Did you know that around 60 percent of new restaurants fail within their first year?
Starting a restaurant isn’t an easy task, and there are many obstacles that can shutter your restaurant in an instant. Thus, if you want to maximize your odds of survival, you need to identify what these obstacles are so that you can eventually overcome them.
Here are some restaurant operation tips that’ll help you keep your restaurant in business. If you use these tips, you will be able to join the 40% of restaurants that make it past their first year.
Let’s begin!
A Good Chef Is Critical
According to award-winning chef Tyson Cole, hiring a good chef is critical if you want your restaurant to succeed.
After all, at the most basic level, a thriving restaurant comes down to offering good food. If you have a good chef, you can ensure that your food is good, thereby tackling one of the biggest obstacles you’ll face.
So, how do you go about finding a good chef?
Well, to begin with, you need to create a job ad that will attract good chefs.
In this job ad, you need to clearly describe the kind of restaurant you own and the kind of food you’d like the chef to cook. In doing so, you can ensure the job ad attracts the right kinds of chefs.
It’s generally a good idea to place this ad on general job websites and on specialist websites dedicated to the restaurant industry.
After a certain amount of time, people will reply to the job ads, and you’ll need to start arranging interviews.
During the interview stage, you should ask potential chefs to cook a range of dishes that will be a good fit for your restaurant. If you make this request, you’ll be able to verify the talent of a given chef, and this will help you avoid any nasty surprises later on.
When conducting interviews, ‘temperament’ is another thing you want to focus on.
You need to hire someone that you like and trust, or else it will be difficult to form a good working relationship with them. If you don’t account for this, a particular chef might cause a lot of problems, even if their food is good.
Hiring Reliable Waiting Staff
Great wait staff is also critical! You can follow the same job posting strategy you use to find your chef.
When interviewing waiting staff, consider presenting them with several scenarios to see how they would deal with them.
For example, ask them how they’d respond if a customer is unhappy with their meal. You might also ask them how they’d deal with a set of customers that are making a lot of noise.
Listen carefully to their responses. Are their reactions are in line with what you’d want?
Take Care of Your Employees
Hiring the best people for your restaurant is only half the battle. You also need to make sure you take care of your employees.
If you don’t look after your employees, they might not feel as though they’re valued, and leave after a short period. This is a problem, as finding and training staff takes a lot of time.
If you want to take care of your employees, you can start by asking them how you can make things better.
Generally, most of the people who work for you will have suggestions on what can be improved. If you act on these suggestions, employees will feel that you value their opinion, which will help build loyalty.
Another way you can look after your employees is by implementing a few employee wellness initiatives. For example, you might want to embrace paid time off. This can be good for employees as they can now take time off without feeling any kind of financial pressure.
This is also something that many restaurants don’t offer. If you offer this, you will build loyalty. People will want to work for you simply because you offer this employee perk.
Treat Your Restaurant Like a Business
You also need to follow the advice of Des Mcdonald, which is to treat your restaurant as a business. This means that you need to have a thorough understanding of the numbers associated with your restaurant.
At the most basic level, you’ll need to figure out your monthly costs. You also need to determine your average revenue per customer.
If you do this, you will be able to figure out how many customers you need per month to be profitable.
You should also think about how you can lower the costs of your supplies.
Now, if you want to lower your costs, you might think that you have to lower the quality of your supplies.
However, you often don’t need to go down this route right away. Many times, you can ower your supplier costs by working with a different supplier.
Following this, you should identify each of the key ingredients you use in your restaurant. Then speak to a wide range of suppliers so that you can find someone who offers the best price for a given item.
Get Started on an App for your Restaurant
If you are a restaurant owner that is serious about making your business perform well on digital platforms, you need to not only create a website for your restaurant, but also a specialised app.
As you would already be aware of, digital behaviour of consumers is increasingly being driven and influenced by apps. We never use the Facebook or Instagram website, do we? We always prefer using the app.
According to profitboss, creating a restaurant app can allow your restaurant to open a new channel of interactive communication and engagement with audiences.
You can book online appointments, send them offers, pass on information regarding the launch of new dishes and customize the app in as many ways as you can.
An app can help carve out a cool and distinct identity and allow you to also accept online orders, if your restaurant wants to get into the food delivery space.
Will You Use These Restaurant Operation Secrets?
With the help of these restaurant operation secrets, you should be able to maximize the longevity of your restaurant.
Running a successful restaurant doesn’t come down to one specific thing. There are many moving parts that you’ll need to manage. Following this, there’s a good chance you will drop the ball on something during your first year of running a restaurant.
This is normal, and you just need to make sure you learn from your mistakes. Doing so will limit the number of issues you’ll have to deal with.
Before you go, take a moment to scroll through a few more of our posts. We have tons of great information to help you succeed!
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