Easy Ways to Turn First-Time Customers Into Regulars

Easy Ways to Turn First-Time Customers Into Regulars

by | Aug 19, 2016 | Business Toolkit, Management

Regular customers are the heart of your restaurant business. They’re the ones who come in over and over again, sharing information about your restaurant with others and encouraging them to eat there, too. Turning first-time customers into regulars is a profitable way to encourage further business at your restaurant. 

Build Opportunities to Reconnect

Customers come into your restaurant for a relatively short period of time. While they’re there, you want to do your best to build a relationship with them. That includes:

  • Using multiple opportunities to discuss specials, take their drinks, and share information about special events.
  • Making sure each table knows the server who is responsible for taking care of them.
  • Making eye contact, staying friendly, and chatting with customers, even on a busy night when it’s hard to keep up with everything.

Make It Memorable

Your town is filled with restaurants. Turning your restaurant into the place people want to visit, whether it’s for a Friday night date or a mid-week stop on the way to another activity, means making each visit memorable. There are several strategies that can help you make your restaurant stand out from the rest.

  • Send them off with a souvenir, whether it’s a business card, a pen, or a copy of your menu.
  • Make the last bit count: the perfect after-dinner coffee, the ideal dessert, or a final interaction with the customers.
  • Do something special. Set your restaurant apart by offering a signature dish like no one else’s, creating a unique ambiance, or offering a different kind of special.
  • Make sure that it’s obvious where customers are. Set your restaurant’s name in their minds so that they’ll remember where that perfect dish they’re craving came from!

Your customers should know what to expect every time they walk through the door of your restaurant.

Keep the Experience Constant

Your customers should know what to expect every time they walk through the door of your restaurant. If your food is excellent one time and so-so the next, it’s hard to encourage customers to keep coming back. Excellent service should always be paramount. There are several ways to encourage this consistent experience for every customer, every time.

  • Specifically train each new employee who comes through your restaurant. Make sure they know exactly what’s expected. When realistic, allow them to shadow another employee who is already in their position.
  • Create clear guidelines and directions to ensure that each process is easy to follow. When possible, write them down so that employees can reference them when they need them.
  • Discuss proper tone and attitude with regards to customer service. Young people, in particular, may struggle to speak respectfully simply because it’s something they’ve never been taught.

As you work to increase your repeat customer base, you’ll find that your restaurant flourishes as never before. Your customers will love finding out what you’re offering next, checking out your new dishes, and coming back for their old favorites time and time again. Your serving staff will get to know those regulars, making a better experience for everyone.

You might also like…

Experience Sirvo for yourself

Sign up now to find hospitality jobs and hire top industry talent.
Sign up
3 Reasons To Have Your Restaurant’s Water Tested

3 Reasons To Have Your Restaurant’s Water Tested

by | Aug 8, 2016 | Management

As a business owner, your to-do list never ends. You wear a lot of hats, you keep balls in the air and your plate is always full. From managing your team to ensuring your patrons and guests are always having a positive experience, the quality of your establishment’s water is probably the last thing on your mind. Yet the toxins and harmful substances found in public water might surprise you. Courtesy of Restaurant Hospitality, here are three reasons why it makes sense to test the water in your facilities.

Your building might contain old lead pipes

Many of us have been conditioned to believe lead is a thing of the past. Over the years, lead has been removed from substances like paint, but unfortunately, we still have to worry about it showing up in our water due to old lead pipes that weren’t regulated until after the 1980s. Unless you’re a plumber, you’ll never know whether or not your pipes have lead in them, which is why testing your water for lead is crucial.

We still have to worry about lead showing up in our water due to old lead pipes that weren’t regulated until after the 1980s.

Lead is one of the most harmful chemicals found in water, especially for children who might be drinking it. The only way to eliminate lead from water is to filter it out. While some people believe that boiling water is the best way to get rid of lead in water, this is actually a myth. Boiling water actually causes lead particles to “loosen up,” making the water even more contaminated than before.

