Do you like visiting restaurants? What restaurant is the best place to visit? For example, welcome to Ireland. Just hire a car in Dublin and go to have dinned to Sabor Brazil – the best Irish restaurant. The address is: 50 Pleasants St, Dublin 8. This is a restaurant of Brazilian cuisine and very successful business project in the country. The atmosphere is pleasant and romantic here. It welcomes about 200 guests all together and good to have special dates here. The restaurant business seems to be not difficult.
Nevertheless, there is always a hot question: Why do I have business problems? Everyone is interested in developing own business. Also, everyone meets the problems on the way to success. Whose fault is it – guests, employees, or business owner who could not solve the problems? So, it is time to learn the typical mistakes for restaurant business. If you cannot cope with the problems, your business is losing.
Rule № 1
Physical Comfort for Every Guest
The guest must be always in a good mood. They must not suffer or feel discomfort from cold, hot, light or dark. Everything, including furniture, should be comfortable. Just imagine, every day, seating on the uncomfortable chair in your restaurants the guest thinks: What am I suffering for in this restaurant? The restaurant owner wants to increase the number of seating places by making the chairs small and uncomfortable. Conclusion: physical comfort is always important. The guests cannot be happy when the body is suffering. And your restaurant can be the source of discomfort.
Rule № 2
Be Special!
It often happens that all restaurant owners think that tasty food and good service is enough to be successful. Think of the competition around! Of course, tasty food and high class service is a background for restaurant business. But what makes your restaurant special? What makes the client to differ your restaurant among the others? Conclusion: you should find your WOW feature. When the restaurant has no face, the tasty food and good service cannot help to survive and develop.
Rule № 3
Be the Leader for Your Staff
One man doesn’t make a team – this is not only the proverb but reality. One person cannot develop the restaurant at all. Be honest with your team. You should learn your team: if the waiter is confused or upset, he should not go to the visitors, if the cook is angry, it can be dangerous to work with a knife. It often happens that your staff is not able to manage their bad mood without additional help. You are the leader of your business. So, you must be inspiring, supportive and result-oriented. You should teach you employees to self-control and development.
If the restaurant leader is always supportive to inspire the staff to be happy, friendly, polite, honest, the restaurant business will be always successful. Ho is in charge? You are the leader and you are always in charge! If the restaurant leader is a true leader, the staff will appreciate their job. Conclusion: you should be the leader! If you want your staff to be always friendly, polite, smart and active, you must control and tech them all the time to be the best helping hand ever.
Rule № 4
Be Professional!
There is a wise statement: if you want to be successful, you have to learn fast. The experience says that if you want to develop your business you have to learn all the time. You should learn not only from your mistakes but also from the special classes, events. You are the creator of your business! You should be competent at any question about your restaurant. You may choose teachers, books, classes. Of course, visiting seminars is good, but no one can teach you to develop your restaurant business from a book or two-hour lection.
Conclusion: be active and everything is going to be ok. You should learn more not only for yourself but also for your employees. You are the executive – instructor and educator. You should learn more to control your business and people who work at you. Every point of your business plan must be fulfilled easily. If you know nothing about the restaurant business in details, you can be easily failed or fooled.
Rule № 5
Be Economist!
Economical competence, accounting rules, finances and production are very important for restaurant owners. You can easily meet the owner, who knows nothing about the accounting system. Thus, they cannot see the whole business in general. They cannot define the right strategy and policy for their enterprises. The book-keeper and technologist are needed. Also, you can notice many mistakes. The most popular of them are: wrong ingredients in the restaurant menu, accounting mistakes. This is the situation when the financial accounting is on the low level. The restaurant doesn’t earn the profit.
The worse quality for the restaurant owner is financial incompetence. This is the case when you, as the owner, cannot define the problems of your business and control them all. If you cannot control the situation, you cannot manage it. So, before analyzing information you have to define goals and parameters of what you work with: whet tasks you restaurant solve, what problems should be solved at the first turn, what questions must be answered as soon as possible.
There are types of restaurants which work only by analyzing their work, problems. There are two sides of one coin. You may analyze the financial condition of your business to find the ways of improving. You may also analyze your work and staff competence. There are also many restaurants which are unstoppable in analyzing. They pay attention to any detail, every little thing to analyze it with no reason. Enough! You have to concentrate at the problem you have and analyze it effectively.
Conclusion: first, define the root of your problem to work with figures. Analyzing for analyzing is useless. The figures must help to solve the problem, but not to be the bare statistics of your activity.