Running a restaurant isn’t easy. It starts with passion: a love for cuisine, a desire to serve delicious meals in a particular environment, or a wish to make customers happy. But it’s only the beginning. When you open the doors, you enter a constant, demanding environment with a million little issues. And it never ends.
Many restaurants don’t suffer because they aren’t working hard. They suffer because they don’t have a plan or system.
On a typical day, a hundred little problems may arise. Staff are not where they are supposed to be. Supplies run low and need to be replenished. Service slows down during a lull. Complaints from the customers. These may not be unusual or unusual problems, individually. They just seem so when you put them together in a restaurant.
The result is that a lot of managers are just “putting out fires” all day. It is a very reactive way to run a restaurant, but this is the most common scenario. That might work in the short term. It just won’t let you progress. You’ll always have the same issues and, sooner or later, you’ll realize that today is like yesterday and tomorrow will be like today.
The secret isn’t to work more or harder, but rather to work differently and with more structure. That’s where we get to the main issues that we see:
- You have too few systems or processes. When you don’t know how to do a certain task, it depends on the employee. This can vary from person to person which causes unevenness and inconsistency which can lead to long wait times. When you have a plan in place, you provide consistency and you help the restaurant run efficiently.
- You have no visibility as to what’s happening. When you’re working and dealing with everything in the moment, you can spend less time analyzing things and determining if there’s a bigger issue. If you don’t know what you’re up against, you can’t get it solved and things like waste or poor efficiency continue on, only to be noticed later down the line. In a restaurant, the only way to know that the overall systems are functioning is by stepping back and looking at what’s going on.
- You don’t have staff organized. Just because people work with you doesn’t mean they’re going to know what to do. They might do things differently. It’s not that they don’t try or want to, it just means there is no structure there to tell them how to be efficient or work together as a team.
- You have to fight against costs. It is one of the toughest parts of running a restaurant. When you don’t have it handled, things will be expensive. There will always be a reason to not worry about this issue, but when you have a system in place, you will be able to make decisions that are actually beneficial because you will be informed.
- You aren’t producing consistency. Some days will be okay while others will struggle because of what goes on. But you can’t do that and still run a good operation. But having a system and structure in place will give you more consistency and stability which creates trust with customers and gives you a better starting point to achieve your goals.
- You think that you need to fix everything all at once. No. You don’t. That’s not how these things work. What works best is a series of small changes done together and over time. A new process or two. Improved communication between employees. Better schedules that are actually based on reality. Better analysis on a day to day basis.
It’s all very easy. And very achievable. The end result isn’t hard to picture. Fewer issues. Improved customer service. More efficiency between team members and better management of your expenses. Now, things are still not easy. But at least, the issues don’t have the same power.
Successful restaurants aren’t without challenges, but when the challenges are smaller, they don’t have the same power. If there are no plans in place, it just feels like you’re always dealing with a mess. And that’s what makes restaurants fail.