Business Building Ideas for Restaurants to Try in 2014

In order to stay ahead in the restaurant business, operators have to be constantly on the lookout for new ways to build and strengthen their businesses. Creativity, flexibility and the willingness to try new things goes a long way in this industry. Here are a few business building ideas to put to use for your restaurant business in 2014.

Put All Our New Technology to Work In Your Restaurant

The restaurant industry is particularly well suited to benefit from the various new forms of technology that have arisen over the last several years. From smartphones, to tablets, to video menu boards, we now have the ability to instantly communicate with and engage our customers at a level that was never before possible. Although the success of marketing campaigns done through social media, email and text varies dramatically from business to business, there’s no doubt about it’s potential power in driving traffic, increasing sales and building loyalty. Nearly 75% of fine and casual dining operators say they plan to devote more resources to these arenas in 2014, with 60% of family dining operators saying the same thing. In all but quick-service, operators feel the next likely marketing and reputation tool will be online review sites; quick-service is favoring Twitter, smartphone apps and texting.

Building your digitally connected community of customers has an added benefit aside from just being a loyalty and brand awareness building strategy. You can also offer your customers discounts during off-peak hours as a way of getting incremental visits from your customer base. Roughly 25% of family and casual dining, and 36% of fine dining operators, are already offering this form of variable menu pricing. The lion’s share in table service believes this will be increasingly popular in the future. As discussed in a previous post, the demand is certainly there.

Look for Opportunities to Expand Your Restaurant’s Off-Premise Presence

Another business building opportunity lies in off-premise marketing. Some 56% of consumers say they would likely order delivery direct to their home or office if the option was available. Another 46% said they would use a curbside takeout from a table service restaurant. Even food trucks could represent a lucrative opportunity—70% of customers said they’d definitely be interested in visiting one if their favorite restaurant offered it. Taking your restaurant off-premise also has the added benefit of increasing your overall brand awareness.

Tap into Restaurant Retail, Travel and Tourism

Travel and tourism is another opportunity area that restaurants can take advantage of. This year stands to be a good year for the industry. International travelers alone are expected to spend over $100 billion on tourism-related goods. Money spent on eating out at restaurants will, of course, be a large percentage of that expenditure.

Restaurant retail is another interesting option to build your business. A number of restaurants have been expanding in this arena over the last few years. About one quarter are currently offering packaged food items for retail sale or have opened a grocery store section.

The take home message is that there are a number of business building opportunities out there for restaurants to take advantage of this year. The key to success lies in the operators’ ability to be creative, flexible and open to opportunity.

Important Questions Restaurants Should Answer Before Putting a Mobile Ordering Platform in Place

Having a mobile ordering platform in place is becoming more and more essential to any restaurant’s future longevity. Restaurants around the country are rolling out mobile initiatives left and right, and there’s no question about the success of that endeavor. However, there are a lot of decisions that need to be made before your new mobile ordering platform is ready to go public. Here are a few key questions operators need to answer before joining the mobile ordering movement.

Should Your Restaurant Invest in its Own Mobile Ordering Hardware and/or Software?

The first question to consider is whether or not it makes sense for your restaurant to invest in its own, customized mobile ordering platform. There are a lot of advantages to doing so. You can create your own proprietary software and apps, perfectly customized to your particular restaurant and customer demographic. You can also add nifty bells and whistles. One of these “bells” is a GPS locator that sends an order to the kitchen when it recognizes the person who has placed the order is near.

The downside, of course, is that it takes more time and money to develop your own platform, and doing so may not make sense for every restaurant out there. There are a number of mobile ordering technologies that already exist. It might be smarter to simply use an API (application program interface) to put one of those to use for your business—especially if time or money is an issue.

How Is Your Restaurant Going to Handle the Costs, Data and Security Issues that Arise with Mobile Ordering Platforms?

The next questions to think about in terms of rolling out a mobile ordering platform have to do with properly and efficiently handling money, data and security. For instance, you must decide who is going to host, manage and process payments from your customers. Are you going to use an existing service such as Google Wallet or Square, or are you going to look for a different solution? If you do decide to use a third-party, what transaction fees are involved? Vendor fees vary widely, so be sure to shop around.
Mobile ordering has excellent potential for drawing on demographic data if properly designed and payment processing security is paramount for any business. So, in terms of data, operators need to consider the following questions: What data are you collecting? Who owns it? Where is it going to be stored? How safe and secure is that data? What are the security levels?

What Goals and Strategies Will Your Restaurant Put in Place for its Mobile Platform?

Last but not least, it’s important to set goals and strategies in order to maximize the effectiveness of your new mobile ordering system. What kind of budget are you going to allocate? How can you capture the biggest audience quickly? Do you have a marketing plan in place to get people to use your new system? Are you going to pair your mobile ordering platform with any sort of loyalty program? And, most importantly … have you set success metrics and set up the ability to track the results of your endeavors?

