If You Don’t Hire A Restaurant Consultant Now, You’ll Hate Yourself Later

I know some people who’d started their restaurant business without taking the services of an outside consultant. They said they wanted to save the money that would otherwise go to the consultant, or else use it to buy an additional table or a coat rack. A couple months later, the business fell apart like a house of cards.

Simply put, a consultant is essential to the development of a restaurant establishment. This phase is where you lay down the foundations of the business. If you get this wrong, you get everything wrong.

I’ll point out some of the basics.

1.    Do you want to become part of a franchise or go it alone? Any restaurant owner will tell you that this is a crucial decision. Aside from electronics, foodservice happens to be one of the most dependent when it comes to franchise names and brands.

For example, everyone knows applying for a McDonald’s franchise isn’t cheap and by no means an easy task. But if you do however get the green light, then congratulations, you just killed your financial problems for life. An experience restaurant consultant can help you decide whether to open an established franchise or start your own based on your current budget and expertise.

2.    You need outside assistance to help you consolidate a business plan. Admit it, this is your dream restaurant. You must be very proud of your new business. But thing is you might get a little too emotional when it comes to making hard decisions, and right decisions at this time is all that matters.

For a business to work long-term, you need to produce a high quality feasibility study backed by raw data, and later a solid business plan that would put the pieces of your workflow operations together. I suggest you hire a consultant for this one—that is, unless you have an MBA in business administration.

3.    A business is only as strong as its weakest employee. So when it comes to hiring staff to work for you, no amount of fees is too much for the services of an experienced consultant who specializes in this area. A restaurant consultant can fill you in on the employment law, help you draft employee policies, training and other tasks, such as staff scheduling.

Consultants are also helpful in getting you started in talks with vendors both foreign and local.

An outside consultant is responsible to work with you only for a few sessions, but the results are long-term. If you really love your business, if you really want to make this thing work, take my advice and hire a restaurant consultant to help you get down the basics of running your dream restaurant.

See How Easily You Can Boost Sales By Connecting Your Restaurant Services Through Your Blackberry

These days business owners need to be quick on their feet. Especially restaurant operators, you need to secure every little advantage if you want your business to get anywhere in a market full of competition. I’m not exaggerating. Go to the nearest shopping center and tell me how many restaurants and foodservice establishments do you see.

The first rule is to separate yourself from your competitors. How do you do this? Better service, ambiance, reasonable pricing, improved parking and decor. But there’s something else—a huge advantage to take in more customers—most restaurant owners are taking for granted. Accessibility.

Here’s a fact. When a customer wants to reserve a table in advance, he looks up a couple of websites from his home or office computer. Here’s another fact: restaurant staffs aren’t early risers. So most reservations in the morning are simply recorded on an answering machine or sent as email to be read later on.

Most restaurants are already doing this. But this is no time to be “like most restaurants“. Remember, separate yourself from the competition. Do this by connecting your restaurant’s reservation system through your Blackberry.

The Blackberry is a handy tool for most restaurant operators, though only a handful is aware of it. With a Blackberry, you don’t have to be in front of the computer to accept a reservation, nor do you have to get up in the morning and answer the phone every time a customer dials your number. A Blackberry allows you to send customers personalized replies from anywhere!

If anything, and believe this, customers appreciate getting personalized feedback instead of a canned message from some automated answering machine.

A good deal is to let your general manager handle the Blackberry. A plan should cost you around $15 per month, more or less, but it’s a good trade for putting your restaurant at your customer’s fingertips. Tell your general manager he or she may use the Blackberry as a personal phone, which should encourage him or her enough to respond to customer inquiries professionally at all times.

Now in the event you need to change managers—you found a better person for the job or your manager has decided to leave your employment—you can easily transfer ownership of the Blackberry to the new person. It’s as easy as that. A Blackberry is indeed a restaurant operator’s best friend.

I’ve been in the foodservice consulting industry for some time now, and the use of a Blackberry to improve customer relations is one of the few innovations I’ve seen that actually work. It’s simple, it’s cost-effective, and most importantly, it succeeds in bringing restaurant franchises closer to their customers than their competitors. Separate yourself from competitors by bridging the gap between you and your customers.

The technology is already here, and the only thing left for restaurant owners to do is use it.

For comments and feedback, please leave a message below.

Winning Tactics For Putting Together A Unique Restaurant Concept

One of the things that determine a restaurant’s long-term success is the success of its opening day. I’m not saying the opening day is everything by any means, but it definitely accounts for something. If you could cook up something unique and get folks to talking about “that new place around the corner“, then expect good business for at least the next couple weeks or so.

There’s a great deal to consider when putting together a concept for your new restaurant, and it’s worth every ounce of time and effort you put into it.

