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.

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.

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.

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.

Sometimes while building a new restaurant, we tend to get ahead of ourselves and make mistakes without thinking about details. Below are a few I made in the past or almost made:

• Ordering outdoor tables with no umbrella holes in sunny areas.
• Tile that was not rough enough to prevent slips and falls.
• Buying equipment to fit under counters that was higher than the counters.
• Ordering doors that were 1/2 inch bigger than the opening.
• Mixing paints, stains and finishes that are not compatible. Causes immediate peeling.
• Forgetting there are two different “standard” counter heights. Order high chairs that are the wrong heights.

The point here for the entrepreneurs starting their new restaurant is to pay attention to details, small print and exact dimensions. Small mistakes can cost a lot of dollars to correct. For instance, the mixing of finishes may cost many hours refinishing surfaces. The half inch on kitchen doors could require rebuiding the framework to install the doors. Decorative restaurant tile may look nice, but one slippery floor could cost thousands in hospital bills.

After spending the last few days trying to figure out the county’s interpretation of the referenced building codes in their 44 changes they wanted on the building plans, we narrowed the problems down to three. The rest we made changes, corrections and additions we think will satisfy an over zealous plan reviewer.

Two of the three problem areas deal with plumbing issues. We need clarification on those. The third is a matter of interpretation dealing with the double swing kitchen doors we had drawn in as 48″. The county says we need 30 inches on each side for a total opening of 60 inches. The code does not appear to say that.

The architect met with the plan reviewer. We must meet again with the plumbing contractor to solve the plumbing issue and accept the reviewer’s interpretation of the door issue to prevent further delays. The plans need re-submitted in a day or two to get final approval.

In the interim we are finding ways to cut time when we get into full construction. The electrician continues to do a few things that deal with existing wiring and we have decided to tile the floors now to avoid delays.

Existing walls are being sanded and smoothed for coating, we found all shelving for the walk-in cooler/freezer, found potential outdoor furniture for seating at a much lower rate and have begun accumulating smallwares when seen in restaurant supply ware houses at reduced prices.

The other restaurants are not being ignored. Sales are holding up well under the economic citcumstances and restaurant food prices seemed to have leveled off. In fact, some items like dairy and egg products have come back down from their highs in July. Keeping watch on pricing impacts the new restaurant from the perspective of pricing and final determination of menu items.