Starting, Owning and Marketing A Restaurant Blog|Starting and Owning a Restaurant - Construction, Planning, Marketing, Opening and Managing a New Restaurant

As predicted, Sunday sales levels exceeded Saturday, but not without pointing out a few weaknesses in our system. Below is a list of things that need attention to keep growing:

• Ticket times exceeded acceptable levels at several points in the day. A green kitchen crew was part of the problem, but too many options on the menu also created some confusion for servers and kitchen staff.
• Our new hostess is an exceptionally hard worker, but needs additional training. On several occasions she sat multiple parties in the same server’s section at the same time. This means the server cannot give each table the time and attention they deserve. Multiple seatings also mean the food is rung in at the same time and ready at the same time. This leads to food dieing in the window and longer waits for the guest.
• Kitchen preparation was fairly good except for a few items like Hollandaise sauce, sliced fresh home fries and portioned condiments. Our prep station was constantly putting out fires at this level of business.

Overall, the restaurant is growing daily and we are extremely pleased. We can’t rest yet (or ever in reality), but must focus on our weaknesses to improve the customer experience and our ability to turn tables. It is great to be on a wait at this early stage, but faster service will increase our sales capacity.

On Friday, January 23, 2009, we established a high sales number for a weekday. Sales reached over $1500 as weather improved in Florida, we got to seat outside. Customers enjoy our patio seating.

On Saturday, one of the busiest days of the week in the breakfast business, sales reached almost $2500. This business level tested our kitchen, the wait staff and all of the procedures we hoped we had in place. Several customers mentioned an ad we started on Friday and will continue in a weekly newspaper for 30 days. That is one of the steps in our marketing plan.

Today will be busy again, but all of us need to focus on improving small details that take time and reduce the time in front of the customer and focusing on faster, more efficient service. Servers will be briefed on our objectives to eliminate bottlenecks. Some of those include;

• Improving knowledge of the menu, so there are less questions.
• Consistency in entering orders in the POS system so the kitchen clearly understands what the guest wants and there are no mistakes.
• Location of kitchen ingredients, take out supplies and things that cause crossover paths on the line.

The switchover from breakfast to lunch was a little disorganized at a very busy time of the day. Take out orders are problematic, but should be fewer on a Sunday.

The weekends look very good for the future. Next week we begin building our weekday sales through marketing plans we are ready to implement.

Our first $10,000 week is on the horizon. Today we should easily achieve that milestone for a new restaurant in the breakfast and lunch business.

With a soft opening behind us and confidence in the kitchen and service staff, it is time to extend our marketing to our radius of influence to get new guests into the new restaurant. As we implement the plan, our focus will be on all the elements of marketing - not just advertising.

Marketing has three components:

1. Getting your message to the prospective guest.
2. Selling your product once your customer responds by coming in the restaurant.
3. Delivering the product in a manner that meets or exceeds the guest’s expectations.

The first step in creating our plan was to evaluate our demographics. Our two mile radius is heavily populated with residences and businesses along the main street. During the week we want to develop the lunch trade and take out business from local offices. Weekends will be busy with residents who eat out on Saturdays and Sundays, but may skip breakfast during the week.

A small part of the business development will include the traffic zipping by on the way to work.

Each segment of the plan is designed to meet the demographic parts listed above.

1. Getting Our Message to the Prospective Guest

The message during the first initial contact will be that a) we are open and b) we serve a country/southern style cuisine like our childhood memories. This theme will be carried in our advertising and customer communications. Below are the plans.

Steps Used to Communicate our Message:

1. Select print media to advertise for the next 30 days. We chose two local weekly newspapers that cover residences and some businesses within our 3 mile radius.
2. Send an email message to a database from our other restaurants to let those customers know of our new location. That list has over 1300 names on it, but may not include our entire radius and very few businesses. Two weeks after the first communication, a second email will highlight a “Grand Opening Weekend” or feature some of our unique menu selections for breakfast and lunch.
3. Prepare and distribute a small flyer to businesses that we have developed a relationship with during construction. Ask them to place on their counter (sample in earlier post).
4. Make personal visits to area businesses with take out menu’s and food samples on a daily basis. Our goal will be to see 5 businesses a day during the week.
5. Purchase an advertising contract with a company that supplies direct communication to every new household in the radius of the restaurant.
6. Added the new location announcement and menu to the existing website for the restaurants.

2. Selling Our Product

Our product is different than competitors in the area. We need to distinguish ourselves because we are slightly more expensive and the concept is a little more upscale.

