Tips on Leading Your Restaurant Startup to Success

October 15th 2019 at 8:12am Published by sharpshooteradmin

The food industry is one of the most benevolent options for entrepreneurs to jump into. While the industry is inundated with multiple options, you can easily jump in and take away the audience if you have something unique to offer. People are quite generous when it comes to spending on the food they eat, which is why you have the opportunity to be part of a massive industry.

The best way to experience success in the restaurant industry is to look for ways to dazzle your customers left, right and center. You need to give your customers something new or different. Play with fire, smoke or whatever else you want, but make sure that your customers get something different to take home.

Many restaurant managers or entrepreneurs fail to bring anything new to the market and then regret the limited response from their target market. This isn’t how markets are won over.

The best way to win in the restaurant business is to continue exceeding the expectations that customers have from you on a consistent basis. Customers can have multiple expectations associated with you, and exceeding them gives you an opportunity to serve your customers in the best manner possible.

You should delight your customers through the taste you offer and should pull them over for cementing new sales opportunities. Knowing that most entrepreneurs are a bit lost for options when they start their own restaurant business, here we mention some of the tips that you should religiously follow. You ought to remember that consistency is key when it comes to a food business. You don’t just have to serve good food once but have to keep giving your employees all the delicacies they need to satiate their hunger.

Go through these tips and implement them in your food business for future success:

1.   The Food Industry Thrives on Location

We’re assuming you’re reading this article before having started your restaurant. You still have the choice of selecting your location and menu in your hand and haven’t yet made these important decisions.

While we expect you to know this already, but if you don’t, let us drop the truth bomb on you, location is one of the most important factors governing success for a new food business. A new food business cannot go on to achieve success if the location isn’t a feasible one for the guests you have coming over.

You could be serving the best tortillas, pies, pizzas, steak and what not, but until or unless your location isn’t a convenient one for most people, you won’t see a lot of customers coming your way.

What is the best location for a restaurant? There isn’t any clear cut answer for this. You need to understand the dynamics of your city here, and should make a decision based on what kind of customers you are dealing with, and how you plan on serving them.

You ought to know the most crowded places in your city and how convenient they can be for most customers. Any place that requires an extensive drive isn’t suited for your needs. You don’t want your customers to drive light-years to come over to your restaurant.

Most restaurant experts suggest that the place or the location you choose for your restaurant should have significant footfall on a routine basis, before you start the restaurant. The restaurant shouldn’t be located at a distant corner, where people won’t prefer traveling to unless the need be. Your restaurant should be somewhere convenient, where your target market can already be found in an abundant amount.

If you’re catering to professionals who are at work for the day and need to grab a quick lunch, then the business district should be your go-to objective. Your office should be convenient for individuals going to offices. Likewise, your location should best be suited to the needs of your target market. Research your market, your product and the customer you will be serving, and then make your choice.

2.   Keep a Check on Reviews

Feedback can help you improve a lot of things about your restaurant. From the food you are serving to your customers to the ambiance inside of your restaurant, the feedback you get from customers can play an important part in dictating choice.

Considering how important feedback is, you cannot rely on feedback alone for servicing your clients. You have to take different features into considerations, including the reviews that your customers leave online. Reviews left by your customers online tell a lot about the way you are doing and how exactly you can service your clients.

Negative reviews online can harm all future business coming your way. You do not want clients to leave you negative reviews online, which you aren’t even able to spot. Negative reviews online can push away future clients and can also make it difficult for you to work with all customers in the best manner possible.

Imagine a customer had a poor experience with you. They take the review online and present an exaggerated version of what happened to hinder future customers from coming your way. While your initial priority should be to service clients in the best manner possible on spot, the second best thing you can do is to manage conflicts as they happen online, so that they don’t turn ugly. Let us warn you about neglecting the importance of reviews online.

The only thing worse than a negative review online is the lack of response from the restaurant being questions. If you want to salvage some pride out of the situation, you should make sure to mention an apology wherever the review has been posted, along with a compensation to make it up to the customer. Let us tell you that saddened customers love free food more than anything else. Handle the online customer grievance in the best manner possible, and you would be able to turn a lost customer into a long term customer.

