Christmas in June? Not quite. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t time to start thinking about preparing for the holiday season. In Part 1, we talked about the important things to focus on while coming out of the holiday season and now it’s time to start putting that work to good use.
Once you’ve done the work to understand how past seasons have impacted your restaurant, it’s time to start planning how this year will be different, and how it will be the same.

Advertising

While the season is going to naturally give you a boost, it’s up to you to shape how much and how that boost will impact you. This is where advertising comes in. The few questions you need to ask yourself are:

• Do you want to advertise?
• WHAT do you want to advertise?
• WHO do you want to reach?
• HOW do you want to reach them?

Once you’ve decided that yes, you do, it’s time to start work on the rest. What do you want to show off or promote for the holiday season? Likely not your regular menu, but maybe a special holiday menu, or catering services. You also want to think about who you are trying to reach. Do you want regulars to book ahead, are you trying to reach corporate party planners? Once you know what you want to talk about and whom you want to talk to, then you can start thinking about how you want to talk to them. The beauty of today’s digital age is that your options are boundless. Take the time to do the work behind the scenes of the ads and they pay dividends.

Most effective section sizes and table plan sheet

You’ve planned for an increase in sales, now it’s time to take that to your table plan. Why does this matter so early? Because deciding the most effective section size and plans for your restaurant now will be imperative to determining your staffing needs.
Think about it – if your restaurant has 40 tables and you want servers to have 3-4 table sections during the season, that means you need 10+ servers per shift. If you only run dinners, that means you have 70 shifts to cover (let’s pretend all days are equal). If all of your servers work 5 shifts, that means 14 servers. If you wanted them to cover 2 table sections every day, all of the sudden you have 140 shifts to cover, and need 28 servers. That’s a huge difference to plan for and everyone else will be hiring! Section size is a factor from which all of your staffing planning will start, so take the time to find the right section sizes and table plan for your restaurant for each day, and shift of the week.

Staff planning (hire up and find a proactive receptionist)

Alright, your section planning is done and you’ve done the math – you need 10 new servers. Get to it early! Everyone in dining and retail hires up for the holidays, so getting an early start means you get first pass at the best talent and give yourself time to train the team. Be sure to get updated availability from your current staff based on school break schedules.
So far we’ve focused on wait staff, but easily the most important position to focus on when hiring this season is your host/receptionist. This person is the first impression, but also managing a huge increase in phone calls, so you want someone organized and proactive.
Having a proactive receptionist can make a huge difference to the way a Christmas service runs. They must be focused on the bigger picture not only taking bookings. They need to have administrative prowess taking deposits, email and call clients (for catering or events), as well as being able to communicate with management as to the execution of the table plan and the front of house operations. The receptionist is a major player in the efficiency of the restaurant at Christmas time and should not be overlooked.

Deposits

Catering or working with holiday parties? Great way to bring in extra income on top of your standard service during the holidays. Your proactive receptionist is going to help make sure that your schedule is managed, but you are going to want to set up a system for collecting deposits for these events. Deposits are important to protect you when it comes to the planning you need to do for these events – think of how much it would hurt to have staff scheduled and product ordered for event that was canceled? Don’t get caught with the costs. Deposits ensure that you are covered for these scenarios. You will need to decide what the appropriate amount is, but it should absolutely at a minimum cover any product you need to pre-order and labor costs for prep. 15% to 20% isn’t out of the ordinary in my experience. This also creates a commitment from the client.

Menu planning (set menu vs. a la carte)

Depending on the type of restaurant you run, it may be best to consider running a set menu. Or perhaps you want to keep an a la carte menu. If you decide that a set menu is the right thing for you, make sure that it fits your brand, but still brings something new to your regulars. The same goes for the a la carte method.

Working with your suppliers (pre-ordering)

The holidays get crazy for everyone, including your suppliers. So the earlier you bring them into the planning process, the better. There are the obvious pieces to plan for (e.g. what days will they be closed?), but take it a step further and work together to plan ahead. Once you’ve decided on your holiday menus and you’ve done the work to plan for your volume, place pre-orders for the products that you’ll be using (especially if they’re hot-ticket items like cuts of meat). This will ensure that not only you have enough product to make it through the season, but that you get the best prices to do so.