Putting a mobile ordering platform in place for your restaurant doesn’t have to be difficult, but it does require some strategic planning and a bit of shopping around. If your restaurant business if ready to make the move to mobile, making sure you’ve done your homework ahead of time will make a big difference in how effectively you can roll out your new mobile initiative.

Hiring and Recruiting Strategies for Restaurants

In today’s world of employment, restaurants must rely on a combination of both high and low tech strategies to recruit and hire employees. Along with tradition methods of managing, recruiting, and hiring in-house, there are a variety of web-based employment services that can be utilized as well. Some of these offer a full suite of hiring services – from recruiting to onboarding – and use tests and assessment tools to help find your business optimal candidates.

The fact that much of the employee life cycle (from hiring to onboarding to training) can now be digitized ends up saving both time and money while producing higher quality applicants. Here are a few strategies to put into play while looking for that next best employee.

Make Sure Your Restaurant’s Recruiting Materials are Targeted and Compelling

Regardless of what vehicle you’re using to post your hiring opportunity, it’s critical that all of your recruiting materials are targeted towards the demographic you’re seeking to hire. It’s also critical that your recruiting materials are compelling. Focus on using language and visuals that speak to the crowd of prospective employees. The Millennial crowd in particular (those currently around 18-25 years old) are visual learners who are highly dependent on technology to get their information so it makes sense if you are recruiting from this crowd to have materials which speak their language.

For instance, this crowd will respond far better to a headline which says, “Get a job that doesn’t suck,” than they will to one which says, “Start your career today.” Post videos of current employees talking about what it’s like to work with your business, use lots of pictures and visual content, and ensure that the entire application process can be completed electronically.

Utilize Existing Relationships and Social Media Outreach to get Quality Staff

Posting an ad on Craigslist about your hiring opportunity is going to garner a lot of responses, but typically yields very few people who actually follow through and show up for the scheduled interview. A more cost-effective approach to notifying the public about your employment opportunity is to tap into your existing relationships – such as your social media crowd and professional contacts.

Along with posting your opportunity on your own social media pages, ask your industry contacts if you can post on theirs as well. Make friends with HR offices in culinary schools. Offer a “finder’s fee” to anyone who refers an employee who stays on board for at least a month. Using the people and professional contacts in your life to help find employees is often a better approach, because you’re working with people who already have at least some level of vested interest in your business.

Save Time and Money Using Digital Assessments

Along with being able to speed up your own hiring and training process by making it all digitally available, you can save time and money by using digital assessments to pre-screen your applicants. As you well know, an employee’s ability to be successful at their job often has less to do with their work history and more to do with their personality and work ethic.

Fortunately, you can now use online job boards to pre-screen your applicants according to aspects like personality or work ethic, because the vast majority require prospective employees to fill out personality profiles before they can search for jobs. These profiles typically include everything from work history to personality questions and can be very instructive in terms of finding employees that are well suited for your restaurant’s particular work environment.

The Benefits of Using Tech Tools to Manage Labor Costs

Balancing your cost of labor against the amount of sales you’re making at any given time is often a big challenge for restaurants. It can be hard to predict whether or not you should keep staff on in preparation for potential customers or send them home to save some money on labor costs.

Fortunately, there’s some great new tech tools designed to not only address this issue, but provide a wealth of other information as well. It’s called POS (point of sale)-based scheduling software, and if you’re not using it yet, you should be!

Restaurant Staff Scheduling Becomes Streamlined

When utilizing POS scheduling software, you no longer have to deal with irritating questions such as, “Do I work today?” Instead, you send out an approved schedule via email, text, or smartphone push alerts letting everyone easily stay on the same page.

Even better, if employees want to switch or trade shifts, it can’t happen without management approval and once the change is made it’s sent out to everyone else on the team immediately.  This system also helps to keep overtime in check as well as assisting your ability to stay within your labor budget. You can see how effective a communication and planning tool this can become for your team.

POS-Based Software Boosts Your Bottom Line

Along with making scheduling far more convenient, POS scheduling software also keeps track of information such as historical sales data, labor expenses in real time, and labor to sales percentages. This information can help improve predictive scheduling, control costs, and catch mistakes as they happen so that there are no surprises at the end of the week.

Above-store access allows district managers to view multiple locations at once, in real time if they wish, to see how closely actual costs are paralleling budget targets. This wealth of information is particularly useful in fine-tuning the actions of your managers. For example, if business has dropped off at 2:00 but the manager has kept everyone on until 3:30, it’s easy to see the impact of that choice.

