Double Your Restaurant Profits And Fight The Recession

This morning I woke up and found this interesting article on Yahoo!. It was a market analysis of eight restaurants in the US that are still making a good dollar after the recession hit the country near the end of 2007.

All emphasize value, whether it’s huge portions or quality for less.

It’s exhilarating to know that at a time when less people are eating out, at least eight restaurants are doing it right.

So is there any other way to generate good money from running a restaurant business at such a bad time in the economy? Yes. As a matter of fact, there are three! Here are some tips.

1. Train employees and keep customers happy

Let’s face it. Employees and staff are your biggest budget drainers. So it makes sense that they should be your biggest asset. A good menu is nothing without the chef to prepare them and waiters to bring food on the tables.

Train your employees to work briskly and efficiently. Review your training programs; make sure they address the issues needed to improve your brand service.

How does this make you money? Well-trained employees mean good service. Good service means happy customers, and happy customers are known to spend more than the average ticket.

2. Prepare detailed reports to reduce food costs

A good restaurant owner values the importance of statistics. A restaurant business deals with food, sure, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be concerned about the numbers and figures that show up on your monthly budget report.

I suggest you list down the top ten or five ingredients you spend the most money on every month. Then find ways to cut back without sacrificing quality – remember the Yahoo! article. Schedule a talk with your distributor and check if they could find you a cheaper alternative that’s similar or maybe even better.

While we’re on the subject, consult with other distributors and see if they could make you a better offer. Business is business. If there’s more value on the other side of the fence, then scoot over. I believe customers think the same way. If they didn’t like one thing about your restaurant, they won’t eat in your restaurant. Period.

3. Empower employees by talking incentives

Here we go again – employees. This time, the aim is to make them stay longer and work harder on your behalf.

Not every employee is motivated by the same thing. Some work for money, some work to kill time, some work for personal satisfaction. But even so, the one thing common about them is that they’re always excited to hear about additional benefits. I mean, come on, who isn’t?

Some ideas for incentives include sharing a small percentage of profits with seasoned employees, implementing a monthly rewards program for the employee who showed the best performance, rewarding top sellers with a monthly bonus, etc.

These are just rough ideas off the top of my head. I’m sure you could formulate your own ideas based on your scale of business and budget constraints.

How does this make you money? It’ simple. The longer someone’s worked for you, the more efficient he or she becomes. In the end it boils down to bringing out the best performance from your staff.

I’d be happy to hear more tips on how to invite more customers during the recession. Share your ideas by leaving a comment below.

Restaurant Promotion Ideas: See How Easily You Can Attract Customers Even During The Recession

I know these are tough times, with the recession and a worldwide pandemic going on. And both are perfectly good reasons to stay home and have dinner in the safety of your own kitchen.

As an entrepreneur, you need to step up your restaurant promotion ideas. You need to be able to grab a megaphone and tell your customers, “Here’s ten reasons why you should eat out at my restaurant rather than stay home and eat meatloaf.” When business is slow and shops are closing down for good, as the Pantene commercial puts it, it’s your time to shine.

I’m thinking why not develop low-cost yet delicious menu choices to attract diners to your place? It won’t be easy, but with less and less people eating out, you have all the time in the world.

I got this wonderful idea from Must Have! Menus when it announced that it was developing recession specials menus for cafes, bars, grills and restaurants looking to serve budget-conscious customers.

Jim Williams, the president of Must Have! Menus, says this about their new restaurant promotion idea,

“The idea behind our recession special menus is to provide a marketing vehicle for daily deals that will appeal to those of us with less discretionary spending money right now.”

I personally think it’s a great way to try and keep your restaurant business afloat during slow times. If there’s anything we learned from Ms. Diane Chiasson, it’s the use of bright, eye-catching colors and food sampling that’s the key ingredient in making this new restaurant promotion idea work in your favor.

It should be noted that simply preparing inexpensive meals isn’t going to be the end of it. You need to get the word out. You need to be able to come up with a good marketing plan to advertise this new restaurant promotion idea as much as possible.

If you already have an email newsletter campaign in place, use that to your advantage. You can also offer free dessert coupons to patrons for referring your place to their friends who ordered one of your recession specials.

The recession specials menus highlight a daily deal for every day of the week, promoting food that people love to eat at prices that are lower than they are used to seeing.