Noticing a theme??

Success in the holiday season starts early and is a result of careful, early planning, not luck. Time to get started!

In South Africa, monkeys have a nasty habit of stealing fruit from the orchards or, if they’re especially brash and adept, sneaking into houses to steal fruit from the dining room table. In order to catch the thieves, locals use old medicine flagons and glass long neck bottles with nuts on the inside; when the monkeys grab the nuts, they close their fists and try to pull out their hand, but they can’t fit their fists and their bounty out through the skinny neck. They can’t carry the bottle with them because it is too heavy, and therefore get caught. The owner of the bottle then gets rid of the monkey, keeps the bottle. Even when he knows that the owner is coming, the monkey cannot and will not release the nut, purely because of greed.

Unfortunately, theft is not limited to monkeys with sticky fingers, and you’re likely to encounter it in your business at some point. This might be directly – stealing from the till or taking product – or indirectly – gaming discounts that you have running for customers, etc. If you are to catch somebody in your restaurant or in your bar who you know is thieving, the best way is to catch them red handed. To do that, you need to leave things out in plain sight with a watchful eye. They might think that they are not being paid enough or that they are being mistreated. There is a multitude of reasons as to why they believe that they are justified in stealing from your restaurant, but at the end of the day, they are stealing directly from you and that is punishable.

To catch a thief is to do it in plain sight. Know that you are leaving something out for them to take, and make sure that they are seen to be taking it. That can be a timely process and it could be, if left unattended, a very, very costly exercise so it needs to be pounced on and done very, very quickly. There are several strategies that you can use, but each situation will be unique.

In one situation, I found out that a bartender was stealing cash. I started to mark the notes in his till with a felt pen. I noticed he liked to take $20 notes, so I marked them and put a few of these notes into circulation within the restaurant, within his till and about halfway through the night, I said that I needed some change for two $100 notes. He proceeded to open up his bank (his wallet) and give me the change that he had so I that I had two hundred dollars, he had a $120 dollars in notes and three of those notes were marked with black felted pen, I had caught him red handed. I asked him to come down to the office and started the proceedings, fired him on the spot and took a statement from him, let him go, report him to the police and the police then took the matter further. He was barred from my bar, he was barred from my restaurant and he was never to work in the restaurant company again.

It’s an unfortunate circumstance, but these things happen and they must be addressed because if you allow a culture of thievery within your restaurant, then the only person accountable is you. I have tools to manage stock disappearance. Both the food and the beverage stocktakes allow you to have a very tight control over the inventory in the business, whether for the bar or the kitchen. If you feel the stock is going missing, you could do stocktakes every day. And by utilizing the staff and the input of the stock every day, you are able to determine what is going missing and then you can identify which shift is being stolen from and you can do inventory at the end of every shift. In order to catch the person doing it, you need to be able to be on top of it and by utilizing some of the tools available here, you will be successful in identifying and addressing the problem.

Story

Minnie was a long-time employee at a family dining restaurant. She was trusted, did her job well and her customers loved her. But analyzing the P&L, her GM, Eric, noticed that Minnie had a disproportionate amount of discounts applied to her tables’ checks compared to other servers. All promotions that the restaurant ran – birthday meals, holiday discounts, etc. Additionally, he noticed that many of these were on cash transactions. One afternoon, Minnie asked Eric to apply a birthday meal discount to one of her checks. Previously he would have done so without hesitation, but because of his suspicions, he said he’d be happy to, but first we wanted to go out to the table to wish the customer a happy birthday.

Minnie stopped him and confessed. She lied about the discount being valid and knew that if he went to the table with birthday wishes, she would be caught anyway. She had realized that if a table paid in cash, she could give them their correct change, but without them even knowing, before she closed out the check she could ask for a discount to be applied. She already had the cash, so the total amount of the discount went straight to her pocket.

Eric was shocked that such a loyal and long term employee would scam the business, but he had no choice but to fire her. He identified the problem by staying close to his numbers, and caught her by confronting it head on.