Generate Forecasts so that You can Better Predict Staff and Sales for Your Restaurant

The final major benefit of implementing POS-based scheduling software is that it can utilize your historical sales data, labor budget, current events, and even extraneous factors such as the weather to help determine the amount of staff you should keep on during any given time frame. Managers who have a forecast of sales revenue handy are better able to schedule labor accurately for all positions and wage levels. It makes them more conscious of scheduling on a focused basis rather than just letting a shift ‘happen’.

Now granted, this technology isn’t fool-proof. Utilizing it effectively still requires some gut instinct on the part of your managers, but when used as a guide it can be a very powerful tool to both streamline your restaurant’s business as well as give you some clear insights on how to best manage the cost of your labor against the amount of money your business is actually bringing in.

Leveraging Facebook to Drive Sales and Increase Customer Loyalty

By now it’s old news that every business should have a Facebook presence. That said, many businesses continue to flounder in terms of garnering any real results from their pages. To simply have a presence is not enough – nor is attempting to use your page as a mere placeholder for advertisements. You’ve got to have an effective strategy to engage your audience and get them to take action. When it’s done properly, Facebook pages can be a particularly powerful tool for restaurants to both build their customer base AND drive sales. Here are the highlights of how to do just that.

Post Messages that are Fun, Engaging, and Speak to What Your Customers Value about Your Restaurant

Having an effective presence on Facebook means that you have to walk a fine line between providing content that is entertaining versus content that is brand-relevant. You go too far in either direction and you end up, quite frankly, wasting your time. It’s important to consider what your customers really value about your restaurant – not just menu items they might like, but what makes your establishment stand out from the crowd for them. Figure this out and you’ve got your starting point for posting content that is both engaging and relevant to them.

Take a Note from the Big Guys’ Facebook Campaigns

The fastest way to get an effective Facebook campaign up and running for your restaurant starts by checking out what is really working well for other businesses. Chain restaurants have been particularly good at creating effective social media campaigns. In fact, it was just 14 brands that produced the top 100 Facebook posts by restaurants with the most likes, comments, and shares in the first quarter of 2013.

Spend some time investigating brand pages such as Applebee’s, Starbucks, Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Papa John’s, The Cheesecake Factory, Subway, and Red Lobster to get some great ideas about strategies you can implement on your own restaurant’s page.

Facebook Graph Search Changes the Game

Facebook Graph Search was announced at the beginning of the year and promises to be quite a game changer in terms of how people find your business through online search. The idea is that a person can look for say, a nearby place to eat, based on the likes and recommendations of their Facebook friends. The kicker is that the search results for Graph are based on a variety of factors including the number of likes, virtual check-ins, location in relation to the searcher, number of friends’ photos tagged to your restaurant, reviews, etc., and what shows up for one person will be totally different with the next.

Fortunately Facebook Graph Search is still in beta, so you’ve got a little time to get all your ducks in a row and optimize your pages appropriately so that they show up in Graph search results. Facebook Graph Search is going to become a major pillar in how Facebook presents information about businesses, so it would be a savvy move on your part to get started now and get an edge on your competition.

Technology in the Restaurant

In our day and age, a business can’t survive long without adapting to the ever changing technology that barrages it. While you might think that food should remain relatively unaffected by the latest gadgets on the market, many restaurant owners have found that creative leveraging of new technology has significantly boosted their bottom line. Here are the highlights of some of the most interesting technological uses in the restaurant.

Mobile Payment Platforms for the Restaurant

It is estimated that the worldwide value of mobile-payment transactions will nearly quadruple over the course of the next three years as more and more consumers utilize their phones and tablets to pay their bills. The forecast is that the mobile payment market will be worth around $617 billion with a total of 448 million users by 2016.  This represents a huge demographic that, as a restaurant owner, would be wise not to ignore.

Unfortunately, there is not, as yet, a one-size-fits-all mobile payment platform. Different establishments are experimenting with a variety of different platforms to find the one that is best suited to the restaurant industry. The three biggest platforms in use right now are Square, Isis Mobile Wallet, and MCX.

Several restaurants have seen increased enrollment in their loyalty clubs when they adopt the use of mobile apps. These same institutions report vastly improved data gathering as well.  Integrating your brand with mobile payment platforms allows you to consolidate your mobile payments and mobile loyalty programs into one easily accessible platform.

Tablet PCs for Digital Ordering and Loyalty Rewards

Tablet PCs have become increasingly popular for a variety of uses in the restaurant. Some establishments hand them out in place of menus to allow digital ordering and at-table payment. Others are using them to give customers digital rewards tied to their loyalty programs when ordering certain items in-house. Several restaurants have found that the use of a tablet menu increases their sales of food and wine and has dramatically increased the use of ‘mix and match’ promotions for menu items.

