There has been a lot of great press this year about the restaurant industry’s economic impact from the number of employees to the estimated $709 billion in revenue in 2015. Growing your operations is a great accomplishment. You have succeeded and now it’s time to grow and expand. All you have to do …
restaurant inspections
Do third party inspection programs drive consistent daily execution?
It’s hard to believe that having a 3rd party inspection service show up twice a year, maybe once per quarter (we very rarely see this), has a big impact on the daily execution of operations. Anyone can be great for a day or a shift with some notice. But to be great every shift …
Running Restaurants is Getting Harder – Part 3
To read part two click here Labor cost is another issue that is going to affect restaurant operations. We can’t just look at labor as bodies and do we have enough. We are going to have to redesign our entire operations strategy to minimize labor and operating complexity so we can operate with fewer people …
Running Restaurants is Getting Harder – Part 2
To read part one click here Food trucks are another segment of the industry that have prospered from wireless technology. Until recently it was incredibly expensive to take mobile credit card payments. Now it’s comparable to hardwired credit card payments. Mobile technology has made it easier for food trucks to service customers. It used to …
Running Restaurants is Getting Harder – Part 1
If you are a restaurant manager responsible for one location or thousands of locations, then you need to keep reading. Is running restaurants getting harder? Profitability is being squeezed from every direction. From $15 hr minimum wages, increased competition, commodity prices, and technology to name a few. When I came up in the industry in …
FOH Readiness is Key
I’m sure you have experienced this a million times…. I’m going to share a story from my days bartending in a very busy mountain town. Spring break was one of the busiest times of the year. Two-hour waits for dinner and up to an hour wait for lunch. No real break between the …
How do you use your operations data?
So you are collecting operations data every day, probably every shift, but what are you doing with it? If you are like most operators you are filing it in a drawer in the GM’s office never to be seen again. But what a waste of time and data. Why go through the exercise if nobody …
Yelp responds to critics
On May 22, 2015 we wrapped up a blog series on Yelp. Click here to read the wrap up post. As a Yelp user I recently conducted a search for a restaurant in West Palm Beach and I saw this new message, starting with “Your trust….”, from Yelp right below Recommended Reviews. I clicked on …
Essentials of a SMART Pre-shift Inspection
Baselines are covered first. The SMART Pre-Shift Inspection Protocol captures data that is essential to operations and inspections (fridge temps, food temps, locations of sanitizing buckets…everything you need for CYA moments and health inspections). But the SMART Pre-Shift Inspection Protocol also collects the seemingly extraneous data that could be far more telling than the fact …
“Moneyball approach ” to managing multi-location restaurants
The question is: Which data? What things should our “Moneyball scouts ” be looking at? That’s where SMART Pre-Shift Inspection Protocols come into play. With the SMART Pre-Shift Inspection Protocol, you can leverage your workforce to collect data, which will let you draw correlations between operations, sales, and costs. That will help you determine your shortest path to …