Have you ever noticed when you go to a restaurant that in some, you get a very disjointed service and others, it is seamless from the moment you walk in and sit down – nothing is wanted for and all of the staff is very capable, competent and willing to help? Have you ever wondered why the difference? How are some so chaotic or hectic when others run so smoothly?
I can almost 100% guarantee that the difference between the two are staff meetings before a shift. Communication is paramount to success everywhere from interpersonal relationships to sports teams, and your restaurant is no exception. Pre-shift meetings are designed to provide a consistent channel of communication with your staff, ultimately increasing their effectiveness and customer satisfaction.
Think of it like a pre-game huddle where you have the chance to talk to your staff about the game plan – how the shift is going to run. What are important topics to cover?

• – What to expect of the shift – how many people are going to be coming in?
• Who’s where – which staff member is going to be looking after which section.
• What’s special about the shift/menu – what the specials are, what is on and what is off the wine list, what is on and what is off the menu, are you out of anything?
• Continuing education – you can explain the specials and make sure that they have an understanding of them, including how to describe them or what to pair them with.
• Celebrate – pre-shift meetings are a great opportunity to reinforce positive behaviours, attitudes and actions by celebrating them in public, in front of peers (remember – praise in public, coach in private – these meetings are not a lucrative forum to correct bad behaviours).

The information you could cover is endless, but that doesn’t mean the meeting as to be long. Covering the key details to get the entire team on the same page is paramount to successful, seamless service. By including your staff members and sitting them down fifteen minutes before service you get everyone on the same page and their heads in the game. Make sure to keep it an open forum so that they can participate and raise any appropriate concerns or questions. Committing to having a meeting and setting expectations at the start of every shift, breakfast, lunch and dinner, seven days a week, 365 days a year, you will have a successful business. You will have eliminated the question marks and continued to bring your team together. Meetings should be held for both the front and back of house (though you will have to identify based on your team if they are best held together or separately) There needs to be cohesion inclusiveness and an attitude of togetherness and by promoting meetings and sitting down with your staff, and speaking to them on a daily basis reinforces this, instilling the staff with the confidence and tools they need to execute great service.

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.

Have you ever wondered how you can drive revenue on the slowest day of the week? Generally speaking, Mondays and Tuesdays are your slowest days,  and while we all wish we had the power to turn Mondays into weekends, a more realistic alternative is to hold master classes. A master class is a lesson or class that you open up to your customers. You choose an education topic for the population and use a combination of wines and food to make the classes; often it was almost like a degustation menu.

Working with your suppliers and chef, you can identify what is trending that suits your business and create a class menu and curriculum to support it.

A master class is for the popular. What style of restaurant you have, style of food you present, style of wines you serve, very much determines the calibre or the menu choice for your customers. So if you have an Italian restaurant, you might do five or seven wines to start off with, with five or seven dishes, and you would have an antipasto then you will have a starter or two, two main courses, one dessert. And you would ask your wine supplier for specific varietals from Italy to accommodate those food choices or if you had the wines, you would sit down and you would create a menu designed around the wines that you wanted to push.

Once you’ve designed the menu, you’ll want to ask a supplier or expert to help speak on it. And don’t skip on staff education – the point of the class is that your customers not only get a great meal, but a fun, interactive, educational experience, so everyone working it should be able to speak to all the topics that you will cover and customers might ask about. Remember, when designing your Master class size is irrelevant .The smallest master class we did was for five wines, the largest we did was for twelve.  That one was a particularly special one because the chief wine maker from the vineyard Domaine de la Romanée–Conti was the guest speaker and we had a celebrity chef from the UK come and design the menu. The entire menu was designed around the DRC wine selection apart from the dessert wine which was a Château d’Yquem.

Holding a master class thus allows you to add business to days with lower volume, as well as drive future business. Let’s say, your restaurants seats 90 people and you are able to fill it at  $65-$70 a head, you have made a significant amount of business on a slow day, but you are promoting what you want to sell in the future. Because you are teaching about it, your customers see you as the expert in the dishes or wines offered. So let’s say you know that you are getting a special on a particular Barolo and you want to push that wine for the next six months to nine months, you could absolutely have a main course designed around that Barolo so that when those 90 people come back to your restaurant (you know that they are going to because your master class was so successful), half of them would probably buy a bottle of Barolo simply because you had it on the master class menu. It’s all about driving profit. It’s all about making sure that you are able to hit the bottom line.

