It’s not enough to open a restaurant. You have to change the way you think, act, perform & train your team.
The MOST successful Restaurateurs do these things
Tip #1
Think of yourself as an entrepreneur. A lot of restaurant owners, think of themselves as a restaurateur, or you know, someone who has a brick-and-mortar building – they’ve got a lot of employees, it’s romantic. It’s a certain kind of business.
However, to really be successful with a restaurant, it’s helpful to think of yourself as a entrepreneur. Someone who’s a business person, because a lot of the things that happen in restaurants are really typical business practice. There’s finance, there’s people, there’s systems.
Okay, so think of yourself more as an entrepreneur than a restaurateur. That’s very helpful to have a successful restaurant.
Tip #2
Another piece of having a very successful restaurant is to think of your employees as salespeople. The waitstaff are really salespeople.
There’s a few factors of this. You have real estate, you’ve actually got physical real estate that you rent out. Also, all of the tables in your restaurant are like a piece of real estate that gets rented every night, and you wanna have that space full. And the broker of that real estate, the person who’s maximizing the value of that real estate, is your waitstaff.
And so, training them to sell the highest profit dishes is important. To really speak of the dishes as something that only you can serve, that’s special. So if you’ve got the Cherry Cricket in Denver, they might say “we do hamburgers better than anybody else, and you can go to different restaurants around town looking for the best hamburger, but you’re not gonna find a better one than what we do here because that’s our specialty, and we’re the best.” This is what your servers need to be representing about your restaurant.
So if you’re selling pizza, hamburgers, steak, whatever your concept is, the idea of your waitstaff is to sell the uniqueness that you have in that dish, and the fact that you’re the only one who can do it as well as you can.
Just two quick tips for today, I hope that helps.