If you own a restaurant, you know how tough it is to run the business: food costs are rising, so are the clientele’s expectations, and the same number of foodies have so manydifferent restaurants to choose from. Cutting corners in terms of food quality or service to save money is a doomed and short-sighted solution that only diminishes the restaurant’s quality.
Restaurant owners need sustainable ways to improve profit margins without taking away from the restaurant. Here are three tips that will help your restaurant improve its operations.
Use the Right Technology
Much is made of the new and flashy “disruptor” apps, but sometimes there’s an app that quietly delivers a major impact across an entire industry.Employee scheduling apps have already played such a role for restaurants.
Whether you have a fine dining establishment or a sports bar, many different kinds of businesses can use an employee scheduling app to make life easier for both employees and managers, and increase efficiency in the overall restaurant operations.These apps reduce the time it takes to make a schedule by as much as 80%, and the schedules they produce are actually better.
Your staff will love being able to submit leave requests from their phone, and receive a notification whenever a new schedule is posted, or if any changes are made to the old one. It helps them stay organized and plan their life outside of work.
Restaurant scheduling apps also deliver a full suite of other functions, such as streamlined communications for staff, the ability to track key performance indicators for managers, and lots more.
Software thatreduces the time it takes to complete essential but mundane tasks, while also empowering your staff with other important tools,will really help make your restaurant run more efficiently.
Teach People Skills and Use Them Yourself
Hospitality is one of the magic ingredients that make your clientele glad they chose your restaurant. But service training is tough work, and it takes skill and patience. Train your staff how to interact with customers, and create an example by engaging them yourself.
While the intangible difference this makes is unlikely to get quantified into raw data, devoting moderate work to developing hospitality skills in your staff is a small investment with a large return that will take the form of attracting new clientele while making old customers more loyal.
Smart Marketing
Every restaurant hopes to hit a home run with their marketing and advertising, and there’s a very good reason for it: if you make a smartad that really taps into your clientele, you don’t need to spend a lot of money to significantly drive new business.
Especially with the viral potential of social media, advertising is perhaps the best place a restaurant can invest a little to get a lot back, and that is what efficiency is all about.
The restaurant industry has alwaysbeen a struggle, but tapping into modern software, social media marketing, and even old-fashioned hospitality are efficient ways to improve your business.