Master classes are a fantastic way to have your community or your customers involved and really get a sense for you as a restaurant as a restaurant and as somebody who is passionate about how you deliver, what your food and what your wine represents to you.

Story

We would come up with our master class plans by starting with speaking to a wine supplier and look for what was trending. Then we would get samples of those wines and sit down with the chef and supplier, taste the wines and discuss how the chef could come up with some food compatibility. The wine supplier would come and speak on the different wines that were being presented. The waiters would then train on the food and we would really hone our skills as far as presenting the dishes and speaking about the dishes confidently so that when the wine maker or the viticulturist or the supplier was discussing his wines, the customers who had paid for the privilege of this master class get a great understanding of the comparison between the wine and the food.
This was a sell out every time we had one of these master classes, we would saturate it. It would be done maybe once or twice a quarter and it was extremely seasonal. The smallest master class we did was for five wines, the largest we did was for twelve. That one was a particularly special one because the chief wine maker from the main Romania County was the guest speaker and we had a celebrity chef from the UK come and design the menu so the customers got a really special experience, an expertly crafted menu and 12 incredible wines.

“I don’t know.”

The three worst words a server can use to respond to a customer’s questions. Especially when it comes to describing the products that they are explicitly hired to sell. But when a server doesn’t know what something tastes like, is it really their fault? They are going to get a feel for your menu each time they eat at your restaurant, but most often, your restaurant is not where they’re getting their meals.

So how do you educate your team to describe and sell your products? Tastings. Tastings are a bit of work, but they’re worth the rewards. Here are 5 specific benefits to hosting staff tastings.

The Staff Who Knows your Product, Sells Your Product

Servers want to be guiding guests through their dining experience and helping them make great decisions. And they want to do so with integrity. So it’s really hard for a waiter to recommend something to a customer if they haven’t tried it themselves, especially if they don’t feel they have the confidence to describe it or answer follow up questions. Have you ever brought in a new dessert and let the staff try it? Your boost in sales is likely not from customers happening to notice the new item, but excited servers telling them about it.

If they know it, like it, and are confident to describe it, they’ll sell it.

Customers Want Recommendations

While making recommendations can feel uncomfortable for some staff, the best are great at it. And rewarded. Studies show that great staff recommendations directly correlate to guest satisfaction. They want someone who knows the menu, can describe items in detail and make great suggestions.

Engaged Staff are Happy Staff

Millennials get a bad rap for being “needy”, but the data really tells us they want to be engaged. They want to feel like they’re part of the organization that they work for and they want to be proud of it. Well, since you’re likely dealing with a mostly millennial workforce, this applies to you! Tastings are a great way to reward your staff with the education and engagement that they crave, subsequently increasing their pride and sense of ownership in their work.

Connect the Front and Back of House

Getting the front and back of house on the same page is always a difficult task, so anything you can do to better connect them helps. Tastings help get them connected because they’re speaking the same language and the FOH has a better understanding of the behind the scenes of each item. If you’re having a large tasting event with your team, even better because the event itself will increase staff connection.

They Can Be Big or Small

Doing an overhaul on the menu? Invite the whole staff in for a big tasting of all of the new items. Want to focus on continuing education? Do a mini tasting during your Friday and Saturday night pre-shift meetings. Staff education does not have to be a big to-do, but it does have to be done.

Story

When I moved back to Australia from the UK I took a GM role at one of the most prominent restaurants in the region I lived. This business was open breakfast, lunch, and dinner 7 days a week. It was exceptionally busy due to its proximity to the beach and walking tracks.

