This is a self first-aid program to do a Restaurant Rescue for Restaurant Owners to help you build the restaurant that you’ve always wanted and that you can be proud of.
** This is Part I of the Restaurant Rescue series. ** Once you’ve listened to this episode, don’t forget to check out Restaurant Rescue Part II
Right click here and save-as to download this episode to your computer.
What is a Restaurant Rescue?
A Restaurant Rescue is a self help process for a Restaurant that is struggling and not fulfilling the goals that the owner had for it. It may be a small and short process to win back a little extra time to work on the business rather than in the business, or it might be a radical process designed to save a Restaurant that is struggle to keep the doors open.
A Restaurant Restaurant process is characterised by a number of factors:
- It is a self help process, involving the owners, managers and some or all of the team.
- It has limited resources – usually money and time.
- It has clear goals.
- It requires open and honest discussion about the product of the Restaurant. The Restaurant Rescue process won’t work if it doesn’t address key failings in the business. Common issues include poor food, poor service, theft in the Restaurant, poor managment, poor team or a combination of all of these.
- It will focus on the low hanging fruit in order to strengthen the Restaurant, before increasing the time and moeny available to look at the bigger and more complex issues that can be addressed.
We are focusing on small iterative steps that are low- or no-cost for Restaurants owners to be able to do your own Restaurant Rescue.
How do you know if you need to do a Restaurant Rescue?
- Are you happy coming to work each day?
- Are you proud of the Restaurant?
- Are you spending enough time with your family?
- Are you taking holidays?
- Are you making enough money for the hours you work?
- Is this the Restaurant that you thought you would run when you started the Restaurant?
- If you are working 60 -70 hours a week and not loving every minute of it, then you need to think about a Restaurant Rescue.
Once you’ve made that decision, you need to write down the kind of Restaurant you want to run.
- How many hours do you want to work?
- How much money do you want to make?
- What kind of reputation do you want to have?This is your Restaurant Gap Analysis. What is happening now and what you want it to be. This is the first step to start on your Restaurant Rescue.
Start writing down all of the problems that you have.
Food, money, front of house, stock control, customer service, cash flow, customer numbers, repeat customers. Talk to your customers and your staff and get some honest criticism and feedback.
The next thing to do is to look at the appearance of your Restaurant. Are you attracting walk-ins. Honestly, how does the Restaurant look? What is the interior like?
Start to look at the culture of the Restaurant. What is the vision of the restaurant? What are the values and how does your team know what those values are? How do you turn around the culture of your team?
Look at the team. How do your hiring and firing processes work? How does someone know if they have had a good day or not in your Restaurant?
Right click here and save-as to download this episode to your computer.
Here you can create the content that will be used within the module.
CLICK TO VIEW: Podcast transcript on How to Conduct Your Own Restaurant Rescue. Turning Around a Failing Restaurant
Episode 61 – How to Conduct Your Own Restaurant Rescue. Turning Around a Failing Restaurant
Welcome back everyone.
JAMES ELING: This is going to be really interesting, this is probably going to end up being a two-parter (LISTEN: How to Conduct Your Own Restaurant Rescue. Turning Around a Failing Restaurant PART 2) I think we’ve got a lot of ground to cover. This is something that I’ve spent probably twelve months thinking about these two podcasts because we spent a lot of time talking to restaurant owners all around the world.
What I’ve been doing is looking for the commonalities in people’s restaurants when they’re not going as well as they could be. And so, what I want to do is to enable you to come up with a self-first aid program thatâs going to help you to get the restaurant that you always wanted. Because so many people we find aren’t running the restaurant they that wanted. They donât have the business that they thought they would have when they started running a restaurant–and I think that thatâs really sad.
What weâre looking at is a whole heap of little tiny incremental steps to build a business that is something you can be proud of. Something that you can get the financial return that you want and deserve. And a place that you can be happy turning up to work and working hard but not a ridiculous amount of hours. They’re the big things you’ve got to be getting the financial return for an acceptable number of hours. And far too many restaurant owners donât get that and I think thatâs really sad.
