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.