When I took over, as with all my restaurants, I took a week to work on the floor, waiting, running food and working in the bar. This experience gives me an excellent view of what the staff see and deal with everyday (it also proves I can do what I ask of them but that’s another blog). The one thing that stood out was that the chef had created a brilliant summer menu taking inspiration from Curtis Stone and Gordon Ramsey. It was fresh, had great colours and well balanced with good depth of flavor – but no one knew how it tasted!

When I asked the owner why the staff hadn’t tasted the dishes he explained that it was a costly exercise and he was not going to pay people to sit down and eat.

I was slightly shocked to hear this. I then proceed to educate him on the benefits of staff tasting including cocktails and wines and what the benefits were in absorbing the short term cost for long term gain.

He reluctantly agreed and I arranged a full menu tasting on a Monday evening. We stayed open for service I had the receptionist and the supervisor on the floor and so we held our tasting with the owner.

The outcome was as follows: staff bonded, staff were educated, staff learned new skills (sales), staff learned that all dishes were outstanding. The follow on was that the spend her head increased through wine recommendations and drink sales. The staff were confident with their new skill set and what followed was wine and drinks tastings, cheese education etc.

By educating your staff you will only stand to profit from it and have a more cohesive, competent team.

We all really learned the first lesson in pars when we first moved out of our parents’ house and started doing our own grocery shopping. The first trip was full stock. Everything we thought we needed and more. If it was something we’ve ever eaten in our lives, we probably need it. Then the next trip you wonder, I like bananas. I should buy bananas. Do I have bananas? How many did I buy last time? How many did I eat? You buy a full bunch to come home to a half-eaten bunch, rotting in the fruit bowl. The third trip, you go with a list.

In today’s blog, we’re going to focus on pars for food and beverage cost management, but know that the same philosophy can and should be applied to everything in your business – from supplies, staff and scheduling/ rostering to be specific.

Managing your food and beverage pars is just as important in your business as it is in your grocery trips. The essential questions you need to know the answers to are, “how much should I buy?” and “how much should I make?”

How Much Should I Buy?

Purchasing pars are important because having too much product means waste through expiration and potential for increased theft, but having too little means running the risk of running out. Your purchasing pars for any product should be just more than enough, based on your sales trends, to get you through your next delivery. Remember that you’re trying to grow your business, so you may want to have more of a product this month than you sold of it last month.

This is especially important for perishable items, namely your produce orders. If you’re having trouble nailing down your produce pars, work with your vendor to make sure you’re getting the right number of deliveries per week.

For non-perishable items (or those with very long expiration dates), your purchase pars should be a bit more flexible so that you can stock based on the right purchase price and the time of the monthly stocktake. Don’t forget that holding stock increases?????? Cost! So reducing this at the end of the month increases??????? Cash flow! For example, an 8 bottle case of vodka will likely give you a significant price break over the per-bottle price. But, be cautious. Are you going to use that vodka in a reasonable amount of time or are you just adding something to your inventory that you’re going to count each week? You might get a major price break on plates by buying in bulk, but do you have storage and use for the excess? If it isn’t moving, it is just money in your business that could have been invested somewhere else, but instead is sitting in a store room.

Err on the side of more, though, because telling a customer you’re out of something on the menu is embarrassing and a potential reason for them to not return. Especially if it’s a signature item. You look unprepared and unprofessional.

Ensure all managers responsible for ordering understand the par system and how to use it to order. Communication is key – if one manager notices a par is off, they should communicate immediately with whoever is in charge of setting and adjusting them.

How Much Should I Make?

Setting pars for the amount of product you should make (or thaw) will directly correlate to your waste dollars. Prepped and thawed items are often much shorter shelf lives than their raw or frozen counterparts, so once you’re past expiration, it is just money in the trash.

Set your prep pars with the same approach of purchase – just enough (especially on the short shelf life items). Be cautious of your case pack size and shelf life of opened product as well. And line up your prep schedule for items that use the same raw materials. For example, if you need to open mayonnaise to prep a sauce, but only use half, will you prep another sauce before that product expires? If not, you may need to adjust your prep schedule or case pack size to reduce waste.

Specials

Are your pars off and you have too much of a product that you are in danger of wasting? This is where specials come in handy – add a food or drink special that will help you move that product before its expiration and save a potential costly blunder (then immediately go back and adjust your pars appropriately).