So, I’ve spent a lot of time doing research, spoken to a lot of restaurant owners and so we’ve come up with this methodology. Itâs basically going to be a checklist that we can walk through weâre going to cover off on each of these ones today in detail. Weâre going to go through all the areas that we’ve identified and then what weâre going to do is weâre going to circle back and weâre going to spend time doing an individual podcast on each of these areas. Weâll probably get experts in in the individual areas and delve into them about the basics that you can do to really turn your business around. This is designed to be a Restaurant Rescue that you can do yourself, but you need to realise that your Restaurant needs to be rescued and you’ve got to want to rescue your Restaurant. It starts with you! đ
Because the thing I find really interesting is that you look at someone who’s running a marginal business and they’ll be really bad at a couple of areas. And you think if you’re okay in this area your business will be so much better. And then they might have really great food but a whole heap of other areas let them down. They may be crushing it with marketing but the food is letting them down or they just canât hold on to staff. All of these sorts of things–this is going to help you identify where the problem areas are. Work out where the low-hanging fruit is and then move on from there.Â
Weâre talking about rescuing a failing restaurant. Okay. So, the other thing that I’ve been really conscious of is and what you need to do is a $200,000 fit out.
Now, donât laugh. I know people who do that. Weâre talking about a restaurant probably about 12 months ago. We were trying to sell them a website, funnily enough, because thatâs kind of what we do. And he said, âWell, you know, weâre going to actually rebrand. Weâre going to come up with a whole new concept.â And I said, âWhy is that?â He goes, âBecause the concept doesnât work.â And I was like, âYou havenât actually marketed. I think itâs a pretty cool concept. But you haven’t actually told people about your concept. You havenât done anything to get the word out.â He did have the best restaurant that no one had ever heard of. But his solution was to go out and spend $200,000 on fit out which I thought was absolutely madness. When he hadn’t really tested the concept that he had. So, a lot of the solutions are designed to just cost you a bit of time.
What we want to do is front-load the process with the things that are going to start saving you time. So that youâre investing time in your business which you will get back in more time that you can spend on running your business rather than working in your business.
So, the concept is like Robert Irvine with Restaurant Impossible, you’ve got Jon Taffer with Bar Rescue, youâve got Gordon Ramsey [âs Kitchen Nightmares] as well. They all do these shows where they come in and some poor restaurant owner is up against the wall.
The first thing I think thatâs really important in this process is to work out when you need to take a good hard look at what it is you are doing why you are doing it and how youâre doing it. Because a lot of these people they leave it to the absolute, absolute last safe moment and sometimes they go past that last safe moment where no one is going to be able to help you.
The great thing about these programs they come in with money they can do the fit out they can do all sort of these things but I think fundamentally it’s very confronting to the restaurant owners. That’s because I’ve seen John Taffer, Robert Irvine at the NRA show in Chicago. Itâs interesting they say that they are very in your face because they need to be. They’ve only got three or four days that they’re working with the restaurant owner. There’s all of these patterns that restaurant owners built up and they need to smash those patterns down very, very, very quickly. Now, I think, so thatâs good. Then they come in with the money, they can do the fit out and all sort of that sort of stuff and thatâs fantastic.
Thatâs a really great boost for the restaurant or bar but you also have the problem that, you know sometimes they rebrand it and they rebrand the restaurant you may not be aligned with. How difficult is it then walking into a restaurant that is not your concept? Itâs not your name, itâs not the business that you wanted to run? You may need to rebrand that’s fine but what Iâm thinking is rather than doing a rebranding that someone else has come up with why donât you start thinking about that process. Why donât you start thinking about the rebranding?
Now, how do you know that you need to do a restaurant rescue? I guess that that’s a really important question because weâre going to start asking some very soul-searching questions.
- Are you happy coming to work every day?
- Are you proud of the restaurant that you run? W
- When you opened the business, did you think that it was going to pan out like this?
I’ve spoken to a lot of people, I always wanted to run a restaurant all of my friends would come over. Itâs interesting I spoke to one guy and he said, where have all of my friends said come over and A.) They weâre my mates so they kind of expected it to be for free and B.) They did go down to the beach while I was still waiting tables and working really, really hard on a Saturday. They were down the beach and I was working and they kind of thought that I done the dirty on them because I actually presented them with the bill. Thatâs not what I thought. Thatâs not how I thought this would be. So, what is it that you got into and I think you need to go back to what is it you wanted to do.
