurant I could find and really tried to keep up with trends of what other places were doing so that I could try to do it just a little bit better.
I have also tried to keep up with the trends, to see what the younger generation is into so that I could stay ahead of the ever changing digital world, so I joined TikTok when they came out. It has proven to be an extremely useful tool in putting out video content that we previously were timid to attempt to do.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.campionestasteofchicago.com
• Instagram: @campionestasteofchicago
• Facebook: @tasteofchicago
• Linkedin: @campionestasteofchicago
• Twitter: @Campiones_OG
• Youtube: @campionestasteofchicago
• Yelp: @campionestasteofchicago
• Other: TikTok @theoriginalcampiones

Image Credits
Geoff Russell