Story

I was the lead bartender at a restaurant that used frozen fruit syrups for a lot of our drinks – smoothies, margaritas, milkshakes, daiquiris, etc. This product was purchased frozen and pulled before use. And somehow, despite the incredibly long frozen shelf life, we were wasting a ton of it.

I took some time to understand which flavors we were wasting and what the freezer pull and prep behaviors were and the problem was quick to find. The bartenders were pulling an even amount of each syrup; always making sure that one full carton was thawed of each. It was the right intent, but some flavors like cappuccino and pina colada needed a different approach. The recipes that called for them called for tiny amounts, and were not high sellers.

With the bar manager, we evaluated the sales of each flavor and came up with a better par system. We then coached the bar staff that it was OK to only have half a carton of cappuccino or pina colada pulled.

By fully understanding the recipes, the sales volume and the behaviors, we were able to set a new par system and reduce the waste on this product to almost zero.

Determining section sizes can be a tricky line to walk. You want to make sure that you have enough staff on the floor to take excellent care of your customers. But each additional server comes with an hourly wage, and your servers are going to want more tables so that they can make more tips. So what’s the perfect balance?

As always, it isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer. Not just from restaurant to restaurant, but even within your restaurant, it might depend by the day, or the server. For most, the sweet spot is in 3-6 tables for best use of resources (at my peak I was in charge of a section of 14 tables – 4 x 4pax, 1 x 3pax and 5 x 2pax.) Your more proficient servers can and should have larger sections than your new hires. During the shoulders, the section size will increase as staff take breaks, assuming that all tables won’t be sat. During the peaks, the section size will decrease. Holidays or special events will impact this as well. Maybe you took on a large party with a set menu, so despite the size of the party, you don’t need to increase the number of servers assigned to it. Or maybe it’s a holiday (Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve, etc.) and you want to decrease the section size to let servers focus on their tables.

Is there a secret to allowing servers to have more tables? Yes! Schedule a food runner or server’s assistant to help with the tasks outside of their section. Taking tasks away from the servers such as food delivery or drink ordering, allows them to spend more time in their section, meaning you may be able to staff less, saving on wages and increasing their tips.

Story

I was working as a waiter in a fine dining restaurant. It had already been an adjustment to go from having 7-8 table sections in my previous job to having 3-5, depending on the night. I was super excited for New Year’s Eve knowing that we were fully booked, meaning I could make a lot of money. When I arrived for my shift and checked out my section, I couldn’t have been more disappointed. 2 tables. TWO TABLES? You mean I’m going to come in on a holiday to work and I’m only going to make tips from TWO TABLES?

The good news is, I was wrong. That night we were fully staffed, everyone with 2 table sections (a few servers even had a one table section because of the party size). We had on a few food runners who helped get food out and with the miscellaneous tasks. We were beyond busy – fully booked, but also taking walk-ins. On a night that could have been a disaster because of how many guests we were taking care of, everything went so smoothly because we were all focused on our, very small, areas. Because of this, we did a record high guest count, with a record high check average and, even in my two table section, I made the most in tips I ever had or would at that restaurant.

By identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your staff you are able to provide the appropriate amount of tables for each staff member. By doing this you are getting the best of them and providing the best for your customer.

You know some variant of the old quote by philosopher George Santayana “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Well the fortunate thing about this in the restaurant industry is that we aren’t doomed to repeat it, but lucky to do so. Our past and history give us so much information about how to prepare for the future that if used correctly, it can only help make us wildly successful. Fact!

The restaurant industry can be volatile and unpredictable, but also surprisingly steady and predictable over the longer term. Many of the keys to success lie in our past. Aside from the one-off scenarios (a bus pulled up to your restaurant an unloaded and unexpected tour group), the traffic patterns in your restaurant are just that – patterns. The more you study these patterns, the better you’ll learn to use them.