Are you spending enough time with your family? Are you taking enough holidays? Are you drawing a wage that you deserve? How do you $100,000 a year in the restaurant industry? It’s easy, you take two $50,000 jobs and you do both of them. Sure, youâre working 80 hours a week but youâre earning $100,000. That could be you. Thatâs probably not right and the other thing is, itâs not sustainable.
There are some incredibly powerful people in the restaurant industry who can do that for five years. But 10 years, maybe 20 years but at some point, youâre just going to run out of oomph. And at that point, youâre no longer able to be able to do the work that you need to do. And if youâve got a restaurant thatâs not super profitable youâre not going to be able to sell it. Youâre going to be giving that restaurant away. So, you need to think about it.
This is one of things that I see that a lot of people really get lost in that decision of I’m waiting for it to get better. Oh, okay, whatâs going to happen? Well, we’ll get more people in. How is that going to happen? People, they live this little dream. This little fairy tale that that all of a sudden, the people are going to discover their restaurant and they’ve been running it for 4 years and they havenât had a profitable month. But something out there is going to change, something is not going to change. Youâre the one who’s going to have to change it. If itâs going to be, then itâs up to me. Thatâs what you need to be thinking about.
So, you first off need to make your decision that youâre not happy with the restaurant that youâre running. Yeah, you might be really happy with the restaurant that youâre running and this is still going to be a good podcast because youâre going to probably pick up some areas where you can increase profitability or work even less hours. But really, if you are working in a 60, 70, 80 hours and youâre not loving every single minute of it, then you need to change. Something needs to change. If youâre working those hours and youâre pulling less than someone who’s working front of house then once again something needs to change. There’s lots of legislations around minimum wages. Tragically, they donât apply to business owners. So, far too many business owners are earning less than the minimum wage when you consider what they draw on weekly earnings divided by the number of hours that they work and yet they think that thatâs fine. They think itâs fine for them to deliberately under pay their own wages when everyone else is drawing more wages than them. That is madness. Thatâs certainly isnât the way that you should be running the business.
So thatâs the first thing, you need to decide that you need to make a restaurant rescue because far too many people just accept whatâs going on as being the way that it should be and the way thatâs itâs always going to be. You need to make the decision that you donât want it to be like that.
Now, the next thing that I think is important to do is to write down the kind of business that you want. What youâre going to do here is a restaurant gap analysis. So, currently the restaurant is turning over four hundred thousand dollars. I’m working 70 hours a week and Iâm making 60 thousand a year. Okay, I would like to earn a hundred thousand dollars a year. I’d like to be working 45 hours a week and I would like the restaurant to be turning over six hundred thousand or seven hundred thousand. They’re some pretty hard numbers. What is it that youâre missing though? Like, why did you start the business? I really wanted to run a burger bar that was going to be renowned as the best burgers. Now, are they the best burgers? Now, I’m going to ask you to be really honest about this because this isnât going to work if youâre not honest. If I had a dollar for every restaurant owner who said to me youâve got to come in and try the food because it is simply amazing. I would probably have about $1154. I hear it every day. The food here is amazing. Like, is there a really a high correlation between the people who reach out to me for marketing help. They all have got amazing food or is it the fact that people just think that their food is amazing when in reality, it isnât.
As you do your restaurant gap analysis, youâve got to be looking at the hard numbers. How many hours do you want to work? How much money do you what to be making? What sort of business is it that you want to run? Then start thinking about the soft things. We want to be renowned for having the best Chinese food, the best burgers, I want this to be the best family restaurant in town.
Whatever it is, these are a little bit softer, they’re a little bit harder to quantify. I think they are more important. If your passion is making $100,000 a year. Itâs going to be hard to market that, itâs hard to make that as being unique. If youâre going to get up in the morning to make this the best damn family restaurant in town, the place where people bring their family and they have a great time. If you want kids to leave with a smile on their faces. Or just that look from the Mom who’s like, âThank God, this is the night that I donât have to do the washing up.â If those are the things that get you out of bed, then thatâs the thing that will make you successful, and you need something like that to hold on to during the dark times.