The steps to selling our differences started with server training before we opened and continue with ongoing reminders of quality. Ingredients we use are exceptional in the breakfast business and we highlight brand names.

Steps to Selling:

1. Server training, server testing and daily reminders explain our food, ingredients and cooking methods. Bulletin board notes and Manager working with servers on weaknesses is a continuous process
2. Table POS stating the differences.
3. Menu’s reflect individual items highlighted by our original creations and special brands and/or products that our competitors can’t duplicate.
4. When possible, samples of various items are sent to tables that may have questions about our menu selections.
5. Our product is more than food. We take a slightly light-hearted approach to the atmosphere of the restaurant. We want it to be fun and funky kind of neighborhood place. The servers, décor and surroundings need to emulate our concept.

3. Delivering Our Product

The marketing process is not complete unless you deliver what you are selling. Many restaurants are experts at advertising and get many customers through their doors, but fail to deliver what they promise. The last step is the way you get customers to return.

Guests become loyal repeat customers one at a time. That means every facet of the delivery process must achieve the overall goal of meeting or exceeding the customer’s expectations. To accomplish the goal;

Steps to Delivering Our Product to Meet the Guest’s Expectations;

1. When the guest walks in the door, they must be greeted by a cheerful staff and a bright dining room with other satisfied guests.
2. The guest must be sat and offered a beverage and menu immediately.
3. Servers must have the knowledge and confidence to explain each menu item, the preparation and ingredients.
4. Little time is spent waiting between server contacts from beverage service to ordering.
5. Food is prepared in a reasonable amount of time and delivered hot and fresh.
6. Each plate must be neat, garnished properly and colorful.
7. Each order is checked as it leaves the kitchen and the server must check the order before delivery to insure accuracy.
8. After delivery of the guest’s order, the server must re-visit the table within two minutes to see if there are condiments or other needs the guest may have.
9. A Manager should visit each table to inquire about their satisfaction.
10. Checks are always in the server’s possession and ready to be delivered to the guest as soon as they seem ready. Tables are never left for the customer to stare at dirty plates.

If for ANY reason a guest appears to be unsatisfied, a Manager must visit the table and see what is necessary to turn a bad experience to a good experience.

Plan Summary

Will the steps we have chosen to take in the initial weeks be enough? Only time can answer that question. Certainly the plan must be managed, modified and expanded as we look for measurable results in the coming days and weeks. The key, for now, is execution. A daily recap of sales, glitches and customer comments will keep us focused.

The entire staff must be involved to make this Marketing Plan a success. Prospective customers become loyal guests one at a time. If we can give each customer the experience they bargained for when they walked in the door, we can win our share of the breakfast and lunch dining crowd in our radius of potential guests.

Sunday sales for the restaurant were $2200. That is two busy days in a row without any kitchen glitches that increase ticket times and the customer’s wait. After opening the restaurant nine days ago, some of our early thoughts about the type of business and peak times are in question. It is a little early to change the way we schedule staff, prepare food and anticipate peak periods, but we had:

• assumed we would have an earlier crowd which hasn’t materialized.
• discovered that lunch hour seems to peak around 1 PM as opposed to the noon crowd we expected.
• so far, the average age of our clientele seems to be higher than projected.
• popular dishes are emerging differently than visualized.

There are always surprises when opening a new restaurant of any type. The key is adjusting to the demographic, rather than the customers adjusting to your restaurant.

Our marketing plan will be placed into effect now that we have our confidence with staff and procedures increasing. More on marketing the new restaurant in the next post.

When you open a new restaurant with a relatively soft opening, you hope sales grow through word of mouth. This is the strongest form of marketing you can do. If your product and value is acceptable to the customer, plus you meet service expectations, increasing sales will be the reward.

As I indicated in the previous post, the weekend would tell the story if our message was spreading throghout the community. On Saturday we reached a new plateau with $2000 in sales, despite the season’s coldest weather and no seating outside. Happy we are, but the work isn’t done.

As sales increase, both good and problematic things occur. The good outweighs the bad in our case. Here is a list of things we will continue to work on:

• At several points during the day, we were on a wait. We have to subtlely find ways to turn tables a little quicker. Things like pre-bussing, slower coffee refills after guest has finished eating and quicker table setup will help.
• Notably the new servers are having a few problems ringing correct descriptions of the food they want. Better menu knowledge and consistent input into the kitchen will help ticket times.
• Any restaurant strives for consistency. Servers need more direction on the items they prepare at their station. Salads, topping waffles and plate garnish was inconsistent.

