Boost Your Sales By Adding A Take Out Service
Everything is perfect. The food is delicious, operations are running smoothly, the ambiance is exciting, and most importantly, customers are coming and going – just the way you pictured it. Everything is going according to plan. But any successful businessman will tell you that money coming in isn’t the sole end goal of running a business.
These days it is no longer enough to simply offer great food and services within the four walls of the establishment. You need to maximize your profits. As a restaurant entrepreneur, you must be creative and persistent in finding other means to extend your services to customers. What better way to do that than by establishing a take out service?
Here are some tips on planning an expansion for take out service:
1. Create a simplified take out menu
First things first. Before you begin to plan on anything, first you need to put your attention into creating a simplified version of your restaurant menu—that is, unless you want to bore your customers to death whenever the server or host has to read the menu to them over the phone.
It needs to be simple, and it needs to be direct to the point. Keep the take out menu at a one page maximum, if possible, a simple document that is easy to change and reproduce as the menu changes. If your restaurant maintains its own website, have it uploaded – an effective way to generate customer awareness about your new service.
2. Focus on your local area
Extending your business services means expanding your market niche. A true businessman should think that way if he or she wants to survive the competitive market. But this issue is something the restaurant entrepreneur needs to think about very carefully compared to running other types of businesses.
No one wants to order take out and then drive out 50 miles in the cold with food freezing in the backseat. So for now, at least, focus all your promotions in the area within a couple square miles of your restaurant. If the area around you is residential, handing out take out menus as flyers doesn’t hurt. Offer a 5% or 10% discount from time to time on take out orders within a certain radius from the restaurant.
If the surrounding area is commercial, try this approach. Are you surrounded by offices on all sides? Take an afternoon walk around the nearest offices and introduce yourself and your services to the folks at the front desk. It pays to make a good impression to the people who’ll be holding the menus and making the calls for an order.
3. Make changes in the workflow
The worst possible scenario is the take out service interfering with your in-house operations – servers are getting hung up taking orders on the phone, dining customers are being ignored, etc. Remember this when you plan your new take out service and keep it from happening at all costs. Do this by assigning a different group of staff dedicated to answering take out orders and cooking the food and preparing it for delivery.
For walk-in take outs, one good tactic is to steer the customer to the bar who is waiting for his or her orders. Give them a complementary glass of wine and ask them what they think of your establishment. Not only did you make a lasting impression on that customer, but you’re also one less glass away from emptying that cheap bottle of wine you’ve been trying finish off for weeks.
Small gestures like these make all the difference. Who knows? Maybe you just turned that take out order into a regular customer – either dine in or take out.