These times are tough, I know, which is why I think offering budget-friendly meals to your patrons is a fool-proof strategy for your restaurant business. It’s only a matter of time before other restaurants realize the beauty (and potential profitability) of this idea and begin to follow suit. Go ahead and milk this restaurant promotion idea while you still can.

More Ways For Your Restaurant Business To Stay On Top During A Recession

This is the second part of the article Discover Ways To Turn Your restaurant business Around During A Recession.

Karen Malody says about implementing change in restaurant operations to fight off economic change,

“It may feel like a time to reduce costs via an assortment of low-road solution paths: haphazardly laying off servers, buying cheaper ingredients or simply changing hours of operation without analysis… But cutting costs is not the same as increasing efficiency. Both affect the customer, but only one optimizes success. Many solutions are counter-intuitive.”

Here are some more tips from the expert.

1. Train staff how to use equipment
How your employees go about doing their work has a huge impact on the profits and losses of your business. This might sound elementary, as Sherlock Holmes would’ve put it, but since Karen had to mention it means there are more restaurant entrepreneurs who ignore it than acknowledge it. “Restaurant supply costs also have gone up faster than operators can raise prices,” another expert says on the subject.

Solution: How many times have you invited the repairman to the kitchen over the last couple months? Train the staffs to understand supplies – what each piece of equipment does, how to maintain it, how to use it, when to replace it and, sometimes even more importantly, what not to do with it.

2. Reopen your restaurant
Trio’s is an upscale restaurant in Ridgeland, Mississippi. It used to be good business. But recently no one was coming in as people thought the menu prices were too high at a time when things couldn’t get any worse. The owners, Pete and Steve Efstratiou were forced to shut it down a few weeks in an attempt to revamp its image to try and bring in more customers.

Solution: When I said reopen your restaurant, it meant redesigning the interiors, changing the restaurant’s name, and putting in more affordable meals on the menu and taking out the expensive ones. We’re in a recession, remember? For the Efstratiou brothers, the plan worked. An $18.95 seafood dish at the old Trio’s is now $14 on the new menu.

“We’ve had to adjust our speed from tables sitting for an hour or two to tables turning every 30-to-45 minutes,” says Steve Efstratiou.

3. Show them who’s boss
In the United States, the National Restaurant Association estimates that restaurants lose $2 billion to employee theft every year. If you don’t stop it from taking place in your restaurant, the recession is going to be the least of your problems when kitchen supplies go missing right when you need them.

Solution: Establish a zero-tolerance policy and hammer it down your employees’ throats from the very first day. You don’t have to be a <insert expletive here> to them, but be sure to make it clear that if they do it once, they’re gone.

Staying on top during a recession is more than just about laying off a couple of employees and cutting back on the rest. It requires some very intelligent decision-making on your part as restaurant owner.

John Foster Dulles said,

“The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it is the same problem you had last year.”

It makes sense, more than anything, to the restaurant entrepreneur. Make a mistake and you pay for it once. Make the same mistake again and you pay for it twice.

Finally Revealed! Five Ways To Incorporate The Delicious Florida Sweet Corn To Your Restaurant Menu

The famous Florida sweet corn is in season. This means two things for the restaurant entrepreneur. First is it means you’ll be busy making changes to your menu. Second, it means increased sales as you’ll be seeing more of your customers who love Florida sweet corn – and there are a lot of them.

Here are five delicious ways to incorporate Florida sweet corn to your menu.

1. Try a new salad
Corn is present in a lot of salad recipes. But sweet corn, specifically Florida sweet corn, that’s something else. Fact is sweet corn is so different in taste when incorporated to common salad recipes that Florida’s Department of Agriculture website features an entire recipe for it.

Here is another blog dedicated to corn salad recipes.

2. Beyond the usual chowder
I like corn in my soup, and so does my wife. Add some chicken and dumpling to the usual mix and you got a winner under your restaurant’s name.

Here are two examples of Florida sweet corn recipes that go beyond the usual chowder: Summer Soup of Butternut and Corn and Chief Justin’s Sweet Corn and Tomato Bisque.

3. The oven is your new best friend
No doubt one of the best ways to prepare sweet corn. What you should do is drizzle a bit of olive oil and some fresh herbs on each ear and wrap them in foil individually. Get creative by trying different flavors. Cilantro and lime, some chili powder, etc.

Note: Bake the corns at 350 for 30-40 minutes.

4. Salsa all the way
There are thousands of different salsas and dips that taste good with corn and taste even better with Florida sweet corn! Here’s a personal tip from me: let the mixture sit in the refrigerator a few hours or overnight to let the juices blend thoroughly.