The good part of the day was the kitchen’s ability to meet reasonable ticket times, even at the peak of business. While we have potentially another 25 seats outside during pleasant weather, it appears we have the capacity in the kitchen. Another busy day will confirm that.

Another positive was relatively few problems with any returned food, customer complaints or server errors. That means training and diligence in policing each ticket is paying dividends.

As business increases, so does the need for inventory. We have been trying to keep our Inventory Form up to date as product came in the door. The link above shows an Excel spreadsheet that is color coded based on various items we want to note. One color may be for a particular supplier. Price highlighting means a date when last price confirmation was made. Your form can be modified according to your needs.

Your ability to maintain inventory levels is important because:

• Your restaurant cannot  be out of menu items on a regular basis to avoid customer disappointment.
• Over ordering can lead to waste and spoilage.
• Ordering the proper quantities negotiated with suppliers will keep costs in check. Make sure your supplier has a copy of your inventory sheet for their records when placing an order. It will simplify the process and reduce order mistakes.

Overall, the first eight days of operations have been very gratifying and helps to alleviate some of the reservations we have had about opening a restaurant in this economy. We still have a lot of work to do, but we feel we are on the right track.

While our marketing plan is going into effect, our focus has been to reorganize on a daily basis. By that I mean we look at everything we do and ask if there is a better more efficient way to do each task. Sales are at a pace of $1000 per day. Not where we want to be, but with only word of mouth marketing in effect right now, we have to be happy. This coming weekend, Saturday and Sunday, the biggest two sales days for a breakfast lunch operation will tell the story about our fledgling initial marketing.

Today we are planning to reorganize the kitchen line to make each position more efficient and transfer the load from one person to another for efficiency. Breakfast food orders flow good. Lunch tickets place too much burden on the fry station and expo. We will change that work flow.

The server station needs to be reorganized. There are too many steps to get salads and other items in the station to the customer. We will examine each step to see where we can reduce a few seconds in each step. This allows the server to spend more time on the floor and less time away from the guests.

Opening a new restaurant cannot successfully happen without a plan. It can be elaborate or on the back of an old envelope, but you must keep your goals in perspective. There are many ways to open. You can do an advertising blitz and open after long testing and confidence that you have the major issues in meeting your guests expectations procedurally complete.

In the case of Maggie Mae’s on the Bluffs, we chose a very soft approach. Even after we selected a target opening date, it was kept very quiet. We didn’t even tell servers and staff until the day before. The process was:

1. Upon getting our license to operate, we ordered food and supplies. Training for kitchen staff and servers began about four days prior to opening.
2. Two days prior to opening we asked about 15 friends and relatives to come in between 9 AM and 11 AM to order from our menu. The menu was a paper format in a draft form. We wanted the flexibility to change before the official opening. The pre-opening seating pointed out additional needs in inventory, smallwares and training.
3. One day before opening we again invited friends and relatives for a pre-opening run through. The complimentary meals required them to give us honest feedback on every aspect of their experience. This time we told the approximately 25 guests they could come between 9 AM and 11 AM for breakfast or 11 AM and 1 PM for lunch. Experience from the previous day allowed us to have a smooth service at both breakfast and lunch. A meeting at the end of each day allowed staff to discuss weak areas and make corrections. The next day we would flip on the sign and serve during our normal hours of 6:30 AM to 2:30 PM. There was no publicity, advance advertising or anything but word of mouth.
4. On Friday, January 9th, we flipped the sign on and served whoever came in. By the end of the day we discovered many people had been following our construction progress and were waiting to test our new restaurant. The soft opening approach lead to $550 in sales. Enough to gain more confidence in the planning, training and changes we had made to open.

Until today, which will be our fifth day of operations, we have done no advertising, no news releases, announcements or other form of marketing except word of mouth as it spread through the community.

Confident of our growing customer service strength, the second phase of our plan will go into effect. We will:

• Send an email out to 1300 contacts from our email database from the other two restaurants.
• Take flyers to local businesses we have used and encouraged us throughout the construction (seen in the graphic on this post). Hopefully they will place on their counters.
• Start the process of visiting five businesses per day with take out menus and a sample of some item from our menu.
• An ad will be place in two local community papers for publication next week.
• Above all, ask satisfied customers to tell other people about us. Word of mouth is still the strongest form of marketing.