Of course, tablet PCs have also found wide use as a tool for servers and hostesses to increase and efficiently deliver orders, track reservations, and increase consumer satisfaction with customer service.

Wi-Fi Bars, iPad Jukeboxes and Other Tech Amenities in the Restaurant

While the preceding technologies were used more for function rather than entertainment, these technological advances are equally important to meet consumer entertainment satisfaction requirements as well. Having Wi-Fi Internet available is particularly important, and some restaurants have gone so far as to create ‘Wi-Fi’ bars to encourage customers to linger in their establishments longer. Having outlets available to allow consumers to re-charge their devices is also particularly popular.

Having both plugs and Wi-Fi available can drastically increase the flow of traffic through the doors of the business. Other restaurant owners have employed technology in a more entertaining way – by providing iPads that will play personalized jukebox stations while you dine, or by using those same tablets to run a quiz bowl or other fun game that diners can play while they eat.

There are numerous choices a person could make when selecting the right technology to integrate with a business establishment like a restaurant. It’s smart to analyze the trends and figure out how to integrate technology that is both efficient to install and beneficial to customers to use.

Keeping up in the Kitchen

As vital as good food and great service are to the survival of a restaurant, one thing that restaurants should also strive to do is to stay on the cusp of technological developments that could greatly enhance their business. From the front of the restaurant to the back of the kitchen, all sorts of innovative technologies are available to streamline many processes involved with serving patrons. Most customers, especially younger ones, greatly appreciate efforts made by restaurants to stay up to date with current technologies.

Speed

When it comes to quick service, most customers feel that the quicker, the better. That is why some establishments, like coffee shops and juice bars with more simple fare, are considering installing self-serve kiosks. These will allow customers who know exactly what they want to skip the lines at the cash register. Much like a simple vending machine, they are able to make their purchase and move on. Some of these will even be set up outside the restaurant, which is very valuable to consumers who tend to take their breakfast or lunch on the run. Also, it will help to make more space in the dining areas during some of the busier times of day.

To help servers be quicker on their feet, a few restaurants have begun using some type of personal device, much like a smartphone, for servers to take orders. This can help speed the order-taking process up immensely by eliminating lags between each step of the process. For instance, servers would no longer have to take notes by hand for each order, and then enter it into a computer to be transferred to the kitchen. As soon as the order is complete, it can be submitted to the cooks before the server could even make it back to the kitchen. Some restaurants have even experimented with the idea of letting customers use the device to make their own orders and submit them directly to the kitchen.

Convenience

In almost any family-dining restaurant, customers who have to wait for a table are handed some sort of paging device that blinks and buzzes when it is their turn for a table. While they may keep the hostess from having to yell out a name and check outside every time a table opens up, they are still fairly inefficient. The systems are extremely costly, they do not allow patrons to stray more than a few yards from the restaurant, and they can transfer far too much bacteria from patron to patron.

Instead of using these, some restaurants have begun using a texting system. When a customer asks for a table, the hostess puts their name and cell phone number on a secure list, and the system texts the patron when a table opens up. Since nearly three quarters of American adults text, this is a viable option for almost any restaurant. Customers will appreciate the freedom to wait where and how they wish, and restaurants no longer have to invest in costly, germ-harboring devices.

Technology in Restaurants

With the world making use of technology in all areas of life, it would be unwise for restaurants not to take part.  Customers are changing.  They have less time and less patience, but still want to enjoy their restaurant experiences. There is a way for restaurants to tap into this technological trend.  Technology is an investment that can offer relatively quick returns . . . that is, if the customers are on board.

Technology is useless unless the customer feels he is benefitting from it.  Once the customer’s experience is enhanced by the technology available, however, a restaurant can truly make use of it. Electronic devices can be used to cut a customer’s wait time, to increase the accuracy of service, and to provide instant feedback about a customer’s experience.  This can be a boon for both the customers and the restaurant serving them. Forty-nine percent of people who responded to a Cornell study said that they walked out of a QSR because of the wait time.  And the younger the customer, the less patience he had.  A whopping 69% of customers ages 18-34 admitted to walking out of a QSR because of high wait times.

Using this feedback and the technology available, a smart restaurant may put kiosks, mobile devices, or other technologies to help decrease a customer’s wait time and keep those customers from leaving.Technology can also help customers feel more comfortable about eating at a specific restaurant.  Virtual menus offer the ease of providing nutritional and allergy information so that a guest can decide what to eat and where she should dine.

Devices that enhance the customers’ experience and put some control in their hands can go a long way to increasing a restaurant’s business.  Of course, technology cannot replace a friendly and accommodating staff.  The right choices in technology, however, can underscore the staff’s efforts and provide a more pleasant customer experience.