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

One of the most difficult tasks as a restaurant owner is to keep managers and senior staff focused on problems and potential problems. Many supervisory personnel tend to treat the reporting of inadequate service, inconsistent food or other problems like a shooting gallery at the state fair. As the problem balloon is raised, shoot it down by looking at the source of the report (the balloon), rather than the message inside.

It’s common to hear a server and manager having discussions that go like this;

Example One

Server to Manager: “Mrs. Smith at table 22 says the soup is too salty.”

Manager to Server: “She complains about everything. I had to comp a tuna sandwich last week.”

Two things happen here. Mrs. Smith gets ignored. The complaint is disregarded and the server is discouraged from reporting future complaints from regular guests. The only issue really - is the soup too salty or not? Mrs. Smith may be a frequent customer who knows when the soup is properly prepared. She may be a habitual complainer, who still visits everyday, but she cannot be treated like a fairy tale creation who cried wolf too often.

Example Two

Owner/General Manager to Supervisor/Manager: “There is a note in the operations log that Joe was late again. It also says that Joe clocked in and immediately ordered his shift meal before checking with his supervisor.”

Manager Response to Owner: “That note was written by Nancy. Nancy was having problems keeping up with her own tables to be worried about someone else. Conflicts like Joe and Nancy keep creating issues.”

The conversation turns to Nancy when the real problem is a matter of fact. It is a simple matter to determine if Joe did clock in late and if he went on to eat a shift meal during a busy service time before taking tables.

If Nancy is a problem, then deal with that as a separate issue, but reporting a lag in customer service is part of her responsibility if she cares about the restaurant and guests. No one really likes to hear a complaint, but it’s part of the business. How quick you respond and reinforcing the necessity to keep communication lines open between guests and management and management and servers is imperative to improving the dining experience at your restaurant.

A “shoot the messenger” management style can extend beyond the customer service arena. A manager who doesn’t listen to kitchen staff may be in for some costly future maintenance problems. A troublesome complainer in the kitchen cannot be ignored when reporting an issue with a piece of equipment. Employees who complain about workloads at various times of the day can’t be ignored if there is a real scheduling problem that affects service.

Managers have many responsibilities, but none are more important than solving problems. The solution can’t be taking aim on the person who points out the problem.

The majority of money invested in the stock market looks at the long term rather than overnight profits. Yes, there are day traders that try to bet on trends that impact some stocks on a short term basis. They get in and out quickly, but the big investors, mutual funds, pension funds, institutional investors and most wealth accumulators look at years and months rather than days or weeks.

Restaurant marketing is an investment that can return short term returns and long term results. You have to choose what motivators you use according to the results you want to achieve. There are extremes that are common in both short and long term investments. For instance, if you look at Denny’s breakfast giveaway program in the first part of this year, they gave away their food and had lines around their operations waiting for a free meal. Traffic was driven to their stores, but long term results haven’t stopped their same store sales from declining.

On the other extreme,  long term marketing programs take months and/or years to effectively get results. An example of a long term strategy may be email marketing. As your email list grows, so do the customer responses to simple programs. If you offer a birthday dinner as a motivator, your guest will bring in his birthday party of four or more people to celebrate, but the real return takes constant list building that creates loyalty to your brand.

Somewhere in between the long growth approach and the quick freebie schemes are marketing programs like community involvement, direct mail, special events and social marketing through Internet sites.

When developing your marketing plan for a new restaurant, you should try to look at all the options, but remember there is a price to pay in real dollars and time to implement many strategies. Restaurateurs generally wear so many management and time eating hats that time becomes as precious as any other asset.

In the case of our new restaurant, we can see our long term strategies just now beginning to pay big rewards as the industry has struggled in this recession. Couponing and discounting has had a very low priority for us. Building quality and customer service along with guest loyalty has been our restaurant marketing program from our January opening. We are on target to meet our goal of $650,000 in sales by year end.