Remember, when it comes to food establishments, there’s no such thing as oversaturation of the market. It’s true that there are lots of cookie-cutter restaurants out there. But there are only a few unique restaurants that truly cater to customers’ tastes, and this is where you come in.

The fundamentals. I know you’re looking to start a distinctive restaurant, but even so, you shouldn’t forget about the basics. You need to decide whether you’re going formal or casual. There’s also the matter of whether you’re going to focus on a specific type of cuisine, and if you’re going to serve entertainment alongside the good food and drinks.

Working with a few investors is another thing. It’s a good idea to bring the group together and ask them for input since, aside from their putting their own money into this project, it’s never a bad thing to gather ideas from as many experts as possible. It’s your job as the restaurant operator to dilute all those individual ideas and create a unique and distinctive theme for your restaurant.

Next comes area feasibility. Simply put, there’s no point in opening a restaurant that offers “authentic German cuisine” in a community that’s almost entirely vegetarian. You need to speak to the demographics. Find out what they want, what they’re looking for, and then decide everything from there – from the concept to the dishes on the menu.

Putting together the menu is also—of course—a huge priority, but only after you’ve done a decent job of determining what the demographics expect to see from your new restaurant. Get together with your head chef and discuss your food selections, considering your budget and availability of the main ingredients.

And lastly, restaurant marketing. You have two playgrounds, offline and online restaurant marketing, both of which you need to invest in if you want to get anywhere in this business. Start advertising two weeks or a full month ahead of opening day. When the big day comes, you’ll see all that effort will pay off big time.

Continue on with your aggressive restaurant marketing from here on out.

The foodservice industry has no place for guesses and assumptions. You’ll end up bankrupt that way faster than you could say “Batman”. Prepare, prepare, and be prepared. Leave no stone unturned. Like novels, open with a bang, that’s the only way to create a mark in a world full of cookie-cutter establishments.

Tell me your ideas on how to open a new restaurant in an oversaturated environment. Leave a comment below.

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.

Feel free to leave a comment below this post.

Four Sure-Fire Tips For Your Restaurant To Stay On Top In 2010

This year, 2009, was a so-so year for restaurants. People cutting back in the face of recession, it was still an okay year for restaurants, but it could’ve been better. Thing is, new studies by Mintel show that next year, 2010, has the potential to bring the fire back on our empty stoves. Finally some good news after a year of bad ones.

Back to basics.

In 2010, Mintel predicted that most restaurants are going back to the basics. After a year of cutting back, we’ll be seeing more value served at the tables. No more low-cost value deals. No more $1 burgers. Wait, is there?

The following trends are expected to hit restaurants as soon as the New Year rolls around.

1.    Simple is everything
The concept of “simplicity” applies more to the foodservice industry than anywhere else. Over the year chefs have discovered that, simply put, “simplicity” simply sells.

The American holy trinity of burgers, shakes and fries is a prime example. In 2010, restaurant entrepreneurs should stop beating around the bush and go back to the tried-and-true formula of good-tasting food served from simple ingredients, ample preparations, and classic food combinations.

2.    Home-grown ingredients
Here’s something the foodservice industry would be bringing over from 2009.

When the New Year fireworks are over, customers are still going to look for locally-sourced ingredients. No one wants to eat a lettuce that’s been packaged, thrown and flown all the way from Tibet. As a restaurant owner, find a way to get your hands on some fresh home-grown ingredients as early as now.

3.    On the move
Customers are still going to be cutting back on going to actual restaurants, even in 2010. But that doesn’t mean they won’t be eating your food at home. Mintel has noticed a drastic increase in restaurant franchise efforts to improve their online-ordering platforms, which only makes a lot of sense.

Some months ago Pizza Hut won two awards for developing a smart-phone ordering application, which Pizza Hut claims accounted for $1 million in sales last year.

Don’t you think it’s about time you start reaching out to your local customers, too?

4.    Delicious food from the roots
Mintel’s study discovered that four in every five Americans had eaten ethnic cuisine at a restaurant in the past couple months.

There’s the usual Italian pasta, Mexican tacos and Chinese dimsum, but those are old stories. If you want to stand out, as a restaurant operator, you need to dig a little deeper into the culture of a specific region, such as the unique style of barbecue they have up in North Carolina.

Study experts are seeing these as the top restaurant trends in 2010. This 2009 focused on adding more value to restaurant food. But restaurant operators, such as yourself, are expected to redefine that next year when more customers start to eat out again after, finally, leaving a bad year behind them.

Feel free to leave a comment after this post.

You Don’t Have To Be One Of The McDonald Brothers To Start A Successful Restaurant Business

Someone looking to start a restaurant business shouldn’t read the paper. It’s disheartening to read about what’s going on in the economy these days. In fact statistics show that 90% of businesses, just about, would fail and shut down for good during its first five years.

