It’s time to return to basics and focus on what works for long-term sustainable sales growth, which is better operations. Nobody wants to hear better operations because they are either delusional about the current state of their operations, or they don’t want to put in the hard work and discipline of focusing on running better operations.
Nothing that you will do, no new system (delivery or take out), no new technology like a better POS or better website, is going to do more for your business than having delicious food, in clean well-managed restaurants, with great customer service. NOTHING!!!! If you didn’t want to be an operator and focus on being excellent, then this isn’t the business for you.
I was the dining room floor manager of a busy restaurant in 2001 we added $80,000 a week to revenue over a ten month period. That is right 80K a week, not a month, and we didn’t spend an extra dollar in marketing nor did we add any new sales channel. You know how we did it:
- Moved the servers from 5 tables to 4 table stations- which all the servers hated at first.
- We started using checklists to ensure that we were ready in the FOH for each shift, this included pre-shift meetings with the team.
- We actively managed the dining room each shift focusing on service and turning tables.
You see we had latent demand that before we focused on operations we weren’t getting because our service was slow and quite frankly not that good. When we made the sections smaller, brought in more servers, invested in training those servers on the menu, customer service, upselling, etc. They had more time to do a better job servicing guests. When we focused each shift on making sure that the restaurant and the team were ready, it was easier to wow guests. I’m not telling you anything that you don’t already know; better operations, focusing on the little things, and providing an excellent experience is your best marketing initiative and the quickest way to grow sales.
Here is some information that provides more evidence to the better operations theory:
- A 1-star increase on Yelp leads to 5 to 9% revenue increase. Entrepreneur.com
- One negative review on Yelp can cost you, 30 customers. Entrepreneur.com
- An A grade in your window, for those restaurants that have to contend with health inspection letter grades, can lead to a 5.7% bump in sales. (Based on California Sales Tax Data for LA County)
- Only 16% of Yelp reviews are fraudulent so don’t assume that every bad review you have is just a competitor out to get you – respond quickly and appropriately. Entrepreneur.com
- According to a recent study by AlixPartners, a global business consulting firm, “28 percent of diners surveyed say they would never eat at a chain affected by a food-safety outbreak, regardless of the geographic location of the outbreak.” Tennessean
- Olive Garden same-store sales are up 6.8%. This is what their CEO had to say:
“We’re just running better restaurants today,” Lee said during the company’s earnings call Tuesday. “I don’t think we should discount the importance of ensuring we’re properly staffed, our teams are properly motivated, simplifying the operation, reducing the size of the menu, processes and procedures. NRN
“One of the things we’re focused on now is trying to keep things simple,” Lee said. “Simple is hard. Doing simple things every day is really hard. That’s what’s given us the biggest lift at Olive Garden. We’re not relying on promotional activity to drive business.” NRN
Look at your experience in restaurants. The restaurants that serve delicious food with great service that are clean and well managed on average are much busier than their competitors who fall down in any of those areas.
There are so many outside factors affecting your restaurants every day, from minimum wages, weather, street construction, commodity prices, competition, shifting dining trends, government regulations, cook shortages, and social media to name few. It can feel overwhelming. How do you manage all of those outside factors and run your restaurant? The answer is to control what you can control and react as best you can to outside forces.
If you know that you aren’t doing all that you could be doing in your business to run better operations, make a plan and start focusing 100% on your most critical issues and check them off the list one at a time.
The quickest and most effective way to run better operations is also one of the easiest systems to implement: checklists with follow-up. Checklists focus your managers on those most important items each shift that have to be done to operate at your best. They are self-documenting and easy to use. By executing checklists every day in the same order, they build a routine and drive consistency shift to shift. Checklists work, we asked 107 restaurant managers and owners recently if they thought that managing by checklist would help them run safer and better operating restaurants, and 107 of them said yes.
Most restaurants today have checklists in place, but they are conducted on paper, paper checklists make it impossible to hold your team accountable. We recently conducted a survey and 94% of restaurant owners, and managers believed that their teams weren’t completing their checklists accurately. 94% of paper checklists are being pencil whipped and therefore the restaurant isn’t getting any of the benefits of safer and better operations because people aren’t conducting the checklist.
The key to getting the benefits of your checklists is to use a system like OpsAnalitica that can hold your managers accountable and make pencil whipping a thing of the past. By simply moving your checklists to a tablet we can track start and end times, duration, and make the data available on any device from anywhere. You will always know if your team is doing what they are supposed to be doing.
Better operations can increase your sales anywhere from 5 to 9%. Checklists can play a major part in running better operations on a shift basis. It is consistent daily execution that will yield the highest returns and generate those positive reviews and word of mouth recommendations that will grow sales organically and in a sustainable manner.
I invite you to check out OpsAnalitica by clicking here. To see a list of the checklists that every restaurant should be doing, I invite you to check out this other blog post.