Please enjoy this blog from our great friends at Ameego, the restaurant scheduling and labor management platform. Aside from temperature compliance and food comps, what are some of the biggest ongoing challenges for restaurant managers? If your mind envisioned next month’s blank schedule calendar, the binder of handwritten time-off requests or the stack of month-end …
Restaurant Industry
5 Tips to Writing Better Restaurant Line Checks
Every restaurant should be doing some form of line check for each meal period. Â The reason you do line checks is to ensure that your food is safe and ready to serve to your guests. Â Line checks allow you to catch your mistakes before your guests do, which reduces food comps. Â They also allow you …
87% of Restaurants Surveyed Plan to Invest in Restaurant Tech to Improve Operations
Great blog post from eMarketer, to see the complete article click on the title – Restaurants Invest in Technology to Improve Overall Efficiency.  “Most US restaurant IT decision-makers plan to invest in technology to improve operational efficiency.”  87% said that Operational Efficiency was important compared to 55% they were going to make investments in guest engagement/loyalty. …
Diagnosing Falling or Stagnant Sales
Too many restaurant operators mistake marketing problems for operations problems. They look at falling or stagnant sales, and they think I’ve got to increase marketing spend to get my sales back up. How do you know if your falling sales are a marketing problem or operations problem? Here are a couple of questions you can …
The Only Way to Sustainably Grow Your Restaurant’s Sales is through Better Operations
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. …
The Value of Operations Data at Your Fingertips
Operations data are the data points that are generated every meal period in a restaurant that directly affect sales and profitability.  Let’s break it down: Marketing activities remind your customers that you still exist. People come in to eat at your restaurant. You serve them food (operations) They pay and leave either happy or sad, …
Maybe You Shouldn’t Do Checklists
How could paper checklists be bad? Â Paper checklists are bad because people pencil whip them or lie on them. Â We recently conducted a survey of over 100 restaurant owners and managers. Â 94% of respondents believed that their teams weren’t completing their checklists accurately. Which raises the question; why would a sane person have their team …
The Restaurant Industry’s Dirty Little Secret
The dirty little secret in the restaurant industry is that we know a lot of our restaurant safety-documentation is not completed accurately. Every day in restaurants across the country, restaurant managers are supposed to complete temperature logs, line checks, and other safety checks to ensure that they are operating safely. A lot of those logs …
Don’t Neglect the FOH
I’m sure you have experienced this a million times…. I’m going to share a story from my days at bartending in a very busy mountain town. Spring break was one of the busiest times of the year. Two-hour waits for dinner and up to an hour wait for lunch. No real break between the shifts …
What does the Ford Pinto have to do with restaurants?
Do you remember the Ford Pinto Case from the 70’s? Â Ford Pintos had a flaw in their design, and if they were hit in a rear-end collision at a speed greater than 20 mph the fuel tank could rupture, and there could be a fire. Â Unfortunately, several people were killed in accidents because of this …