How to manage a restaurant with less stress and higher efficiency
People are at the heart of the restaurant business. And while the customers in your dining room are the source of your cash flow, it’s the team members that are your true lifeblood. Without a motivated kitchen staff, food won’t leave the back of house with the quality you strive for. Without an empowered front of house staff, even the best food can’t make up for poor service. Successful restaurants create a positive working environment for their team members, which translates into a better customer experience. Effective restaurant management is key to achieve this.
At the same time, balancing customer experience and profitability in the restaurant business is no easy task. For restaurant managers, orchestrating front of house and back of house operations is just the tip of the iceberg in how to manage a restaurant. Effective restaurant management is also handling everything behind the scenes. Inventory management and pricing, profitability and cash flow, staffing and work schedules, and even posting to social media all add up to be a time-consuming but necessary list of responsibilities entrusted to managers by restaurant owners.
Here are some restaurant management tips to empower your team members, elevate your guest experience, and boost your bottom line.
Listen to your staff
Talking to your team members frequently and consistently is critical to maintain a positive culture among your staff. A whopping 96% of service-level staff feels that improving communication is key to retention in the restaurant industry. Because they’re working in an environment that changes just about every day, restaurant staff need time to both understand the ever-evolving ways to improve in their jobs and voice their suggestions for how the restaurant can be run better.
Effective restaurant management requires taking time to hear out your team members, both as a team and individually. In the restaurant business, time is also hard to come by, so forming strategies to maximize communication in short windows will boost staff morale even in the heat of service. Try the following:
- Prepare for your pre-shift: Your pre-shift meeting is a rare time when you can get the undivided attention of most, if not all, of your staff at once. Make those few minutes count by preparing an agenda beforehand. And if you can, hold a post-shift debrief to reflect on the day’s accomplishments and learnings.
- Make time for one-on-ones: This gives you the chance to speak directly with each team member. Work around their schedules, finding time when they can dedicate 5–10 minutes to open, honest conversation without getting interrupted. Let them control these conversations, speaking their minds about what needs to improve to make their job easier. Allowing staff to open up in this way will help them feel empowered in their work, and fill you in on how to improve restaurant operations.
- Keep meetings within regular shifts: This way, team members don’t have to come in early or leave late.
Provide restaurant staff with clear training
A huge part of managing a successful restaurant is onboarding new team members, as well as providing growth opportunities for everyone on staff. Clear, cohesive trainings and development programs will go a long way in getting new hires up to speed and making current team members even better, with direct bottom line results.
Creating these programs, whether you’re getting ready to open or you’ve been in business for years, is easier than you might think. Start by writing down each daily task for your restaurant, from setting up the dining room to entering orders into your point-of-sale system, and determine which staff members are responsible for each of those tasks.
Then break down each of those tasks into easy-to-follow step-by-step instructions, calling in team members to advise as needed. Once completed, you’ll have detailed instructions for every aspect of your restaurant for new hires and current staff to reference as needed. Just be sure to update them regularly.
Here are some more tips for how to manage a restaurant in terms of team member training and development:
- Create mentor programs: Pair junior and senior staff members together so the veterans can help get the new hires up to speed. This will elevate culture among staff as well as save you time.
- Develop rewards and improvement plans: These will be based on staff performance. Use one-on-one meetings to find out what motivates each person on your team and tailor a reward system to recognize positive performance. Likewise, create a plan to deliver constructive feedback and support struggling team members.
- Lead friendly upsell competitions: A bit of competition keeps things interesting, as well as increases sales and optimizes inventory management. Free meals work great here as rewards.
Track food costs and cash flow
People are the top priority in restaurant management, but of course cash flow is essential for staying in business. Accurately monitoring money coming in and going out will provide the foundation for how to manage a restaurant in the eyes of restaurant owners.
To lead a successful restaurant, you not only need to increase sales over time, but also maintain profitability. This means knowing your food costs and labor costs, and problem-solving through ways to keep these expenses under control while delivering a quality customer experience.
Keep your books organized and accurate by adhering to these best practices:
- Calculate exactly how much it costs to make each of your menu items: Using your bulk ingredient prices and recipes, determine the price per dish to the penny. Compare that cost to the menu price and volume sold according to your point-of-sale system, and adjust pricing accordingly. This art, known as menu engineering, can have a huge bottom line impact.
- Assess how quickly your kitchen staff goes through each ingredient: Inventory management will help reduce food costs due to spoilage, as well as enhance the customer experience if you find yourself frequently selling out of certain menu items.
- Use your reservation system to optimize staffing: Creating work schedules around when your dining room is most occupied is no secret, but some restaurant managers overlook data from waitlists, takeout, and other areas in deciding when to add more kitchen staff or front of house staff.
How to manage a restaurant: Get the right tools
Empowering team members, monitoring cash flow, and providing guests with the customer experience they’re looking for is time-consuming even for the most experienced restaurant manager. With Yelp for Restaurants, however, restaurant managers can breathe a bit of fresh air.
From Yelp Reservations handling online reservations and waitlists to Yelp Connect allowing you to promote featured menu items, specials, and events to potential customers, Yelp has everything you need to reduce stress and labor costs while getting your restaurant discovered by a broad new audience. Yelp’s front and back of house technology integrates into many major point of sale systems, making for a seamless experience.