Running a new restaurant
The real game begins the day you open your restaurant’s doors for business. Herein also lies the real test: whether you would succeed or fail. The outcome would depend a great deal on how you handle the following departments:
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Inventory (initial stock)
Which items
Start with the items listed on your menu. You cannot afford to experiment (gamble) at this stage. Make sure that your ‘specialty’ item is there at all times for this would be the main reason for many customers to walk into your restaurant.How much of each item
The most important thing when you start up would be to tread with caution in this department. While it is good to have ambitious projections, don’t let those projections lead you to losses. Keep a reasonable quantity of all the items which you have in your menu. Within a month you would know which items to spend more (and less) on. Here, your restaurant POS system would provide you with spot on analyses and reports to inform your future purchases. -
Operations
Selling
Once there are customers, your sales would be on. Whatever the customer may wish to try, make sure you have your best staff at hand to assist them pick something or try another. The servers explaining the menu items to the customer would be a good idea too. This would not only personalize the experience but also potentially lead the customer into spending more than planned.
Staff
Your staff must be well conversant with the norms of modern dining. If they are not, you must arrange for them to be trained in modern hospitality. The cheapest way of doing this would be to have a mix of fresh and experienced staff where the experienced staff members would train their inexperienced colleagues while being ‘on the job’. This will go a long way in popularizing your restaurant because people like to be served by servers who are both pleasant and efficient.
Services
One of the hallmarks of successful restaurants is the quality of their service. Their servers serve and serve it in style. This is what you would want to make sure too. Your servers must be as much pleasant as they are required to be quick. This could also mean that they have full coordination with your kitchen staff who for their part would try to be as much efficient as they could get. -
Management
Becoming a restaurateur requires more than just advising around, sitting and seeing. You need to keep a watch over many aspects of the business while also dealing with the in-out customer traffic. These are briefly discussed below.
Money: Cash & Card
Money matters are the lifeline of a restaurant. Whether your customer pays in cash or through card, you’ve got to make sure that the transaction is quick yet smooth, safe and secure. For handling cash, your restaurant till would come into play. Coming as part of your restaurant POS system, this till would do more than handling cash. It would generate reports and analyses on your total turnover each month. Your POS system would make sure that customers opting to pay through cards would have as much smooth and safe transactions as cash. However, all that would depend on the quality of the POS system you have.
Personnel
You will have to design duty rosters for your entire staff. In old days, this would be done through manual record-keeping. Not anymore. Thanks to your modern Point of Sale system, you can have your staff’s performance and check-in check-out indices to help you allocate duty according to performance, discipline and number of customers served.
Customers
You need to make sure that your customers are greeted and seen off in a very good style. The manner in which you greet them goes a long way in promoting your restaurant if the rest of things too work as planned. Likewise, give them a warm goodbye and express the wish to welcome them again. Requesting them to fill out a feedback form would be a good idea.
Inventory
By keeping track of the inventory, you can make sure that none of your amount spent on it is wasted. Here too, your restaurant POS system would come into play. It would report on inventory items which are depleting fast (which means they are high-selling items), depleting slow, or not being sold at all.
Marketing
Based on the reports generated by your POS system especially on inventory, you can devise marketing strategy targeting the customers with special ‘limited time offers’. With each customer’s ‘profile’ too at your disposal, you can develop ‘targeted’ marketing strategies as well. This is a great way of boosting sales and generating much needed returns.
If you take care of these important elements, your business is bound to start solid. Good luck!
