Part 1

You did it. Congratulations. You’ve made it through the holiday season mostly unscathed, apart from that one meltdown in the walk-in. The restaurant was busier than ever, staff made money and customers are happy. Phew. Time to kick back and enjoy a well-deserved respite.

Wrong.(sorry)

Right now is a crucial time to start preparing for next year. No, I’m not saying get the decorations back out. But there are a few things that you can do now to make your next holiday season a whole lot easier.

Tie Up Loose Ends

The rub of the holiday season landing at the end of the year is that you get your busiest time as you’re getting ready to close out your financials for the year (for my U.S. clients). Do the work to make sure you’ve paid all of your invoices and been paid for any outgoing invoices, and that you’ve processed them all so that you don’t get a P&L ding to start the next year off.

Document Everything!

Use the tools designed and available on the website at www.myrestaurantsuite.com to document all of the important ebbs and flows of the holiday season and how it impacted your restaurant. When did school get out? What did that do? Are you located in a mall? Did they have any events you need to be prepared for next year? What were the days like in terms of traffic flow? How were your staffing levels? Did you have enough? Too much? Not enough? History is your greatest asset, so make sure you have as much documented as possible so that you don’t make the same mistakes next year.
The key areas to assess are:

• Staffing
• Sales volume, and flow
• Events and scheduling
• Inventory and pars
• Menu and customer satisfaction

Events and Catering for Repeat Business

Did you participate in any events or cater for any customers? Or maybe even sold bulk gift cards to a company rewarding its employees? Follow up! Follow up now to make sure they were satisfied and make sure they were so happy that you’ve earned their business for next year’s Christmas party or event. Store their contact information away and be prepared to contact them again in August or September, when they will likely begin their holiday planning again. Survey Monkey has a great Auto responder, just set it up and it will email people on a set date so if your 2 busy its done anyway. Planning big organizational events is hard, so make it easier on the event planner to have one thing ticked off the list, and repeat business for yourself.

Plan for a Drop in Volume

School is going back and the holidays are wrapping up, which means after the new year, you’ll more than likely see a sales drop. Be sure to adjust your schedules and pars accordingly to prevent a bloat of costs hitting you at the start of the year. Bear in mind – whatever you sold in gift cards is coming back your way, so don’t prepare for a ghost town.

Thank Your Staff

You didn’t get through the holiday season alone and you may have been too busy to even enjoy it with your team. If you didn’t have the time between shifts and events to have even a small gathering or show of appreciation for your team, do it in January. They worked hard and just like your customers, you want a great team back next year too.
And now, kick back, relax, pour yourself a glass from the last carton of egg nog, and toast a great holiday season.

Story

Jenny was running a successful bar catering business. Of course the holiday season is the busiest as parties hit their peak, both at work and at home. Her first season was tough to manage because she didn’t know how to anticipate the volume, which meant as she got busier, she was scrambling for staff, often the day of events.
As the holiday season came to a close, she did follow up calls and emails with all of her clients to understand their satisfaction level and plant the seed for repeat business. By doing so, she was able to document specific concerns of customers who were less than fully satisfied and customers who would definitely be back.
In August, she started reaching back out to the customers, locking in the satisfied customers and following up with the less than satisfied customers with specific commitments for this time around (I understand that you felt you needed a second bartender and we’ll be sure to schedule you two of our best).

This meant that before she started taking on new business for the season, or even needed to start scheduling her staff, or even before Halloween, she had a great picture of the season to come, and has been able to grow the business exponentially each year using the same tactics.