Food

Making Restaurant a Sustainable Business

By - Admin Jul 06, 2020 5 Mins Read
Making Restaurant a Sustainable Business
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These days, restaurant is not just a place where we enter to have good food or to kill our hunger. Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Lounges, Banquets, whatever type they are, they have now become a community center of this century and will be more diverse in coming up days. Professional gatherings, Business Meetings, Small personal parties and receptions, Personal chit chats, everything happen is restaurants in this era. It has become a trend in personal and professional life to utilize restaurants as venue to celebrate success, lament failure and plan solutions to excel or avoid. There is no dispute about the role of restaurant in today�s busy urban lifestyle, however not every one of them enjoy the same level of importance and success. How to make restaurant a profitable, sustainable, successful and long-term business is the first set of queries an entrepreneur have in their mind. A successful restaurant not only serves good food, but also provides great customer services, ensures consistency of customer experience at a cost that is based on its food, services and location.

Preparation & Planning

A proper preparation to make restaurant business a successful venture includes location selection, systematic planning and careful investment. The location should have proper visibility, sufficient parking space and possibility of future expansion while the locality should have a positive history, easy accessibility and a neighboring community that generates good foot traffic. A complete business plan should be prepared with concrete idea of what types of food the restaurant wants to serve and what class of restaurant they want this to be: Fast-food, Midscale or Upscale. A detail layout plan of a restaurant should be developed including a plan for dining area, kitchen area and administrative area. The design should be based on the food to serve and the class to maintain. Furthermore, a plan of promotional activities and human resource management aspect of the business should be formulated before the restaurant comes in to operation. It is imperative to have clarity of investment before starting a food service business. Capital requirement is dependent on the type of food the restaurant plans to serve. Certain kinds of food demand certain kinds of kitchen equipment, service quality and often prefers a certain dining layout. It is fruitful to ascertain the sources of investment beforehand so is to move forward as planned to make smooth transition to opening and sound operation after opening. There should always be some extra fund in possession to address any unforeseen, yet unavoidable, expenses that arises before, during or after the opening.

Menu & Pricing

Trying to offer unlimited number of food items in a menu doesn�t offer choices but create confusion to the customers. Even though, the variety of food items has increased over the years, menus itself are growing shorter. It is important to remember that an elaborated menu come with as elaborated set of operational problems. Whereas, a simple and straight forward menu offers clarity and choices to the customer, and explains what the restaurant does well and what is its specialty. A long menu takes longer time for customers to decide on the food they want to have. Delay in ordering food limits the ability to serve more customers and collect more revenue in return. Similarly, in the production area, many different dishes cooking at the same time require more space, more equipment and more personnel. It takes longer than usual time and additional cost to produce food as more burners, fryer grease, and hands are used. Knowing how to properly price the menu is the first step toward making a profit. It is not necessary to match the price of the competitor but necessary to price the menu that matches the quality of food served, atmosphere and layout created and standard of service offered. The menu most be based on the financial picture of the business and purchasing capacity of the target customers. While deciding the food items to go into the menu and setting a price for every one of them, it is important to takes into account every cost of operating business including rent, staff salary and benefits, equipment depreciation and repayment schedule of the capital invested. Not to forget, the hero of the restaurant, the cost of purchasing and preparing the food to sale. The price should be comparable to the quality of the food being served, standard of the services provided and convenience of the location it is in. Delay in service reduces the number of sales during the operation, especially during the pick hours,overpriced menu prevent customers from returning again and combination of the both or either one of them, on the other hand,may have serious implication on customer experience.

Customer Experience

Being a service industry, customer experiences is paramount for any restaurant to do good business. Such experience is derived not only by good food, consistent taste, great ambiance and convenient location but also by how every customer is served, cared and attended to. Courteous staff, polite behaviors, positive attitude, attention to detail, knowledge of customer�s food habit and some degree of personalized service are some areas a restaurant most focus to enhanced customer experience. It is inevitable to receive complaints from customers but the key is how the complaints, when there is one, is received and handled because for every customer complaint received, there are many more left unexpressed. The restaurant manager as well as the customer service staff should be properly trained on complaint management. Constant improvement is another mantra to elevate customer experience and that is possible when customer�feedback are received, recorded, analyzed, shared among the team to address the concerns received from the customers and preserve the ones that received compliments.

Unique Identity

An original and unique identity created and maintained by a restaurant is the reason for customers to visit it again and again, choosing over its competitors. Such identity could be a unique food item that is able to connect with everyone. It could be the ambiance the restaurant has created or it could also be the standard of service offered. The most important thing is to make people feel nostalgic in the restaurant and that is not possible only by good food and good services; it is possible by offering an emotion that people can remember long after they forget what they ate and how the service and ambiance was. The customers come into contact with the menu more than any other things in the restaurant, it is not only a list of food to choose from but also a brand and a unique identity. Therefor the menu layout,food choice and listing as well as the pricing all need to be in harmony. Staff uniform, tabletop design, interior, furniture and fixtures are some areas where uniqueness can be created.

Promotion and Marketing

Restaurant is not successful and sustainable just by cooking and serving good food, it also need to get the word out. Word of mouth is indeed the best ways of marketing for any service business but in today�s competitive world, it is not enough. Gathering all the contact information from every person you are in touch and promoting the restaurant and its services to them is the best method of marketing a restaurant. Marketing to the regular customers creates better result and increases sales opportunities compared to marketing activities to reach new customers. The regular customers are much better source for new customers than any other marketing tools. Enhanced customer experience, happy customer base, quality food and services are one aspect of sustainable and long-term restaurant business. Making the unique identity visible and brand competitive and restaurant image ever present in the mind of regular customer and curiosity in the mind of the potential is another aspect which is possible only by well targeted promotional activities and advertisement.

Hiring and Payroll

The secret of successful and sustainable restaurant business lies in recruiting skilled personnel and management team who is capable to work collectively in a team while fulfilling their individual responsibility. It doesn�t matter whether s/he is a chef, or a hostess, or a cleaner, they are responsible to performs professionally and create holiday mood to customers. Each employee are the brand ambassador of the restaurant and should be oriented to make a real show and create a unique individual experience for customers. The manager should be knowledgeable of restaurant operation, able to create harmony between work and workers as well as be responsible for a comfortable atmosphere where every member of the team knows what their role is and perform them smoothly and consistently. Every customer have their own expectation of food and services and it is the team efforts that makes sure that these individual expectations are met. Keeping payroll low does not mean to pay less than what the workers deserve, it means to garner the optimum use of the available workers. No employee should be paid more than their worth because everyone has their price, and their salaries depend largely on their assigned responsibilities and how they are performed.

Effective and Efficient Operation

Owners themselves working in either half of the restaurant is a good idea for sustainability as it will exposes them to the strength and shortcoming of the business and provides opportunity to address them appropriately. The owner or manager should ensure that the price of goods and services purchased are comparable to what others are paying in the market. They should also have good negotiation skills to ensure best price on purchase and best skill set on recruitment. Data collection and analysis of restaurant performance as well as the customer feedback analysis ensures necessary information are in place to run a profitable business. Comparative study on the potential and actual revenue performance provides information to overcome the flaws and to plug the loopholes as necessary. Last but not least, a restaurant should comply with all the regulatory requirements, be available for health and hygiene inspection and fulfill operational safety compliance. Submitting company updates, getting the company audited, paying taxes, fees and other charges as required by the government authority are some basic administrative work that need to be carried out on time to avoid hefty penalties, fees and other assorted fines. Failing to comply or submission could cause government authority to shut down the restaurant.
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