Get An Instant 20-30% Increase In Sales With These Simple Year-End Restaurant Tips
If anything, the Christmas holidays is a time for change.
It’s the season to spoil ourselves and, as restaurant owners, an opportunity to grow our business. But it’s also a great time to look at your business operations to see which aspects of it deserve carrying over to the new year and which ones has you saying, “Hey, this doesn’t work for me anymore. I need to find a way to fix it if I want to keep doing things right.”
One thing I recommend is for restaurant operators to invest in lost-cost-to-no-cost internal restaurant marketing. Forget TV commercials and billboards. The best way to gain the attention of customers is to pamper them inside your restaurant.
For instance, start seeing your customers as guests and not as… ahem… customers. We all want to feel special when we dine out with family and friends, and your customers are no different. Stop looking at them as if they’re one-time customers, because they will turn out that way. Instead build an on-going relationship with your guests. WOW them with your attention, and they’ll happily return the favor as loyal patrons.
When it comes to repetitive processes, invest in the effort to create systems that takes these responsibilities off your shoulders. Don’t do everything yourself. For recurring tasks, find which ones take up valuable time and, if possible, outsource them. If you could find someone who’s willing to do it at a low cost, by all means let them do it. Stop focusing on minimum wage activities and start training your attention on the more important matters at hand.
Last but not the least, this new year may be the best time to automate your restaurant. I’m not talking about the usual in-house POS system. I’m talking about the smaller, recurring tasks such as restaurant marketing mailers or weekly newsletters, food pricing, paying your bills, etc. The point is to buy you more time to manage other aspects of the business with these things on auto-pilot.
It pays to think about these matters as we inch closer to 2010. There’s no telling what challenges the new year has in store for restaurant operators. So it’s best to prepare beforehand—that is, by cementing your fair share of loyal patrons and outsourcing the small things so you could concentrate on the bigger things at hand.
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