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

OK, this is a role reversal. I am the one asking questions about the value of Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and a half dozen other similar sites. For an independent casual to upscale restaurant owner, how can you find or justify the hours it takes to post, monitor, respond and keep fresh your content?

I can think of a dozen better, less time consuming and less risky ways to market a restaurant than any of the viral options being hyped by the experts (self pronounced experts!). Here are a few questions for those who are embarking on this time eating media frenzy with scary downsides;

• Wouldn’t your hours be better spent training staff to improve service? This will bring back more customers.
• Do you have a big email marketing structure in place? Are you building a no risk email program with few man hours required?
• Are you involved with the community and the other groups where your customers will see you?
• Do you have a perfect menu, exceptional creative food and spotless restaurant? This is what brings guests back on a long term basis.
• Have you done a poll of your guests to see exactly what percentage you can reach on these social websites and how many you need to monitor?

Prior to the recession, restaurant guests seemed to be a happy lot. They ventured into just about any food purveyor that opened their doors partly for exploration, curiosity and culinary adventure. In the last two years wallets closed up like the strings on a beggar’s purse. Consumers with less discretionary dollars to spend wanted value and “comfort”.

If you look the word comfort up in the dictionary, the common definitions include to “soothe, console, reassure, support, encourage and make physically comfortable”. That seems to sum up the average diner who walks into a full service restaurant in today’s new world. The term comfort has to be your goal for the purposes of restaurant marketing.

In the restaurant world we have bantered around the word comfort primarily to describe a particular type of food that made people feel good or brought back memories from earlier days. In fact most restaurants who changed their menu philosophy in the last year or two will tell you that “comfort” foods sell better than they ever have. That is one blessing this financial hurricane has made clear - you can be creative using lower center of the plate proteins and give the guest what they want at the same time.

However, comfort must extend beyond the plate to get more frequent visits from your guests and keep the buzz about your restaurant going. To extend your comfort factor consider these tips;

• Are you offering a comfortable atmosphere that matches your concept and guest’s expectations? Is your restaurant too loud, too quiet, too bright, too dark, too fancy, too casual?
• Physical comforts are just as important. Are your chairs too hard, too high, too soft? Is the temperature too cold, too warm? Do you smell of pleasant food odors or stale carpets and bleach cleaned floors?
• There is comforting service standards to consider. The old days of hard hitting up-selling professed by out of work “consultants” is over. You and your servers need to be less formal and more personal with the guest. Names are important. Smiles are like gold. Haste is unforgiving. Manager visits are expected. Greetings on entering and exiting should be part of every staff member’s vocabulary. The days of the pompous waiter in the tux are over.
• Value IS comfort. People want to know they are making good buying decisions. That applies to buying a car or a meal. Highlight the things that make the guest’s experience at your restaurant a value. Can you rattle those things off right now - this minute? Is it portions, prices, entertainment, friendly servers, exceptional chef, fun, easy to park and enter, quick service? Embed those comforting aspects of your restaurant in your server’s mind, your POS materials and advertising as part of your marketing plan.

Sunday, February 2, 2009 brought us another record day with revenues exceeding $3000. This week we have focused on:

• More efficiency in the kitchen. We have added shelving in critical locations, changed duties for different positions and moved ready to cook items in easier locations. The wole goal is to reduce time to produce various menu items, even if it is just a few seconds.
• Eliminated crossover paths for any reason on the line.
• Spent a considerable aount of time working with servers individually and as a group to reduce entry errors and more consistency in adding and removing components to menu items.
• Will have a soup and sandwich daily special that will reduce kitchen time to produce orders.

So far the changes have improved ticket times and less confusion in the preparation. All of these procedural matters are tested on weekdays when volume and staff is less. The weekend will tell be the real test of the changes. Getting tables in and out is still the goal.

Opening a new restaurant is one way to become creative with policies and procedures. Occasionally you stumble upon ideas that may help the other restaurants to improve their service and production. One such change will be the carification of modifiers that allow a server to furhter explain the customer’s wish on a ticket. When the order is sent to the ktchen, the extra detail eliminates mistakes and improves the delivery system to the guest.

It’s 5 AM on February first. A Sunday - Super Bowl Sunday, in fact. Yesterday we set a new restaurant sales record for a single day since opening of almost $2800. That’s great news, but getting a handle on how our sales each day keep growing is just as important for continued growth.

Based on initial customer conversations, the vast majority of our guests are coming for the first time as the result of referrals to the restaurant. Someone visits us and tells their neighbors, family and friends. You can’t buy advertising, run promotions or offer coupons that would be this productive.

Studies have shown that people react sooner and more often to a word of mouth recommendation of a restaurant than any other single motivating factor. Customers take the assurances of someone they know before relying on the hype in an ad, coupon or promotional device, no matter how attractive.

The fact that we are getting personal recommendations tells me several things:

• Our message of quality food is getting out. Our prices are 20% higher than our competitors, but we sell our ingredients and quality to each guest.
• We must be meeting and/or exceeding what the customer expected when they walked in the door.
• Our consistency must be better than I expected in these early stages (three weeks).
• Our location is as good as we expected with plenty of parking, road exposure and good ingress and egress.

While pleased with the initial sales and response, we still have a lot of work to do. Our break-even number is about $1500 per day and we need $10,500 per week (without owner compensation). This will be our second straight week of hitting those numbers, but other costs are involved as we buy more smallwares, small equipment and other items to support the growth. Break-even is great, but profits are why we are ultimately in business.

On the very positive side, we are meeting our sales goals. On the other hand, we clearly need to work on staff training, kitchen routines and turning tables. On the proverbial ten scale, we are an eight and very pleased.