So okay, who wants to start a new business?

But here is the thing. The success of a restaurant business first and foremost depends on you. Sure, there are several elements involved on the way to success, but all of them require effort from you – the restaurant operator.

Some restaurant owners are happy about their restaurant succeeding in one area and failing in another. You can’t please everyone, right? Wrong. Many restaurants fail because their owners get lazy or refuse to exert more effort. Some owners come up with a good idea now and then, but fail to back it up with action.

You must understand that people need to eat. But unlike our ancestors, who eat in order to survive, modern people are always looking to explore different tastes. Which is why a restaurant business is always a good thing, recession or no recession. You just need to come up with a solid business plan.

So what makes a solid business plan?

• A nice location
• The perfect theme or concept
• A hardworking team of restaurant staff

First things first, don’t rush out to buy the first piece of real estate offered on your table. You need to consider a couple things. Does the location fit my desired concept? Does it coincide with my market niche? Am I going to be visible in this location? Stuff like that. Your choice of location should of course go along with your choice of theme. If the two don’t mix well together, scout for another location or else revise your theme, one thing or the other, all the while putting your budget into consideration.

Next is your restaurant’s workforce. Simply put, your main commodity, the food, is going to be prepared by your chefs, and the waiters and waitresses will be the face of your brand name. So make sure you hire only the best people for the position, not someone who’s only looking for a paycheck. Likewise take good care of your staff. Reward them where it’s due, and be sure to provide them a respectable workplace that they’d be proud to tell their friends and family about.

You can never take a bad picture of Paris.

DJ Mo Twister.

Same goes for restaurants. There’s no such thing as a bad time for starting a restaurant business. All you need are the right ingredients to make it work, to find the perfect blend of good food and a unique dining experience that customers would come back to again and again.

Leave a comment below.

Four Deadly Restaurant Management Sins

Most of the time we like to read stories of success or else brush up on ways to improve our restaurant’s services. I admit, I’m guilty of both counts. But I’m also aware that sometimes we need to learn the sad truth before we could appreciate the brighter side of things.

As a topic related to restaurant management, it means we need to be familiar with the problem first before anything else.

For this article, I’ll enlist the help of Mr. Chip Evans, who wrote an article titled, “A Dozen Things That Can Go Wrong With Any Foodservice Business“. I’ll discuss the Top 4 most important ones.

1.    Losing focus
Most restaurant owners start out with a lot of focus and very passionate about the business. A year or two later, an Italian-themed cafe, for example, now sells Chinese dimsum.

What happened along the way? The restaurant owner lost focus.

Chip Evans says,

Stay focused on what you do best.  If you sell hamburgers, don’t over-expand the menu and forget your core hook.  Do not confuse efforts with results.

2.    Keeping unproductive people on the payroll
This is one of the strongest reasons why a restaurant closes down for good. Uncompetitive, unproductive staff is bad for business. Very bad. Sooner or later, their incompetence is going to show up in the figures, and you’re the one who’s going to have to pay the price.

Fire unproductive staff, even if it’s family. That’s the only remedy to this problem.

3.    Not hiring the best people
Letting competitive employees go and not hiring them is just as bad as keeping unproductive ones on the payroll, maybe even worse.

Chip Evans believes the trick is to hire people who are better than you at doing “sector” jobs so you could focus all your attention on running the business.

4.    Not having accurate business plans with clear objectives and timelines for execution
Every business needs a definite plan. The plan should lay out what you intend to achieve long term, plus a brief description of the timeline for their execution.

In today’s business environment a business plan can often be no longer than 6 months long.  It’s no longer ‘business as usual,’

says Chip Evans.

When real capital is involved, it pays to think and plan first and act later.

Chip Evans is the current president of The Evans Group LLC. Based on his credentials, and my own personal experience as a former restaurant operator, Evans definitely knows what he’s talking about. More than anything, these tips will help you improve your restaurant service.

Leave a message below for comments and feedback.

Give Me Five Minutes And I’ll Show You The Real Deal About Restaurant Marketing Books

The Internet makes it so much easy for us to get our hands on credible information. Anything you need to know, right this minute, just one click of a mouse and there it is right in front of you. Same is true for first-time small restaurant owners looking for tips and advice on how to get started on their dream business.

This is where restaurant marketing books come in.

Why restaurant marketing books?
There’s the Internet, and it’s free. There are hundreds of articles out there right now trying to get your attention.

But there’s something else you need to know – anybody can say anything on the Internet.

Writing on the Internet requires little to no investments whatsoever. Unlike restaurant marketing books, you can be rest assured the writer somehow made some effort to get his book on the shelves. That says a lot about his confidence in his expertise—in this case, restaurant marketing—and that people are going to want to read what he has written.

