How to Streamline Your Restaurant to Increase Profits
Even if, as both the owner and the general manager of a restaurant, you may well have a deep-seated passion for all things food and drink, you also need to be making enough money to support yourself and your family and keep the doors open.
With this in mind, here are a few ideas on how you can streamline your restaurant operations to increase your monthly profits.
Optimize Your Menu
Whether your restaurant serves speciality cuisine or is more of an informal cafe providing basic, affordable, and delicious food to walk-ins, it is essential to optimize your menu.
Luckily, there are a number of effective ways to do this, including:
- Break down each dish using a cost analysis and re-price where appropriate
- Be creative with categories instead of using the basic starter, main, and dessert style
- Use eye-catching and tantalizing words to describe each dish
- Choose quality over quantity when deciding the number of offerings in each category
Focus on Creative Marketing
Not only should your menu be a one-stop representation of who you are and what you stand for, but you also need to embrace online marketing and social media advertising too.
The most popular social media platforms for cafes and restaurants in the UK are Instagram and Facebook. If you are limited in time, concentrate on these and post regular content, ideally with an emphasis on photos and videos.
In addition, you should also get creative with other methods of online marketing aside from your restaurant's official website and join several different restaurant marketing and delivery apps, such as Just Eat, Clover Network, Food Hub, Deliveroo, 7Shifts, Epos Now, and Open Table.
Improve Storage for Perishables
Next, the fewer food products and ingredients your restaurant throws away, the less money your business is wasting, and when viewing this through an eco-friendly lens, high levels of food wastage are contributing to both economic and environmental crises, so this will reduce your carbon footprint too.
Reputable and respected storage and technology provider Bito is an innovative leader in this area and is dedicated to the provision of containers, shelving, warehouse technology, and transportation systems, making them the ideal choice for products to store food products safely and securely.
Heighten Staff Training Levels
There are, as you will already know, more than a handful of ways in which servers and bar staff can encourage guests to spend more time and more money when dining, and even though you are aware of such tactics, it is your front-of-house staff who have the power to upsell.
As it stands, certainly in the UK, there is no formal training required to work as a waiter, and therefore, it is often down to 'on the job' learning to instruct new starters on what to do.
Investing time and money into properly training your employees will pay dividends, especially when you encourage your team's passionate, driven and hospitality-minded members to upsell to win incentives and progress their careers.