When looking at the past to plan the future, you need to understand 4 key areas hours of the day, days of the week, events and season. Understanding how these factors impact your traffic will allow you to much more accurately plan staff schedules and set prep and ordering pars. Make note of not only how these effect your traffic, but ordering habits (for example you’re likely to see increased beer sales on Father’s Day and increased dessert sales on Mother’s Day). There is no one-size-fits-all solution to forecasting because every restaurant is unique, so every restaurant is impacted differently by events and seasons.

Hours of the day: what are your peaks and what do the shoulders of the shift look like? Understanding this curve is essential for staffing – just because you need 10 servers on for peak does NOT mean that you need 10 servers on when you open the door.

Days of the week: compounding the hours of the day, how do your patterns vary depending on days of the week? Are you near an office area, so you’re driven by the Monday to Friday crowd? Weekend nights? Saturday and Sunday brunch/lunch?

Events: what events impact your business and how? If you’re located outside of a concert venue, this is easy to sort out. But if you aren’t, it can be a little tougher to identify these events. So how do you do it?

Talk with your local schools – when are they in and out of session? Do they have any big events (sports, etc.) that you should know about?

Communicate with your landlord’s management team – are an events scheduled on property?

Sign up for alerts from your community – will a marathon bring in heaps of customers? Or are you on an unfortunate part of the route that will be blocked from traffic?

Holidays – if your forecasting and planning tools do not automatically include holidays, be sure to add them all in.

Got surprised by one? Track it in your forecasting tool of choice. You may not have known that your community would be doing a fundraiser basketball tournament this year. But now you do, and you’ll have it tracked to check in advance next year.

Seasons: how do different seasons impact your business? Seasons could be winter and summer. They could be Christmas and Easter. They could be sports-related. You need to understand what changes you see. For example, most restaurants will see, of course, increased traffic during Christmas season. The successful ones see that not only does their volume increase, but their traffic pattern changes. Rather than having short peaks during the week, people are taking off time with their families, so the traffic spreads out across the shift. When you used to need to schedule only 20% of your servers and cooks in at open, you may need to increase that to 50%.

Read more strategies in the Cost Analysis chapter in How to Run a Successful Restaurant and check out the Wage Forecasting Tool on the website. This tool was my favourite in the operations game purely because of its real time tracking ability allowing me to adjust shift times and hours on a daily basis. It enabled my to effectively hit my wage percentages every week.

Story

John was the GM of a restaurant in a mixed office and suburban area. His weekday lunch shifts were high volume and short with his customers needing to get back to work, while his evening and weekend shifts were more spread out and weighted to the weekends, where his customers spent more time with their families. Add in being located next to a movie theater and concert venue. John was a forecasting ninja. If you needed to know something that would be coming up in the community, you could find out from him faster than you could Google it. He worked hard to create relationships and find the right sources of information, but it paid off.

Never was John caught on a concert night short staffed, or losing weekday customers because slow service caused them to come back from their lunch breaks late. John was able to steadily grow his sales year after year, often by double digits, because of his keen ability to use the past to plan his future, ensuring that he was always prepared to deliver quality service and food.

The ability to forecast is a learned skill. It is one that will eventually come as second nature and will enable you to drive revenue in even the worst months.

Waste. It is perfectly named, because it’s a waste. Every ounce of waste in your business from food stuffs to over pours and spillages comes at a cost. While it would be unrealistic to eliminate all waste in the business, it’s significantly worth your while to find and address areas of waste. Waste can also often be like playing a game of Whack-A-Mole, once you have one area under control, another one pops up!

Ultimately waste increases your cost of goods, so you want it as low as possible. Here are the key areas and tips to reduce waste:

Menu design – do your recipes call for a too diverse list of ingredients or too many specialized sauces that you can’t move?

Over-prepping/thawing – are your par levels for your prep and freezer pulls tight enough? If you are prepping or thawing more of something than you can use before it expires, you are just throwing that product, literally, in the trash. (NEVER consider extending product past its shelf life because you are afraid of waste – serving product that can get people sick is going to be much more trouble than over-prep.) If a product sells out, that’s OK. Its better to have a sold out dish than wasted profit.