Restaurant marketing books on the Internet?
It’s possible. As more people learn to use the Internet, expert writers and restaurant operators are preferring to publish their stuff online.

Take me for example. As a small business marketing coach I have a free e-book and audio book ready to give struggling restaurant operators a chance to turn their business around. It’s okay to trust what people write on the Internet, but only as long as the source can walk the talk.

Restaurant marketing books versus restaurant consultant?
If a restaurant marketing book was written by a consultant, do I really need to hire another one?

It depends. If this isn’t your first time starting a restaurant business, then I assume you have a pretty good idea what went wrong the last time and keep it from happening again. But if you’re new to this business, still trying to find a stable footing, then simply relying on the guidance of restaurant marketing books isn’t going to take you very far. You really need to hire a business coach or restaurant consultant. Trust me, I’ve been there and done all that.

Look around your local bookstore or Amazon, ask friends if they could recommend you a restaurant marketing book worth entrusting your business on.

Restaurant Marketing Services: Want To Establish An Online Ordering System?

When was the last time you entered a restaurant, took one glance at the line, then walked right out again to look for another place? We’ve all done that one time or another. For the customer, it’s no big deal. For the restaurant operator, it could very well break his business.

The Internet makes a lot of things possible, even for restaurant establishments. Now modern technology allows even small business owners to establish an essential piece of marketing service for restaurants—that is, an online ordering system.

Here a couple things to note about having an online ordering system.

1. Prepare to take in extra work
An online ordering system, as a restaurant marketing service, isn’t going to pick a convenient time to take an order from a hungry caller. Orders are going to come in right when everyone else is hungry, during lunch or dinner rush. Are you prepared for this? The last thing you want is your delivery service getting in the way of your in-house operations.

2. Be prepared to hire more staff
To take care of the extra workload, you need to hire more people and, if possible, divide your staff into two teams – in-house and delivery. But take note this also means more names on the payroll. As restaurant operator, it’s your job to figure out if this new restaurant marketing service is worth the money that goes out.

3. Changes to your workflow operations
So okay. Hiring more people seems like the obvious solution. But when you got more employees competing for the same resources coming from the kitchen, inefficiencies begin to show themselves like a bad apple at the bottom of the basket. Be sure to provide both teams their own resources, or find a way for them to work around each other more efficiently.

4. Be flexible
Operating a restaurant is much like going out on dates – every one is different, and so each attempt to establish an online ordering service is going to present its own unique set of problems. Be flexible and learn to adapt your solutions based on the problem at hand.

Knowing the different types of restaurant marketing services and properly implementing them are two different things. Same goes for online ordering. It seems like a wonderful approach to attract more business, but unless you can smooth your operations to work with this new restaurant marketing service, think twice before setting it up.

Top Three Reasons Why You Must Hire A Restaurant Consultant

Hiring a restaurant consultant is one of the biggest early decisions you need to make as a restaurant operator.

I know how it feels. I’ve been in that situation. Here you are, trying to put up a restaurant business and hoping everything turns out okay, and already you’re faced with a choice to hire someone who may or may not be an asset in the long run. These are times even I wished I was clairvoyant.

Anyway I’ll let the facts do the talking. Here are three reasons why it’s a good idea to hire a restaurant consultant.

1. It helps you out long term
restaurant consultants don’t go for free. When you hire one, that person goes into the payroll, something that turns off restaurant operators just starting out. Here’s my advice: don’t worry about it and just hire yourself a good restaurant consultant.

Restaurant consultants are important, because quality pre-planning, something these guys are good at, helps in preventing your business from running into something unexpected in the future. A good restaurant consultant is here to save you money long term. Remember that.

2. They help with staffing
A restaurant is only as good as the staff body that manages it. If your chefs can’t put their hearts into their dishes even if their lives depended on it, or else the waiters are more impatient than the customers they serve, your business will never take off.

Restaurant consultants, on the other hand, they are familiar with hiring, training and establishing staff policies, as well as the employment laws in your area. They can also help you figure out the best scheduling for your staffs while working around a budget.

3. Consultants will get your restaurant open
Hiring a restaurant consultant guarantees you’ll get your restaurant open no matter what. They’re here to guide you every step of the way - from conducting feasibility studies to fishing out good applicants to helping you organize and price your menu.

In the beginning the crucial thing is to get your business off the ground, and it’s restaurant consultants that provide services to help you with just that.

The pros of hiring a restaurant consultant easily outweighs the cons. Don’t worry about the money. The fees pay for themselves over time. The important thing is to get your restaurant business up and running by hiring someone to turn your ideas into real business solutions.

Don’t let your investments go to waste. Consider hiring a restaurant consultant.

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