You made your dream come true. You own your own restaurant. Congratulations! It is a lot of work though and if you want your restaurant to be a success you need to make sure the daily operations of your restaurant are working at optimum levels.

Here are some tips for streamlining day to day at your restaurant:

Always Focus on Efficiency

In any business, time is money so being as efficient as possible is crucial. From the beginning, keep looking for tools and strategies which make the daily operations easier but without compromising the quality of the food or service. It could be as simple as rearranging workspace in the kitchen to make prepping dishes more efficient to adopting a high tech program that keeps track of inventory better so you never again run out of key ingredients in the middle of the dinner rush.

Hire the Right Staff

You have a mission and a vision that is ingrained in your heart and mind, but is your staff as passionate about the restaurant as well? Be careful in the hiring and training of your staff to make sure that your team is as dedicated as you are to make the restaurant success.

Make Time for Planning and Analyzing

The daily running of the restaurant can easily suck up all the hours of the day, but you shouldn’t let it. If you have efficient processes in place and hard-working employees on your team, you will be able set aside the needed time for the planning and analyzing needed for the overall picture of your business. You need to be able to step back from your daily to-do list and spend time on helping your restaurant improve and grow.

Also make sure you are collecting important data points that can help you analyze what is working and what is not. You should always be taking the pulse of your restaurant.

Create Recipe Costing Cards

Wasting money on extra supplies you really don’t need or losing money because you are not charging enough for dishes to balance out the cost of ingredients can really put your restaurant in a rocky financial situation. To ensure that this does not happen, create recipe costing cards that lay out the cost of every item on your menu and how much food you should order. Include on these cards also what your ideal pricing would be for each dish.

The Customer Is Always Right

You probably hear this all the time, but it is very true. In order to develop strong relationships with your customers to keep them coming back time and time again, you need to make them feel like their thoughts and feelings matter. Do the best you can, within reason of course, to make things right with your customer.

Constantly Work on Yourself

Don’t forget that it is not just your policies and infrastructure and employees that impact the operations of your restaurant. You do as well. Everything you do affects all parts of the restaurant including the food and employee behavior. Always keep working on being a better manager. You are on the right path when you realize that there will always be something new to learn.

Here are some things to consider as you fine tune your managerial skills:

• Always present a positive attitude. If you are running around the restaurant stressed and angry, it is not only going to affect your employees it will also rub off your customers as well. While there were always be bad days where nothing seems to go right, you need to remember your passion for providing your customers the ultimate dining experience.
• Keep open communication with all your staff. No one likes to be left out in the dark when big things are happening in their place of work. From day one make sure you have established certain channels of communication for all your staff. Regular staff meetings are a must also because it is not just the big changes that need to be shared. Everyone should be on the same page every day.
• Show consistency in all your dealings. Your employees can’t be at their best if they don’t know how you are going to react to them day to day? If you are a yeller, your employees will always be on edge. Be consistent in how you treat your employees and in the guidelines and policies that you want them to follow. Eliminating all the guesswork will make it easier for everyone to get their job done.
• Don’t be afraid to innovate. Innovation is the key to any business. You must be willing to try new things, not only new dishes but new management and marketing strategies. In today’s technologically savvy world, new software and new technology is constantly coming out. Make sure you keep up-to-date on anything that could be useful to your business like Sling, which is a scheduling software for employees.
• Delegate, Delegate, Delegate! Running a restaurant is a 24/7 operation and you can do it all. If you try, you will only drag yourself down until you collapse. If you hire skilled employees who share your mission then you can feel confident in giving them important duties and responsibilities.
• Don’t just issue orders, Be a team player. Employees appreciate when their bosses roll up their sleeves and work alongside their team. Modeling the behavior you want yourself is so much more powerful than just laying down rules in a staff meeting.
• Admit when you make a mistake. We are all human and make mistakes. No matter how you prepare, at some point you will make mistake. How you handle it is the most important thing. Your staff and business partners will respect you more if you can admit the error, apologize for it, and be clear on how you are going to handle it.

The bottom line is that the restaurant industry is constantly evolving on a daily basis so you need to be constantly evolving too. Always have your hand on the pulse of what your customers are looking for and what is new in the industry so you can always make smart choices in the running of your restaurant.

Want to learn more about streamlining the day to day of your restaurant, contact MBB Management today.