All of the events above will be strung out over the next week. We still don’t want a blast of business that would detract from the food, service or guest experience until staff is fully prepared to handle a volume of business. We may think we are ready for anything now, but we must know we are!

The opening of Maggie Mae’s on the Bluffs in Belleair Bluffs, Florida has been a six month rocky road. The many posts on this blog have detailed the problems, hurdles and emotions of trying to open a new restaurant. The last thirty days have been intense in terms of time committed and concentration of resources to accomplish flipping on the ”OPEN” sign.

The new facility officially opened on Friday, January 9, 2009, more than six weeks beyond our projected opening date when the project was started.

Below is a day by day recap of the first four days of operations.

• Day One —  We turned on the open sign at 6:30 AM on a Friday. Our first customer didn’t come through the door until about 7:30 AM. It was a long hour with the entire staff waiting and wondering if we were ready and if anyone would come in at all. By the end of the day we had managed $550 in sales. However, it was clear the new servers had to do more training on the menu and the kitchen needed some procedural changes. The breakfast and lunch business parts were about equal in the number of customers.
• Day Two — Saturdays are the second biggest day of the week for breakfast guests. We had spent the overnight hours adding some enhancements to the kitchen such as shelves, moving the order printer and getting some utensils that escaped our initial inventory. The photo in this post is the kitchen line. Barely shown is a double oven followed bt the stove and salamander combination, the griddle and fryer. You can see a portion of the server window in the middle right of the photo. Second day sales were a respectful $850. The procedural and kitchen modifications clearly helped food delivery. However, the servers were still not trained well enough on the menu despite our request to study it closely overnight.
• Day Three — As usual, Sundays start lowly. People get up later and eat breakfast as a treat they may not enjoy during the week. Overnight we had compiled a new server menu test to force familiarity with the menu. The questions were based on what had been experienced in the last couple of days. The servers each took the open menu test before starting their shift. By the time customers finally showed up, the apprehension about the day was shown by servers, staff and management. I had been confident that we would have a good day, but the minutes between orders were starting to wear on me. Watch what you wish for! When guests started coming in after 8:30 they didn’t stop. At one point we filled every seat and ended the day with good sales of $1650. The kitchen, servers and procedures went extremely well. Ticket times were good with only minor anticipated problems.
• Day Four — A Monday. This day would tell the story. If our word of mouth opening had been successful, we would have a decent day. Of course, we didn’t expect a repeat of Sunday, but customers did respond and we ended the day with $900 in sales. A a business day as opposed to a weekend, we had a good business lunch crowd that exceeded breakfast.

Overall, we are extremely pleased with the results of our very “soft” opening. Part Two of this post will recap how we got this far from a marketing perspective. Marketing for a new restaurant is always a challenge, but our plan was in place and working so far.

It is difficult to believe I haven’t written a post in over a week. The week is like a whirlwind that never stopped. To detail all that has occurred will take several posts to explain the details and activities that lead up to the opening day photo on the right.

Besides the holiday immediately after receiving our restaurant license, many of the suppliers were not delivering on their scheduled days. To complicate matters even further, both sister restaurants had about tens days of exceptionally high sales.

Fortunately we were prepared to hire and train employees, test menu items and get the doors open.

A day by day log and activity detail will be posted soon. Right now our exclusive goals are to work out the “kinks” that always creep up on you on opening day.

We are officially a statistic. A licensed restaurant in Florida. After 5 grueling months of construction, delays, inspections and all the emotions that went with the daily hurdles, we received our Certificate of Occupancy from Pinellas county on Tuesday, December 30, 2008 and our state restaurant inspection and licensing on Wednesday, December 31, 2008.

Now the real work starts! Our tasks in the next few days before the doors open include:

• Hiring and training staff.
• Finalizing menu.
• Ordering smallwares, food and dry goods.
• Testing recipes.
• Implementing our marketing plan (some of which started weeks ago).
• Developing procedures, recipe manual, POS materials and forms.

There is nothing more difficult than marketing your operation and putting butts in seats. New restaurants are a dime a dozen with an average of over 55,000 started each year in the United States. Unfortunately, an equal number close each year. While the many details listed above are necessary to open the new restaurant, the priority is to make certain we start communicating our message to potential guests.

Choosing suppliers, pricing menu items and organizing storage and focusing on each step to create maximum efficiency for staff will reduce waiting time for customers and increase table turns on a busy day.

Each plate of food must go through the line in an orderly progressive manner without retracing steps as menu items are produced. The end of the process is the server window where food is ready for delivery.