A New Restaurant

At it’s core, being successful in the Restaurant and Food Service Industry is very simple: Have income that is greater than your expenses.  If you aren’t making enough money, you need to either increase your income, decrease your expenses, or both.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it?  But like so many things in life, the devil is in the details.

Increase Your Income

Ideally, everything you are doing is moving you toward this goal.  The more money you have going into your cash register, the happier your business life will be.  Having a good cash flow makes keeping your busness healthy so much easier.  Everything from property upkeep and upgrades, to hiring a quality stall relies on your ability to have enough income.

There are basically two ways to increase your income: increase the number of guests to your restaurant, and increasing the amount that each guest spends.

Getting more customers requires you giving the guests a reason to come.  It’s marketing and advertising, and running specials that will get people through the doors.  It is also necessary to do the things that keep your existing customers coming back repeatedly.

Building check averages is about a lot more than just increasing prices. In fact, many times a price increase will result in a decrease in income because some of your customers will leave for less expensive options.  On easy way to increase your check averrages is to teach your servers how to suggest appetizers and desserts to your customers.

Decrease Expenses

The two biggest areas of expense are food and labor.  Learn to control these expenses and you are almost guaranteed to succeed.

Controlling food costs requires keeping a close watch on your inventory to make sure your food is not being wasted, allowed to go out of date, or being stolen.  You also need to learn how to properly cost your recipes so you are sure to charge enough for your meals to be profitable.

Look for more information in the coming days as I start getting into the nuts and bolts of how to control you costs.