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

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.