So, weâve got some things written down and I think itâs important that you write these things down. They’re going to be your goals. This is what you want to start moving towards to. As we do our audit and we move through the areas, youâre going to start doing a restaurant gap analysis. Why am I working too many hours? Why do not have the revenue that we need? Why donât people think of us as the number one family restaurant in town? The next thing that I think is really important to do is to start looking, create a list of all the things that are going wrong.
Weâre doing a restaurant rescue, okay so, we can drop the lie that everything is fantastic and itâs a great restaurant. You know deep down that itâs not great restaurant. Thatâs fine. You know what 90% of restaurants are not the amazing, probably 99% of restaurants aren’t completely amazing. So, itâs completely fine. The second step is to actually make that admission. Right, weâve got a problem. The food is ordinary, the place looks like a dump. Front of house, sometimes you just want to fire them on the spot because theyâre so rude to your customers. Are you concerned about inventory? Do you buy a lot of steak but not sell a lot of steak? But not throw out a lot of steak, ah, thatâs a weird problem. Whatâs going on there? What do you think the problems are?
Now, the process that I really like is to then go at your customers. Okay, so I’d like to create a business thatâs like this. How do you feel, do we live up to our brand promise? Do you love the food, whatâs your favorite menu item? Why is it that you come back? Go out and seek honest criticism–honest feedback. And when someone says, âI really love this!â Thatâs a little bit of information. When they say, âThis doesnât work for me.â Wow! Okay, thank you so much for sharing that. Weâre going to try and work on that.
We do that in Marketing 4 Restaurants. All the time weâre reaching out, what can we do better? What the next feature that you want to see? How does this not work for you? What are your expectations around this product? This is how weâve gotten to build a products that, FORBS (Free Online Restaurant Booking System) and FROLO (Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering system), are really robust and continually growing in more and more countries. Itâs not easy to do that.
Weâve had some really long conversations and have been really frank with customers. With restaurants, we say, âYou need to be able to do this, we need to be able to do this or we caused these problems when this happened.â You take that all on board you feed it back and through the team, through the process, you build a better product. This is what you need to be doing. If youâre not going to be honest with yourself then youâre not going to understand what the problems are.
Everything seems to be wrong in the Restaurant – What do I do???
Your menu is far too expensive. Your food is just no good. The service is awful. The food is great, but it takes 45 minutes to come out. So, you start this process with you, you write down what you think the problems are. Then go at your staff. Now, hopefully youâve got some staff that you can trust and that you want to build the business with.
Sit down with them and, âSo, okay, what do you think the problems are from your point of view? Tell me, if this was your perfect job where do you think we need to be going? What are the issues as you see them?â Do the same with your customers. When you think about the food, I think that one of the really important things to do is to know who your competitors are and go and have a meal there. How does the steak compare? How does the pizza compare? How are they getting it out from the kitchen? How does it taste compared to yours? How busy are they? Far too many times, people say, âAh you know itâs been a really quiet winter.â Well, thatâs interesting because youâre empty and the restaurant three doors up is full. So, theyâre not quiet, thereâs got to be something going on there. Youâre missing one, at least one of the pieces. Youâre missing one of the ingredients of your secret sauce. What is it that you need to do?
The menu is part of your Restaurant’s sales team
As weâre doing the sorting, the next thing, I think, thatâs really important to do is to go outside across the road from your restaurant just spend 15 minutes there. Watch people as theyâre going by. Are they going in? If theyâre not going in, why arenât they going in? Have a look at the place. Have a look at the other shop fronts of the other restaurants. How does yours compare? Watch the people as they go by. I think one of the interesting things, I did this with a restaurant owner once. He said, âYou know a lot of people stop but very few of them go in.â And it was a very simple thing, he didnât have a menu in the window. You couldnât actually see what was going on in the restaurant. People are hesitant to go in and ask for a menu because then they might need to get up and leave. Thatâs why you have a menu in the window so people can make that decision. Your menu is one of your sales team. It should be, you want to put it out, front and center in the window so that people can go, âWow! that sounds really good. Iâm going to have one of those.â
What is the appearance of the restaurant? Next thing that you want to do, is you want to come in and sit down.
- What does the restaurant look like?
- Watch your front of house staff. If itâs a small place, itâs going to be really awkward for them.
- Try and watch the flow of people coming in.
