Restaurant Management Tips

Restaurant Management Tips

Know Your Environment

Planning is important. It doesn’t matter whether you are a 10 year restaurateur or just beginning to ask “How To Start A Restaurant”.

Ask any successful entrepreneur how they restaurant management tipssucceeded and the answer will undoubtedly include the word “planning.” Planning for success as a restaurant manager means doing your homework and knowing your business.

You need a road map to guide your restaurant to success when you start a restaurant.

Without it, you compromise two important key ingredients: customer serviceand revenue.

Failure to plan for success in the restaurant business is equal to providing poor customer service, which ultimately drives business away. And when customers are not eating at your tables, you don’t see more green in your bank account.

Every day brings a new opportunity and a new set of realities. In the restaurant business, planning for daily success involves knowing the culture and community of your area, the strengths of your employees, the best hours for business operations and how much food to have on hand for customers.

With these key components covered, you should enjoy restaurant success on a regular, daily basis.

What’s Going On? Community Events

Do you know what events are happening in your community? Are you familiar with the regular events that occur during the calendar year?

Daily success as a restaurant manager is being aware of now just what’s going on inside the restaurant, but outside too.

Restaurant management tips are a great way to learn different ways and efficient ways to run your business from other peoples perspectives in the restaurant business.

If your community annually hosts a family event, concert or theater production, it would be important for you to know.

Failure to be informed of local events could leave you with a shortage of food, or employees if you were unexpectedly hit with a large number of customers. So, do your homework.

Build It And They Will Come? Well Not Really

You need to cater to when your customers want your service. If you don’t want to be open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, find out what the peak hours of eating are in your area.

Make sure you are open during some of these times. Providing quality service to a large number of customers will not just increase revenue, but also grant you access to free advertising. People always speak well of good service during busy dining hours.

Know Employee Strengths and Weaknesses

Did you plan to have enough people at work today? Do you have a combination of stronger employees working with newer ones?

Knowing your peak hours of operation in order to provide enough staff is key. But it is also important to have stronger employees working with weaker ones so operations continue as smoothly as possible.

Do Not Run Out Of Food – You Knew This One Right?

Walking through your food storage areas on a regular basis will keep you informed and ahead of the game. Unexpected trips to the grocery store or other franchises are time consuming and costly.

Checking food supplies after an unexpected inflow of guests and on a regular schedule will help operations run smoothly, continue delivery of quality customer service and increase revenue.

Be Prepared – Plan For Various Situations

The key to success is being prepared. Think of emergency situations and how you would handle them. Prepare for these situations as best you can.

Pick one or two scenarios and at each meeting rehearse how the problem will be addressed. Repeat until the issue is drilled into your employees and the react the way instinctively the way you expect.

They find new topic to address at the next meeting. Do your homework and you should enjoy daily success on a regular basis.

Closing the Restaurant – Using Checklists To Ensure All Is Done

closing-the-restaurant-checklist-feat

Closing the Restaurant – Using Checklists To Ensure All Is Done

Properly closing a restaurant is one way to make sure the morning shift starts their dayclosing-the-restaurant-checklist-media correctly. It therefore stands to reason that if the morning shift completes their duties properly, the afternoon or evening shift can report to work and smoothly transition into waiting on the evening’s customers.

From the busboy to the salad prep girl to the dishwasher, each person in a restaurant has a specific duty to fulfill. The same applies when closing a restaurant. If each person follows their specific checklist to close their respective area, the work will get done quickly and smoothly.

Managers

Ultimately, any job not properly completed by the support staff should be caught by the manager on duty. In fact, the restaurant manager’s closing checklist probably has many tasks to complete. This includes making sure each area is clean, walk in units are cooled at the right temperature and all food is stored. The manager must also handle the money and statistics from the day’s activities. Normally, the manager’s supervisor will stop by the restaurant to review receipts, statistics and deposits.

Kitchen/Servers

The kitchen closing checklist will differ from the server closing checklist. Each should outline specific tasks to complete that are easy to follow and in a specific order. The goal is to ensure that the next shift will readily and easily be able to find supplies and wait on customers. Therefore, every dish and utensil should be properly stored once cleaned. Every floor must be mopped with the bucket and mop returned to their positions. Finally, there should not be any food left out overnight.

Reward Systems

When a restaurant is closed in a timely and efficient manner, its owner(s) may decide to reward its employees from time to time. Recognizing the achievements of employees by the year, month or week could serve as incentives to lower paid employees to work harder. However, simply saying “thank you for doing a good job” can sometimes make a big difference too.

Closing a restaurant involves everyone doing their part to set up the following shifts for success. No one person can do it all. But if everyone does their part, a restaurant is likely to do well financially while at the same time providing quality.

Overlooked Areas When Starting a Restaurant

Overlooked Areas When Starting a Restaurant

Some restaurants are a great success and some are failures from the start. The restaurant you dreamed of for years is finally open butoverlooked-areas-when-starting-a-restaurant-m the patrons don’t seem to be coming in to experience your dream.

