You’ve done the hard part of opening a bar or restaurant, and now it is time to expand. Growing your bar/restaurant is often a complicated experience. Understanding how to expand while maintaining your core mission will greatly help you through the many difficult choices you will have to make as a business owner.
Following these four simple steps will help ease many issues allowing you to grow your restaurant smoothly while keeping customers coming through the doors.
1. Create an Experience
Great food makes guests come back, but a great experience makes guests come back more often.
You will never be the one-stop restaurant for everyone. So, you must identify a specific target market, or two, and excel at them. Understand the experience the customer wants and build everything from the greeting at the door through plating so that they tell their friends and want to come back on a regular basis.
2. Create Profit-Driven Specials
Design your food and drink specials based on your profit margins. The whole purpose of specials is to drive profit and highlight what makes your restaurant great. Don't just pick the super expensive steak because it costs the most. If you can offer a signature dish that is more popular with a higher profit margin, it is way better to sell that every time.
3. Create a Culture of Training
Instill in your management team a culture of training or "upsell and cross-sell every single time."
Every restaurant is experiencing pains coming back from COVID due to new staff, even though we are about a year removed from the heart of the pandemic. Management must know that training cannot stop after the second week of a new hire.
Spend a half hour before weekend shifts every week teaching your employees how to upsell and set clear expectations on what they should be offering every guest. Track upselling and cross-selling every shift. Leverage contests to reward top performers, and make the contests simple, like no side work next shift. Do the math and show them how much in tips they could make if they increased every table cost by $10-$20. Doing this will help boost the performance of your staff and help increase sales.
4. Do More Than Speak With Guests
When manager touch points aren't working, do something that does. Manager touches at each table are supposed to accomplish two goals: First, get feedback to save a bad guest experience before it goes on Google or Yelp, and second, to build rapport with your guests.
When customers see the manager stop at every table in rapid fire succession and ask, "was everything fine," it doesn't build rapport or allow a guest to give valuable feedback candidly.
Instead, split it into two different solutions. Get a phone number where guests can text you to provide compliments or candid feedback. Place a small sign in the front of the restaurant or a note on the check asking for compliments or feedback on their experience. Also, let managers get creative. Ask them for ways they can engage with guests more meaningfully that can build rapport and add to the customer’s overall experience.
Growing a business, especially a bar/restaurant, is never easy. Understanding your customer base, providing proper training, and allowing your managers to be creative will help your profits grow over time and at a comfortable pace. Remember, you always want your customers smiling after they finish their meal. They will remember the great experience they had previously, which will result in them coming back more often and telling friends and family about your restaurant.
Adam Spooner is a co-founder of Pareto Impact Consulting, a business consulting firm helping small to medium-sized business owners grow by delivering customized solutions that drive growth, increase profitability, and create a lasting impact.
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