- When they sit down, what is it that theyâre doing?
- How does the front of house staff cope?
- What does the place look like?
- How does it compare to your competitors?
- Is it homely?
- Does it look dirty?
- Is it not well cleaned?
- Have you got areas where itâs easy to see that itâs fairly filthy?
Now, one of the interesting things, when you watch an episode of Bar Rescue or Restaurant Impossible, always there seems to be just horrible, horrible filthy issues in some part of the bar or in the kitchen.
Itâs really weird that it seems to be every one of them has some sort of horrific problem like that. This is one of those things that you want to be thinking about.
- What is the appearance of your restaurant?
- What is the cleanliness like?
- What is the toilet like?
- Do you have one of those kitchens where people can come in through the back door and walk through the kitchen?
- Is the kitchen clean?
- Are people going to be put off with the food that or just by the things that they see when theyâre coming in?
A lot of people donât understand what happens in the kitchen so theyâre going to be extrapolating out from the things that they can see. If the plate that they get is dirty, well, if they havenât washed that then theyâre probably not washing a lot of things. If the table is dirty, well, what else is it that theyâre missing? So, you want to start thinking about the appearance of the restaurant and start writing the things down that need to be fixed. I think the really important thing is that here there’s probably not going to be a lot of things that you can fix very quickly because of the fact that itâs going to cost money. I think, can you get some decent chairs from a secondhand place? Can you lease them? What is it that you can do to fix it up? Some restaurants do a really, really good job of a little bit of a makeover where they’ll just paint the restaurant themselves over a quiet time needing awhile for the fumes to sort of get out. You donât want to be thinking about the 200,000-dollar makeover you want to be looking for the quick and easy things that you can do to make a difference.
Restaurant appearance is (almost) everything
I know one restaurant where they have this amazing sea motif all throughout the restaurant. So, there are mermaids, fish, sharks all painted on there. Those are really talented paintings or murals even. Now, the problem is that their specialty is Chicken Palmers. There’s very little seafood on the menu. The concept is really off. They would be much better off if they painted the walls because it is confusing, you come in there and itâs like, âWow! this is just really weird.â What are those things that you can do, the quick and easy things you can do to the restaurantâs appearance.
Now, the cleanliness is interesting because itâs part of the culture. What is the culture like of your restaurant? If the place is not clean, itâs probably because youâve got staff there who donât clean. Itâs not part of their culture to make sure that the restaurant is really clean. The culture is generally described as the way we do things around here and youâre going to see things like how do they greet people. Does everyone have a smile? Is everyone in the kitchen working together as a team? Do you have interpersonal issues within the team? In a company with a poor culture, that tends to happen more often because people aren’t focused on the big thing. As the leader of the organization, this is really your job to make sure that the culture is strong.
Is your vision your mission? A Restaurant Rescue needs a mission!
What’s the vision for the restaurant? If you want to the best family restaurant in the town then you need to be hiring people who are family people. You need to be hiring people who love kids. You donât want someone who’s going to be looking down their noses at kids. Thatâs not going to work, that shouldnât be part of the culture. Everyone needs to know that you want to be the best family restaurant in town. That will attract people who are family people to your restaurant. This is how you build a culture around it. Youâve got to have a vision around what it is that youâre doing. Youâve got to have values and you want to share them and reinforce them.
Now, having a strong culture is really important because it will ask you to do a couple of things. One, youâre going to hire the right people because of the fact that they know your culture. Youâre going to know who youâre looking for. Youâre not going to be taking anyone with just a pulse. Youâre going to be looking for someone who, âLook at this person theyâre really great family person. They light up when they tell me about their family and you know I can see them lighting up when theyâre dealing with our customersâ families when they come in.â So, youâre going to hire better. Two, youâre going to retain those key employees for a lot longer because they are in a job that shares the same values. If they love their family and other peopleâs families, if theyâre a real people person then theyâll enjoy working in your restaurant and they will stay a lot longer. Youâre going to actually spend less money on hiring and training staff because your retention is going to be longer. Have you told people the kind of restaurant youâre trying to build? Do you have people who donât share your culture?