So why is the restaurant down the street always packed and booming with business when yours rarely sees 5 tables of guests per night? Many restaurateurs seem to overlook some important factors that may make or break their restaurant. In the early planning stages it would be advisable to create yourself a checklist for opening a restaurant.

Target Market

Identifying your target customer is one of the most important areas that many overlook. When asked who their target customer is many will say “everyone” .

However as they say “you can’t please everyone”. You should identify your customer type and that will help you determine more factors to come such as location and type of restaurant. Target customers could be families, older retired persons, young professionals, tourists, even children. These questions must be answered using market research for you to enjoy success.

When identifying your target guest you must take your restaurants location into consideration. You need to determine what type of area you’re located in and use those demographics as a selling point.

Market Research

Market research should begin at your local library and finding local business information, as well as published articles in magazines, journals and newspapers. Find out what your community likes to eat and what things they are looking for in a restaurant. Visiting other local restaurants is also an important for market research. See what these restaurants are doing to bring in the customers. And see where they are lacking, and opportunities to capitalize on.

Talk to people and not your friends and family – get a wider range of influence. Your friends and family will often have similar ideals. Make a list of questions to ask and when you meet people ask them those same questions. Record their answers and over time you will have solid research that will be less likely to be skewed.

Location, Location, Location

Location is extremely important to the success of a restaurant. And access to your restaurant is also very important. Yes is needs to be visible to passing automobile and foot traffic. But the customer needs to be able to access the business quickly and easily. If they are driving on the highway and do not see you restaurant until they are at the exit to access, are they really going to turn around at the next exit and return.

And at that same location are there 5 restaurants between yours and the closets neighborhood? You better think of how you are going to draw people to past those 5 other restaurants and get them to make the extra effort to come to you.

Competition Is Good But …

We all know that competition is good for the consumer. But too much competition is not good for you. Evaluate your surroundings to ensure there are not too many similar concepts in the area. For example if you are opening a pizza shop make sure there are not three other pizza shops right down the street.

Be Unique – Have A Unique Selling Proposition

Having a concept for your restaurant is something that is also overlooked. Make sure your concept is unique to your area. Is it an “all you can eat buffet”, “sports themed” featuring local teams including professional, down to high school, or is it “open 24 hours”. These are all unique selling features.

WOW Factor

Give customers the WOW factor. Make your guests feel welcome and at home, while providing them with excellent customer service and a great meal.

Don’t Run Out Of Cash

Plan for the worst of expect the best. You should plan on needing $100,000 – $150,000 capital when starting up your restaurant. Have an error free business plan presented to your bank and loan officer. This will ensure you can pay your employees, pay for food and beverage costs and have money for bills and utilities before you start to see a profit coming in.

In Summary

When starting up a restaurant it is always important to have these overlooked areas double checked. By making sure your restaurant is at its optimal potential will help your profit and your guests will have the experience you’ve been dreaming of.

At Workplace Wizards we understand you are excited about opening your own business and we want to see you succeed. We would like to help you succeed. We would recommend our forms and checklists for starting a restaurant. But whether you take a look at them or not, planning and preparation can help alleviate a lot of future stress for you and your family and solidify your long term success.

How to Write Up an Employee

How to Write Up an Employee

Owning a restaurant means managing people. Employees are just one example of a how-to-write-up-an-employee-mgroup of people you must manage. After interviewing and hiring an employee, it is important to let them know what your expectations are during their employment.

During the orientation process it is a good business practice to provide the employee with either a physical copy of the employee handbook or a link to access your company employee handbook on your restaurant or businesses website.

The employee handbook should be as detailed as possible and attempt to address every possible scenario, although this is probably not possible. The employee handbook should address rules and the policies and procedures of your restaurant.

To avoid neglecting areas to address with the employee, so they do not claim ignorance in case of future poor misguided decision making, it would be wise to make a checklist of what to cover during orientation.

Each employee should sign a form acknowledging that they received a copy of the employee handbook. On this form, both the employee and manager should sign. That way, if a problem occurs in the future, they cannot claim they didn’t receive the employee handbook.

Once a problem occurs with an employee, that demands they receive a reprimand, or an employee warning notice, here are the steps to follow:

  1. Give the employee the benefit of the doubt. Hearsay is not a reliable source, so try your best to get the truth about the infraction. Chances are, if more than one person says the same thing, something wrong happened.
  2. The policy for infractions should include a verbal warning, first write up and second write up. After that, termination is the consequence. This policy should be in writing and use an employee write up form and each employee should know this at orientation.
  3. Once you determine a person needs to be written up, document the infraction and put a copy of it in their employee file. Each employee should sign the infraction form, but if they refuse, make sure you have a witness in the room during the reprimand to verify the employee is aware of the note being placed in their file.
  4. Establish a timeframe to follow up with the employee regarding the infraction. At the time of the follow up, you are trying to determine if the employee’s behavior improved or declined. Take the appropriate action based on their behavior.

Having a paper trail that documents employee reprimands is important. In case you have to suspend or terminate an employee, if a lawsuit or unemployment claim arises, you have proof of what happened. This protects you as the employer.

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