The love of your life your restaurant
Restaurant Owners and Managers take pride in the restaurant and work very hard to make their dreams a reality. Believe me, it is not easy to start a restaurant or manage a restaurant. It takes dedication, commitment, integrity and passion to open and correctly manage a restaurant.
Think about it, the end result is consistent repeat customer visits. Your customers need to be impressed with both the service and food/drinks you serve. I you can’t get a guest to say WOW great service and great tasting food then your business may be in serious trouble.
Restaurant owners should hire the best of the best of manager’s; after all they are the ones that will ultimately run your business. Train your managers to take personal ownership as if they are the owners.
Give management intense training before they actually manage your business. Managers need to master each position 100%. Managers need to possess excellent customer service skills when dealing with employees and customers.
There are few things that you should know about managing a restaurant:
- To hire top performers with a sense of urgency: Always perform previous job reference checks on all managers/employee candidates prior to making an employment offer.
- Create an awesome training program: Hold your new hires and existing employees accountable when training goals have not been reached. Owners and managers should be involved daily during the training process to ensure that the training program is correctly executed. In-fact, it is strongly recommended that the owners and managers sit down with the new hires and go over the training that they received that day. This process is vital in making sure that each employee retains the information and correctly utilizes it during the shifts. Training is an investment not an expense: give each employee quality training. Owners/managers during the shifts should always praise employees when they see them doing something right. Never correct an employee during any peak time unless it directly affects guest service. Always correct employees in private away from guest and employees. Document if needed the employee by using an employee corrective action notice or an employee write-up form. A paper trail is your goal in case of an unemployment hearing or a lawsuit.
- Always give each guest top notch service: Train each manager and staff member to treat each guest as if they were the president of the united states (V.I.P.) very important person. Managers should be on the floor where the money is 90% of the time and 10% in the office doing administrative work such as: food orders, schedules, etc. These tasks should be done on your low sales days and during off peak times. Managers or supervisors should perform table visits to ensure that the service is above average and that the food taste great and served hot.
- Serve great tasting food and drinks, fast: Go through your menu and remove any item that is a low performer. Replace it with a popular item that will sell. Train your cooks, prep cooks and servers on serving great tasting food fast. Never serve food that is not at the right temperature. Never serve food that is not presented properly. Remember WOW customer service and great tasting food served fast will help build a reputation that will customers will remember. The number one way to advertise your restaurant is word of mouth. Your goal is to get your customers to say WOW, the service was great and the food is exceptional.
- Always be on the lookout for areas of opportunities. As the owners or managers make their rounds in the restaurant during the shifts they should be looking for areas of opportunities along with the corrective action. Pretend that you are the customer, jump into the customers shoes and see what they see and hear, this is commonly referred to as the customer’s eyes. Remove or reduce eyesores that customers can see and hear.
- Always replace or retrain your weakest links (employee). If you have a manager or employee who during the training process is a low performer, then it is your job to retrain, assign a different position or replace the employee with someone that can do the job. Don’t carry dead weight, it will affect customer service and not to mention it may create a domino effect of low performers. This action could be averted if during the training process was executed properly and consistently. Nobody wants to let an employee go, start by conducting job reference checks to filter out undesirables, hire top performers with a sense of urgency and ensure that each employee receives the best training.
Other fantastic tools:
http://www.workplacewizards.com/restaurant-manager-performance-evaluation-form/
http://www.workplacewizards.com/restaurant-employee-performance-review/
Over 121 restaurant forms, checklists, quick reference charts, spreadsheets and training manuals
http://www.workplacewizards.com/restaurant-form-2/