Creating a great Restaurant culture
This is something that I learned probably 15 years ago. So, I used to run an IT company and at one point we employed probably about eight people. We realized that their culture was, âI didnât like going to work.â This is how I know what itâs like. I didnât like going to work. I found it stressful, I didnât like the people that were there. And I just thought, âThis was an awful job.â
Then one day, I woke up and thought, âThis is my company.â And I sat down with my wife, Tina, and we agreed, âWe really need to change the culture of the company.â I’m pretty slow and had actually completed an MBA at this point. It just took me that long to realize that our culture was so bad and that it was my fault to let it get to that.
So, we said, âOkay what weâre going to do is bring everyone around on the journey.â Weâre going to provide them with a vision. Weâre going to provide them with some values and weâre going to reinforce those values. In hindsight and probably at that point, we had two really good people in the team. I think, actually, just one. So out of eight people: that was myself and my wife, so obviously, weâre going to stay. We had one really good engineer. I would have been better off sacking, writing the names of the people down and just sacking the other five people over a period of 12 months.
We couldnât sack everyone in a 12-month period. Straight up, we couldnât have done that–that would kill the company off. But what we should have done is just move through them very aggressively and said right, âYou’re gone, youâre gone.â
And since I started to hire the people who were going to be able to help us to change. We should have been ripping it off like a band-aid rather than bringing people along on the journey and we had people who didnât come along with us. They hung around for like four or five years, and it was only when those last people left that we could really say, âYes, we have fixed the culture here.â The productivity doubled for the average engineer in our company. It made a fundamental difference to the way to what we were able to do and how we are able to do it–really, really big difference. But we did it over a period of five years, when we could have done it over a period of 12 months.
So, one thing I always like to say is, hire slowly and fire quickly. Itâs really important when you make that mistake and, you know what, we all make mistakes. I think that hiring people is really exciting because you get to bring new skills and new passion into your company. But it is like going to the casino because all of the time you’ll hire the wrong people. You want to be thinking about the people that youâve got for the culture. Because the culture is the one going to make the really big difference in your restaurant because peoples passion, thatâs going to be the difference between your restaurant and the restaurant just up the road.
So, then leading on from restaurant culture the next thing then is people. You’ve got to have the right people. Those people have got to have the right skills, the right training. Now, one of my favorite Jim C. Collins quote he wrote a book called Good to Great and he looked at a lot of companies that weâre successful over an extended period of time. He always talked about having the right people on the right seat on the bus.
How do you hire the right people for your Restaurant?
This was one of the things we found: So, the right people are the people who share your values and they share your goal. The aptitude to do, to work in the company, what youâll find though is that some people are not sitting in the right seat. Youâve got the right person but theyâre not on the right seat. And we found this in our company’s, we move people from being managers, weâve removed that responsibility from them. Weâve promoted them up because theyâre really good at their job we made them a manager and it was awful we then just move them back. We found the right spot for them. We always knew that they were the right people. we were always happy for them to come along for the journey. They wanted to come along on the journey with us, but we put them into roles which they werenât suited.
So, I think you have to think about that, You have to play into everyoneâs strengths and minimize their weaknesses. One for the tools that you can use with that is DiSC profiling. I think weâve talked about that before. DiSC profiling is a really powerful tool. There’s lots of personality tests that you can do. What are the peopleâs strengths? Because the whole point of a team is that you want to minimize everyoneâs weaknesses and maximize their strengths. If you donât have the right people and you need to fire them.
The next thing that is really important for the team is: Do they know what it is expected of them? Because one of the things that can be frustrating for a staff member is when something happens and they donât know what to do. Theyâre not empowered to do, but it only gets them frustrated because they havenât fixed the problems. There’s another problem that I have to fix. And thatâs like, âWhoa, hang on a sec there.â Have you actually empowered this person to be able to deal with this problem? And often the case is no, they havenât.
Can a person in the team define what a successful day is for them? Because that often isnât the case. Do they have the right training to be able to do what it is that you need them to do? The perfect example of that is the restaurants in Queenstown where they have a huge transit through population. As a consequence, they had often trained people who havenât got front of house or back of house skills. Because they donât have those skills, a lot of the restaurants there need to put a training program in place.
