Welcome to FohBoh: The Social-Business Restaurant Network

What is FohBoh?

FohBoh™ is the first, leading social-business network for the global restaurant industry. If you are employed by or associated with this enormous and incredible industry, FohBoh is your online water cooler to connect, voice your opinions, and do business. We are passionate about this industry and about developing the most thriving, vibrant community to help serve this industry.

FohBoh is short for Front of the House, Back of the House (in industry parlance), and is unlike consumer-centric sites like Yelp or CHOW. We are the first and leading B2B social-business network for insiders of the enormous, worldwide restaurant industry. In just 80 days since our launch on January 1, 2008, we've grown 14 times to over 4,100 members and are continuing to grow rapidly.

What is FohBoh’s Mission?

Our mission is to build the world’s largest and most vibrant online restaurant industry community to help you, our members, succeed. We want to create a superior environment (both online and off) where people can come together to share ideas, get feedback, make friends and new business connections, learn and do business. The industry has long needed a central water cooler. FohBoh is a powerful tool that gives you a voice in the global restaurant industry. We are passionate about creating a fabulous community that engages you, educates you, and helps you in your business. As we like to say, The Conversation Starts Here™...

Who Joins FohBoh?

FohBoh is for servers and CEOs, cooks and chefs, managers and executives, bartenders, commercial Real Estate developers and brokers, architects, designers, lawyers, accountants, food and beverage vendors, wineries, boutique produce growers, bakers, consultants, concept developers, investors, lenders, owners, franchisees, franchisers, operators, manufacturers, and more. It's a big universe!

The Power of Social Networking

Social networking has exploded in recent years as more people have access to the Internet, technology to access it fall and sites like MySpace and FaceBook have paved the way as horizontal, generic networks. Social networking continues to evolve.

Many see 2008 as the year for the rise of major vertical networks that can better serve niches than the horizontal networks like FaceBook. People are naturally social, especially those in the restaurant industry and we saw a tremendous need for FohBoh. We believe that only a network dedicated to the restaurant sector could better address community issues and needs. For example, these include staffing, concept development, hiring and retention methods, shift-orientation and scheduling, purchasing methods, employee training, equipment and maintenance, licensing, health regulations, real estate, site selection, customer service, financing, legal and marketing among others.

It’s Time for Restaurants to Better Utilize Internet Technology

Every day, millions of meals are prepared and served to hungry customers eager to evaluate performance, write and post reviews online. Too often, restaurateurs leave it up to restaurant reviewers and web sites like Yelp to drive traffic to their establishments. Restaurants have been at the mercy of reviewers. It’s time to take control and manage your destiny. Promote, blog, add value, learn, teach and grow.

The Restaurant Industry

Few other industries are under such scrutiny. Few other industries have such high failure rates and no other industry employs so many on a part time basis than the restaurant industry. To suggest that the restaurant industry is fragmented is an understatement. So, why socialize an already social industry? Because it is fragmented, part time, always moving, huge and the network is the organization and the organization is the network. Restaurateurs must connect, communicate and conduct business and FohBoh offers an insider’s view to the restaurant world.

The National Restaurant Association projects that in 2008, the restaurant industry, in the U.S. alone, will generate over $558 billion in sales, from over 945,000 restaurants operating in 50 states staffed by over 13.1 million full and part time employees. Restaurants are supplied by tens of thousands of vendors that provide fresh, frozen, packaged and pre-made products daily and keep the equipment operating.

How do I maximize my use of FohBoh?

First, we recommend signing up! Once you do, you can comment on other people’s content and also write and post your own. After you sign up, complete your profile and customize your page to give others the opportunity to get to know you better. Since this is a B2B network, we recommend that you don’t hide behind an anonymous avatar, though you are free to do so. This also means that recommend you upload a great photo of your face so people can identify you. By default, we assign you a random avatar, mostly because everyone loves something colorful and interesting.

Now you have a huge community to explore and content to catch up on. You can read from many hundreds of useful blogs, participate in discussions, make new friends, ask questions of the community by posting a discussion thread. You can also view photos and videos contributed by the community as well as posting your own. There are a ton of fun and entertaining videos, but also some very useful educational ones, as well as interesting interviews.

We ask that you also familiarize yourself with our community guidelines when you have a moment. We want to foster a helpful and positive community. And we're quite proud of the incredible one that has developed so far. We have a number of member mavens who may reach out to you. In the midst of what many believe is a new US recession, there has never been a better time for a social network to help us through this time.

Welcome aboard!

The Founders, Ted & Michael

  
Video Introduction to FohBoh

We love this movie that Nathan over at RestaurantRevolution did about us... Thanks, Nathan!