Over-ordering – ordering product well can be tough, especially if you spread the responsibility for it amongst several managers; the key to ordering well is to have set pars, make sure to forecast your sales and needs, be cautious of deals from your vendors (yes, it may be cheaper to get a whole case, but if you throw half the case away, you lost money), and keep following up. By instilling an ordering system such as the one I have designed, you can significantly minimize wastage and set par levels suited to your business that anyone can follow.

Product quality – loss in quality typically comes through produce; you need to have a consistent check-in process when your produce is delivered and a good relationship with the vendor. Once you accept sub-par produce, you are likely going to waste it when it rots. By doing this you are also setting a precedent that it’s OK for the vendor to offload rubbish to you as no one checks it. Be stringent and if something slips by be sure to hold the vendor accountable over the phone.

Mistakes – mistakes are going to happen, but can be minimized through constant training and education. Everything takes effort and constant monitoring here but with diligence comes profit. By using your teams strengths and making them accountable can go a long way to making this happen. Read my accountability blog for more.

Adherence to recipes – similar to mistakes, but harder to spot is adherence to recipes. Does a drink from the bar call for 2 ounces of strawberries, but one of your bartenders consistently uses 3 ounces? Do your salads call for 7 ounces of lettuce, but they often go out with 9? Waste. It’s small, but it adds up. Address recipe adherence by putting tools in place in advance (correct size ladles, scoops, etc.) and make observations throughout the shift. This above all else lets the staff know that you are watching and that nothing get by!!

Pack size – work with your vendors to ensure you’re purchasing product in pack sizes that you can use before their expiration. Don’t forget about the bar – if you really want to carry a particular beer, for example, but don’t have the sales to sell a full keg before its expiration, you may be better off bringing it in bottles or cans, or not at all.

Theft – this one is an obvious no-no, but not always as easy to spot. Consider where you store items and how accessible they are to sticky fingers. Also consider how desirable the item is (napkins may not be as tempting as wine).

Returned items – you are going to have customers send food back that isn’t really a mistake, but they just don’t like it; track these because ultimately they impact your inventory and if there’s a pattern, you may need to address a recipe.

One-offs (promotions) – when considering special events or recipes, keep waste in mind. The events and recipes are great for variety in the restaurant, but don’t get yourself stuck with product you can’t use. For example, having a killer Candy Cane martini might be great for the Christmas season, but if the pack size on the syrup is too big, you’ll be left with product that will be essentially worthless on January 1^st.

It’s ok to run out! – by selling out of a items on the menu you are forcing other products to move reducing potential waste issues. This is good practice in a business that closes over the weekend or has 2 days/ 3 days down time due to season. Having the other products move creates turnover of lesser products therefore lowering your food cost and driving bottom line numbers and ultimately profit for the business.

You should have a system in place to track your waste. Not only to keep your inventory and P&L tracking straight, but this will allow you to identify trends and address them quickly. This may mean having a waste sheet in the kitchen and bar for staff to track anything. Track and analyze (but to get good data here, make sure that the staff know it’s ok to make mistakes, otherwise it won’t get logged and you won’t know about it).

See the chapters on Cost Analysis and Specials in How to Manage a Successful Restaurant for additional tips on managing costs in your business.

Story

A colleague of mine once recited this to me when we were planning and event.

A large restaurant chain decided to have an event day with a one-day-only recipe to increase sales on historically one of the slowest Tuesdays of the year. The innovation team came up with a great recipe and marketing came up with fun ways to promote it. The day itself was a smashing success.

But the following week, the restaurant GMs started to reach out, asking what they should do with the sauce they had to purchase for the item. There was significant left-over in the restaurant and no other recipes called for it. The finance team ran an analysis and a promotion that, excluding waste, was a hands-down success increasing sales by over 20% in most locations, would be considered a loss if they had to write off all the sauce that had been unused.
The marketing and innovation teams scrambled and were able to get a menu item in place before the sauce expired, saving the profitability from the event day. The next year, the same promotion was run, but the pack size on the sauce was reduced and the backup plan was already in place to ensure that the sauce would be used in the next 8 week promotion, allowing the restaurants time to use through it.

The bottom line: always manage your wastage. If you do not it can and will undermine your ability to run a successful and profitable restaurant.