Now, some of them, the training will be: This is how you do it and it is over in five minutes and if you blinked youâd miss it. Other places are saying, âYou know we have to invest in this person. Weâre going to give them a whole dayâs training or two days training.â Make sure that theyâre comfortable with it. They find that the staff hang around a lot longer and it may only be for a season. This may be a part of your thinking in your business plan: how youâre going to attract staff. So, theyâre going to invest a huge amount but they invest a little bit more than the other restaurants up and down the road. Able to retain this staff longer. Theyâve got staff who are more engaged with them.
SUMMARY
So, I think weâve probably covered enough for one podcast today. I’ve probably given you a few things to think about. The most important thing is to have a think about is whether to do a restaurant rescue. Are you happy with your job? Your hours? Your mission in life, the big thing. and the pay packet that youâre getting at the end of the day? Are you being fairly compensated the pressure of running the restaurant? If the answer is no, then you probably have to run a restaurant rescue.
So, you need to be really, really honest. Write down all of the things that are wrong. Go out to other people, your staff, your customers and find out from them what it is that they think the problems are. Be really honest about how you think the restaurant is functioning.  Do that audit. Have a look at the appearance and then start moving through so when we talked about the appearance, cleanliness. The cleanliness of the restaurant. if itâs not clean enough then maybe you are starting to look at the culture. What is the culture like? What are you doing to build a culture? Are you getting people who share your mission and your values? And you donât have to have Michelin values but Iâm going to tell you I think itâs really important that you at least think about it because it can be a powerful tool in hiring and retaining staff. And creating engagement with your employees. What is the team like? have you got the right people on the team? Do they have the right skills? Have they got the right training?
So, there are some things to start off with. Weâre going to be back next week with the next episode (Episode 62: Restaurant Rescue: How to turn around a failing Restaurant – PART II) in this podcast where we’ll be going to be talking about, well six more things. Weâre going to talk about processes, systems, your business plan, KPIs, finances, the menu and we might talk a little bit about some marketing.
So thatâs it. I hope you have a really busy day. Well, talk to you real soon. Bye.
Take Out is an important revenue stream for many Restaurants. There is less work front of house in serving the customers and you arenât limited by the number of tables you have. Taking orders online decreases errors, frees up a staff member to serve customers rather than answer the phone and most importantly, it builds your Database. Many businesses offer online order tools for Restaurants, but nearly all of them want to clip the ticket on the way through, some charging 10% and they also take your loyal customers contact details. We think this is unfair and thatâs why we built FROLO, the Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering system. Start taking orders on your website today. Itâs quick and easy and best of all, itâs free. FROLO is the perfect alternative to Menulog, Just Eat, Grub Hub, Delivery Hero, and Eat 24.
You don't want to be the best restaurant that no one has ever heard of.
There are 2 types of Restaurant Website visitor â those who know your Restaurant and those who donât. If your website isnât set up properly, your regular customers will find your site, but new customers will be going to your competitors down the road.
Our free 7 point audit is designed to help you understand if your website is is bringing in the new customers that your Restaurant deserves.
I am sharing few points and I think it will also work.
Serving simpler, cheaper French cuisine might drive sales and increase.
Special dining days entice customers to try your restaurant and come back for more. For example, you might offer a special for every day of the week. On Mondays, you could offer half-price appetizers or a special dinner at a lower price. Your restaurant’s specials will encourage customers to visit consistently and spend more money on other menu items.
You spend a large amount of money on food for your restaurant. Any price break you can negotiate with your food supplies lowers your cost of goods sold. If your food suppliers will not budge on their prices, shop around for other food suppliers in your area.
Part of increasing restaurant revenue involves increasing customer volume throughout the day. This means that your restaurant should turn tables quickly to make room for new customers. Every customer who walks out the door because of the wait to eat in your restaurant is lost revenue. Instruct your table cleaners and staff to clear tables quickly. Do not rush your customers out but do bring them the check promptly once they finish their meal.
In any turnaround strategy, you have to implement a plan of communication. Most strategies fail, or fall short, because employees are left to figure things out on their own. Engage all levels of employees, be transparent in your communication. Share what you can. Learn how each employee will be receptive to the message. Understand your style of communication and tailor your approach for your audience. Learn more about how you can better understand yourself to drive more effective messages for a successful outcome https://discbodhi.com/collections/frontpage/products/everything-disc-management-profile