5. It’s all about cream
Simply put, creamed corn is delicious. But have you tried creamed Florida sweet corn yet? If not, try this amazing recipe from Chef Justin, obviously a Florida sweet corn fanatic, and then we’ll talk.

Florida sweet corn is more than just another item on your menu. It is a distinct flavor that, when prepared well, will bring in new patrons and keep the old ones loyal to your tables.

Double Your Sales By Advertising Your Menu

Social media is getting a lot of attention these days. Whether you need to let out some steam before going to bed at night, or simply bored with work at the office, millions of people are connecting and exchanging bits of information over this digital landscape that is the Internet.

For the average person, this means fun. For the restaurant entrepreneur, this means sales.

If you own a foodservice establishment—restaurant, café, fast food chain, etc.—you already have the perfect tool you can use to advertise your business on social media: your menu. What better way to plug your restaurant than by bringing your menu to the screens of millions of home computers? And all of it for free.

Here are four ways to advertise your menu on social media:

1.    Advertise on Facebook
Almost anyone who uses social media to connect with friends has a Facebook account. Facebook is one of the more popular social media websites these days. So what you should do is add a copy of your menu to your Facebook profile.

Make sure it is uploaded as text and image to make it readable both by search engines and the human eyes.

2.    Partner with CityMint
The cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Chicago and NYC all have one thing in common – they belong to CityMint’s market. If you live in any of these locations, partnering with CityMint would be a good move on your part.

Restaurants that are partnered with any of CityMint’s markets have their menu uploaded and accessible through CityMint’s popular iPhone application. Imagine your restaurant’s menu being available on the iPhone… that’s just great.

3.    Blog
Blog your menu. It doesn’t get any simpler than this. These days blogging is one of the most effective ways of communicating relevant information with other people. In your case, the “relevant information” is your menu, and the “other people” are your potential customers.

4.    Advertise on Twitter
Advertise your new dishes on Twitter. Then pass along a discount coupon for hearing the good word. For example, if a customer says he found out about the new dish on Twitter, knock off 5% ~ 10% of the check. That should boost your Twitter buzz.

Most restaurants upload their menus on websites as a static PDF file. This is a big mistake. Search engines can’t read PDF files, and the tactic is boring. The best form of advertisement is still word-of-mouth. And on the Internet, social media is the new word-of-mouth.

Four More Tips To Increase Revenue With Proper Food Merchandising

In the last article, we talked about five effective ways to improve sales through proper food merchandising, a restaurant marketing strategy advocated by foodservice specialist Diane Chiasson. But the list doesn’t end there. Here are four more tips from the expert.

1. Use merchandising and cross-merchandising to boost sales
Here’s a good question to get you going. Did you know that food sampling and cross-merchandising increases the average consumer’s transaction by more than 75%? Make sure your products are visible from every possible angle. Pair relevant food items together, such as sandwiches and potato chips and soups together, or cheese and yoghurt and fresh fruits.

Diane says,

Customers often enter an eating area with no clear choice of what they want to eat, so by selling paired add-on items, you stimulate the appetite, increase impulse sales, and boost sales, as well as enhance your diner’s experience.

2. Use signage and point-of-sale materials to reinforce your brand
So you finished designing your display areas. Now you need to create the appropriate POS materials and signage to complement your theme and promotion. Simply put, restaurants with proper merchandising and POS materials have higher sales and perform better overall than those without.

3. Stimulate the customer’s appetite with good lighting
Diane says about good lighting,

Lights are not used to just illuminate a space, but must also be used to focus on food items, displays and merchandising areas, and used to create a specific mood or theme within your space

Anyone will tell you that the eyes have as much to do with stimulating the appetite as the tongue. Which is why lighting is right up there as one of the most essential elements of designing the interiors of a restaurant. More than anything, the food should always dominate the displays in and around the restaurant.

4. Be consistent with branding
The last thing to remember is that you need to be consistent with your branding, and one way to do that is by understanding your brand and the message you want to put out there. Think long term. Refrain from making sudden changes to your messages and brands. If you do this, you might even get the chance to start your own private label line.

These tips should put you in the right path to being a successful restaurant entrepreneur. I’ll end the article with a final quote from Diane,

I really believe that you, as a restaurant operator, can create the opportunity to add or sell something extra to your customers not only in the eating area, but for customers to take home such as homemade specialty desserts, sauces, etc.

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.