Additionally, you can also use the world of online reviews to improve your service. First of all, read all the negative factors customers have highlighted. Once you are done doing that, you can go over to the other restaurants and start studying competitors. When you look at competitors you will realize just how necessary it is for you to improve in certain areas. Look at the positive reviews for your competitors, and see whether you are providing the same standard or not. If you’re failing to provide a similar standard, then you need to up your game and improve the scope of what you are offering.

3.   Serve Great Food

This one ought to be a no-brainer. You cannot seriously achieve success in your restaurant business, without serving your customers the kind of food they want. Great food is a must when it comes to the restaurant business and is a key when it comes to success here.

The perception of your restaurant in the eyes of your customers is defined by the kind of food you serve them. All of the factors including location, ambience and service do add up in defining their perception of your brand, but none can play a bigger role than the food you serve them. The food has the biggest impact on your customers and will help them feel satisfied when they walk away.

Customers can tolerate a drop in the service or the ambiance of the place, but they aren’t really okay with witnessing a drop in the quality of the food that they get from your place. The food that you offer to your customers should be exclusive or unique. As we have already spoken about above, the food you offer should be unique in its own way. We already know that the food business is saturated or inundated with options. There are so many varieties and food options available that customers already have places they want to go to, decided in their mind. If you want to pull them away from the places they are already going to, then you have to give them the best food that they have had in their life.

Good food can only be served when you maintain consistency in the quality protocols that you followed inside your restaurant. Quality is a must that should be ensured at all times. You can ensure quality by either hiring the best chef in the market or by purchasing only quality ingredients for the dishes you have in mind.

Once you have a good chef and quality materials for ingredients, there is no reason why you have to go elsewhere for food options. If you aren’t serving something exclusive or unique, then you have to make the taste inside your restaurant stand out. Your customers should be able to enjoy the best taste in town when they come visit your restaurant. You ought to give them exactly the kind of brilliance they are looking for when they come to visit your restaurant for good food.

You can further make food as the stand out in what you offer, by having a standard dish that can attract people towards you. Every restaurant has that one dish that can pull customers towards them. You should also have the signature dish that pulls customers towards you and help you seal the best deals. A signature dish wouldn’t just add popularity to your restaurant, but would also help associate the name of your restaurant with that one signature dish you have. If you’re able to create that dish in exquisite mastery, then you don’t have to worry at all about the results or how they will be in the future.

4.   Follow Smart Menu Planning

You ought to know the importance of a smart menu when you are starting your own business. A smart menu can do wonders that nothing else can when defining the popularity of your food startup. The menu is the first point of contact that customers have with your brand. You should make sure that the initial point of contact is a replication of the standard you want for your business. Your restaurant should have a menu that is aesthetically pleasing and has all the dishes that your customers might be looking for when they come to you for the best food in town.

A well designed menu shouldn’t just inform customers about the rates and the items you offer, but it should also draw the attention of your customer towards the high selling items on your list. The high selling items should be marketed appropriately, so that they are able to draw in the results you want from them.

If you have studied different restaurants successfully, you would know what a successful restaurant does differently from a small and growing restaurant. Successful restaurants that are eager to achieve success, almost always have the most aesthetic menu in town. They realize that the customers coming to them currently are motivated by their success, and the items they have in the menu. Also, every restaurant has a signature dish or a dish that is performing particularly well. If your restaurant has a dish that is doing particularly well, then you should highlight it in the menu. You can tap the menu to sell the right items to the customers; items that you are confident of when it comes to achieving the kind of success you want.

5.   Manage the Guest Experience

All the guests coming into your restaurant aren’t just here for the food. They’re here for the ambiance and the guest experience as well. You should give your customers the kind of guest experience they are looking for, so that they can walk away with all of their high hopes satisfied. Eating at a restaurant is no more about the food for customers. Customers, when they walk into a restaurant, want more than just food. They want the best delicacies in town, served to them in the most exquisite manner. Customers are willing to pay the cost associated with such a purchase, but want the serving and the ambiance to be top notch.

