6 Mistakes Restaurant Owners Make

Who has time for mistakes? Mistakes cost you time and money and can originate from poor staff results due to lack of training or lack of communication, customer turnover and attrition due to poor customer experiences and lack of public awareness, and a constant resistance to change.

Most restaurant owners do know this, so if you don’t know, this is a huge mistake! Constantly having a [link

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text="pulse on expenses"] is critical to maximize your margins.

Food, inventory, energy, waste, etc., need to be running as lean as possible. There should be no room for cost reduction because you know your costs so well that you are continually looking at other vendors, new innovations, or new internal practices to combat unnecessary or avoidable costs.

[li]The only thing separating you from repeat customers is your staff.[/li]

[li]The only thing separating you from a successful business is your staff. [/li]

[li]The only thing separating you from closing your doors is your staff.[/li] [/ul] [clear]

Are you starting to see this trend? Your business cannot operate to its maximum potential if the owner(s), managers, and staff are not on the same page and not constantly [link

href="http://dineability.com/internal-communication/" alt"YOUR ALT TAG"

text="communicating effectively and efficiently"]. What’s most important out of that last sentence: communicating effectively and efficiently.

[br][clear] If your communication is not ingrained in those two words, your communication efforts may be doing the opposite of what was intended. An unproductive and arduous meeting leads to uncertainty, anxiety, lack of confidence, and leads staff down a dark road that will directly affect the customer.

Develop a communication strategy for your meetings that everyone can follow and watch your meetings run smooth.

Telling your staff where the forks and menus are and where the bathroom is does not constitute “training.” It takes commitment from owners to mold their staff into lean-mean-restaurant-machines! Training should be mutually beneficial and should be inviting and celebrated, not demanding and forced.

[br][clear] As you are producing more capable and competent staff, you are creating a better run and efficient restaurant. What else does training do for your staff and restaurant?

Investing in your staff will produce a more committed team that will produce better results.

Become democratized! Beyond giving “the people” a voice, listening to your customers has incredible benefits. If you had an opportunity to know what dissatisfies your customers, what your restaurant needs to improve, how satisfied were new customers vs. repeat customers, etc., you are in a much better position to harness and drive revenue.

[br][clear] “Well, customer surveys only capture the extreme experiences, either very good or very bad, it doesn't capture the in between experiences.” If that is your response that general means you don’t know how to run a customer survey to maximize participation for all service experiences. Further, listening to customers doesn't mean surveying them. You could do other such data collection methods such as focus groups. Gather customers together and have a candid live discussion.

Whatever you do, capture the voice of your customers!

If you live in today’s world and are not a part of an indigenous hidden tribe whose technological innovations include sharper arrows, you better be entrenched in the world of social media.

Why? Because your customers are there and it’s free. Wow, what a duo! Free marketing to your customer base is something to take advantage of. Not much else to say here, if you don’t know what to do, or how to do it, give DineAbility a ring and we’ll help you out.

“It's not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, it's the one that is the most adaptable to change” – Charles Darwin.

You should not change for the sake of change, but instead have the wherewithal to innovate, modernize, and upgrade what you are doing to what you should be doing in order to progress your restaurant.

Change is something our world does, and as that change happens, you need to be prepared to change with it. Some examples of change are societal changes, environmental changes, new technologies, new customer tastes, new competition, new employees, new vendors, new and better ways to operate, and so forth.