Authored by: Olivier Thierry (Chief Marketing Officer)
(Part 1 of 2)
Whether you have a single pizzeria or a multi-chain restaurant concept, there are several factors that limit your potential to increase profitability, scale and optimize efficiency. We’ve selected eight of the big ones that can be overcome if you have the right solutions in place.
1. A Lack of Management Oversight
As a restaurant manager or owner, it’s hard to be everywhere at once. That means you likely aren’t getting a 360-degree picture of what’s going on in your restaurant. Things including security can be compromised. You could be overstaffing during downtimes and understaffing at peak times. Multiple restaurant locations make these issues even harder to manage. Poor management at just one location can put a serious dent in your entire brand’s image.
How are you controlling costs? And do you really know whether your restaurant is operating as efficient as it could be? Can you pull reports and do an analysis of what’s working and what’s not? Are you able to juggle staff scheduling without pulling your hair out?
Operational challenges often are a byproduct of a lack of automation. If your restaurant isn’t automated, the problems and accompanying solutions tend to be complex and a drain on your time and resources.
2. Inability to Hire and Retain Quality Employees
It’s a challenge finding the right employees for your restaurant. They are the front line of your restaurant and its most visible element. If your staff provides top notch customer service, they can add luster to your brand and keep customers coming back. But if your POS systems are difficult to learn and use, you’re not going to keep quality personnel.
If your restaurant is not running efficiently, your staff are going to become frustrated. It can impact their work and they’ll contemplate leaving for greener pastures. Not to mention, they may share their negative experiences online, making it difficult for you to attract quality recruits and potentially deter customers.
You need to hire people who see working at your restaurant as a career, not just a job. Proper training can go a long way in employee retention. And having training materials online and not in some hard bound book makes it easier for new employees to get up to speed quickly. It also makes it easier for you to make changes or updates.
3. Losing Track of Inventory
How do you know what’s in your food and beverage inventory? Do you have to take a physical count? These factors take time and could be riddled with inaccuracies. Your profitability depends on how well you manage your expenses. And that means you need to know if you have overages, shortages, or any loss. If you don’t keep on top of these things, you lose money. But this is a laborious task that can divert resources from our tasks.
You need to have the ability to pull real-time reports and do analysis. You need a central dashboard to give you a snapshot of what you have so you only pay for what you need.
4. No Insight into Delivery Operations
Which of your drivers are delivering fast and which ones aren’t? Are you efficiently dispatching your delivery team, or are you just winging it? At any given time, do you know where your drivers are? And what about third-party delivery services – are you paying too much in commissions to use them when you could be doing the job better with your own team? And are you able to successfully navigate the complexities of both in-house and third-party delivery services?
You need to have centralized management of your all your delivery services that includes dispatching and tracking. Ideally, the solution you have should feature mapping services and the ability to reroute on the fly.
Now that we’ve covered the first four things preventing you from running your restaurant your way, come back tomorrow when we’ll share with you the next four and how you can resolve them.