When you talk about boosting the customer service in your restaurant, you should know that customer service includes of the experience that your customers have inside the restaurant. This includes everything from the helpfulness and politeness of the staff, to how the dishes are served, when the food arrives and the comfort level within the interior of the restaurant. Effective engagement inside the restaurant can increase the satisfaction levels of your customers and can help get you the rating that you are looking for here.

The staff and how they serve the food, matters a lot. Good staff that is helpful to help can turn out to be good for customers. Customers don’t just want good food, but want to be treated well too. No customer would want the staff inside your restaurant to be mean to them and serve them food late. Knowing this, it is necessary for your staff to be helpful and polite. Customers can be tough at times, but your staff should know just how to pacify customers and give them the kind of experience they are looking for.

6.   Ensure Owner’s Involvement

Owner’s involvement is one of the most important aspects of restaurant success in this day and age. The owner isn’t just required to start the restaurant and keep it as it is, but they should be involved in the processes, and should be present at all times, so that the restaurant is able to succeed at the highest level. The owner must oversee all operations, so that the business is able to grow, and that the original adherence to quality isn’t lost.

While your chefs can be the best in business, you need to be present yourself for ensuring quality when it comes to the food being prepared. Restaurateurs should be physically present when it comes to managing the daily sales, inventory and finance of the restaurant business.

7.   Manage Finance

Coming to the most important role of the lot; managing finance. Managing your small business restaurant finance might not look like a daunting task, but believe us when we say it is. Most people mess up their finances after first starting their restaurant finance. If you want to manage your finance in the best manner possible, you should make sure that you are able to meet customer expectations and demands and have all inventory levels stacked up.

Some of the expenses that you would be required to meet as part of your daily operations include:

• You will have to maintain positive inventory levels at all times. The inventory should be enough for the future, so that you don’t push customers away, due to the unavailability of certain options.
• You should make sure that all of your servers and chefs are paid well in time. When you’re in a service business, you need to make sure that your customers are getting their dues and are able to give their best, because their motivation levels can directly impact the service your customers get.
• Overheads including gas, heating, lighting and rent must be paid.

These are the usual costs you would incur in a month. Your working capital should be feasible for meeting these expenses as they come your way.

If you feel that you’re unable to meet your expenses and that the cash is running low for incurring inventory for food, then you should head for small business funding in time. Small business funding from a private funder is easy to acquire and can help you prepare for a tricky situation. 

A cash crunch can come at any given time, and you should make sure that you are prepared for it before it actually happens. You can manage your restaurant finance through the following means:

• Remain frugal with the money you spend after starting. Look for the best deals on interior décor, and make sure that you aren’t offering hefty discounts.
• Have a financial plan at the ready for how you should progress with finances. Know how long it will take for your business to break even or to meet the expenses that you expect to incur. Your financial plan should include a budget.
• Budget for all expenses, and make sure that you limit expenses as much as possible.
• Manage tax and legal issues by having a separate person to deal with finance. Such a person will help you track your expenses in the long run and will keep you on the right side of the law.

8.   Ace Marketing

The initial success of your startup food business is all about how well you’re able to market it. The marketing techniques you use can help you ace this step.

Your marketing plan should be divided into different parts including:

Online Marketing:

Online marketing would include the digital strategy you would like to follow for your business. Your online marketing strategy should include social media marketing and web marketing as well. You can devise a plan for social media marketing, which includes targeting the preferences of your customers and interacting with them online. Use social media platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat for creating impromptu and interactive videos of your food and sharing them online. The main purpose of social media marketing is to pull customers over. Try to do that through it. When it comes to the website, you need to make sure that customer testimonials are somewhere on the home page and you have your best signature dishes highlighted.

Offline Marketing

Offline marketing is supposed to be a lot more traditional than online marketing. You can host events, go for local advertising and distribute pamphlets as part of offline marketing. Remember that offline is also necessary to complement online marketing. You cannot focus on any one of these methods, and the right marketing strategy would include doing a bit of offline as well as online marketing.

With these tips above, you can surely lead your restaurant startup to the success that you always imagined for it.