Smart restaurant management delivers results when it comes to profits and success. Those who do well at it can enjoy access to more funds available for reinvestment into refurbishments, staff training and better equipment.

Here are the important factors that count when it comes to good restaurant management:

  1. Buy Smart – Danny Meyer recently introduced group buying to his enterprise, Union Square Hospitality. It saved him $200,000. None of his chefs were forced into taking part, but as they decided to try corporate procurement they could see the savings of just 2 and 3% here and there adding up fast. It was also an option that fitted in well with the group’s culture of bottom-up leadership.
  2. Involve your staff – Legal Sea Foods (based around the Boston area) regularly gets a council of wait staff and bartenders together to brainstorm new business ideas. They work on solving questions such as how to bring a more child friendly atmosphere to the restaurant group. Over 20 minutes or so they’ll come up with some excellent ideas that can then be taken forward for implementation by restaurant management.
  3. Check what mood your guests are in – the mood of each guest is taken note of at a restaurant in Washington, Virginal. The welcome staff will assign a number between 1 and 10 to categorise the mood. Then servers and chefs work hard to get that mood up to at least a 9, whether it involves taking guests into the kitchen or giving them a bottle of champagne on the house.
  4. Expansion possibilities - of course location is key to the success of any restaurant, but it also pays to consider the possibility of expansion. The more seats you have in-house, the more profits can you enjoy.
  5. Get clear on profit and loss – if this isn’t your thing, then it’s worth the pain of forcing yourself to get a good understanding of it. It could be what makes it possible to save enough to expand your restaurant chain as the owner of No 9 in Boston did when they tightened things up enough to be able to open two more restaurants close enough to each other and they even made a saving on construction costs.
  6. Define your role as the owner – for any team to work well, you need to know what you can do. But you also need to work on training so that your team grows with you. They will then put more into the business, and you need to trust that they can do it – if you don’t then you won’t expand.

Smart restaurant management can put you streets ahead of the competition. You just need to know a few approaches. Another approach is to offer online restaurant table booking and online restaurant ordering. Find out more about installing it here.