 Your local utility company can only test so much

Lead is a problem local utility companies can’t solve, either. While local utility companies test for contaminants at their facility, there’s not much they can do once the water is flowing through your pipes. Because every plumbing system is different, testing for lead is a difficult thing to regulate and measure from a community- or city-wide perspective.

Most water contamination occurs in private plumbing systems or service lines supplying your facility.

While local utilities work hard to ensure the water leaving their facility is safe, your facility’s’ plumbing system is like the Wild West. Most water contamination occurs in private plumbing systems or service lines supplying your facility, meaning that even if you have cleaner-than-average city water, your personal water could still be at risk.

Your customers care about the water quality

According to a recent Gallup poll, Americans are increasingly worried about polluted drinking water. The percentage of concerned citizens grew from 55 percent in 2015, to 61 percent in 2016. Give your customers peace of mind by ensuring the water they drink from your tap, water fountain or kitchen is clean. That extends to your soda and ice machines.

Testing your water to keep it free of contaminants like lead and arsenic is an important step that will increase trust and build a better relationship between you and your customers.

You might also like…

Experience Sirvo for yourself

Sign up now to find hospitality jobs and hire top industry talent.
Sign up
10 Steps To A Great Restaurant Newsletter

10 Steps To A Great Restaurant Newsletter

by | Aug 5, 2016 | Business Toolkit, Management

Not only does the food you prepare bring in the customers but the environment and atmosphere in which you offer it. Giving your customers a sense of what awaits them begins long before your restaurant newsletter arrives in their email. Your newsletter expresses who you are and what you have to offer. It builds on existing relationships to create new ones. To make sure you do everything right, here are 10 Steps to creating a great restaurant newsletter.

Offer Great Customer Service

Perhaps you have unlimited funds to create a beautiful environment — but even a small, casual restaurant can provide a wonderful experience. Service is key. Friendly, professional, hard-working staff who serve the correct items in an appropriate time-frame let customers know you care about them. Building relationships with customers through simple techniques like calling them by name is key.

Create Your List

Who will receive your newsletter? Your customers who love you! Provide a way for customers to join your email newsletter list. All serving staff should speak about the newsletter after a customer has enjoyed a delicious meal and good experience in the restaurant. Let them know its purpose: providing a weekly menu of specials? Offering coupons and other incentives?

Learn how to take beautiful photos of the foods you offer or find an employee who has a good eye.

Use Photos

Photos are the way to tantalize your customers with Food, Food, Food when you can’t lure them in with the sight and aroma of an actual dish. Learn how to take beautiful photos of the foods you offer or find an employee who has a good eye. Build a photo library of your own foods to use in newsletters.

Plan It Out

Invest planning time into your newsletter. Think about what is most important to communicate and how you can frame it. Create a visually appealing template. If you can’t afford a designer, there are lots of email services out there nowadays that offer help and templates (we use Mailchimp).

Customers want to know what delicious food you’re going to offer them when they visit in response to your newsletter reminder.

Be sure your plan is for something that is easy to digest (no pun intended) and keeps the focus on what’s most important. Also, keep it simple; you don’t have to put everything into this newsletter — save some for the next one. Last but not least, you want to be consistent in frequency, so when you’re planning, keep this in mind!

Be Present On Social Media

Connect your newsletter to your accounts on social media that your customers use – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and more. Provide links to these accounts in every newsletter. Post pictures and company updates to keep in touch with your customers and let them know if there’s anything coming up.

Listen To Your Clients

Be client-centered in your newsletter. What do your customers want to know? They want to know what delicious food you’re going to offer them when they visit in response to your newsletter reminder. Customers look for both familiarity and variety. Your regular, fixed menu offers them familiarity. Specials and Items of the Day offer them variety.

Make sure to share something new each time – a program, a new service or a new award – to make each newsletter unique.

You don’t need to repeat your whole fixed menu in each newsletter. You can summarize it, sometimes pick a dish to highlight. Be specific, though, about Specials and Items of the Day, and whenever possible, include mouth-watering photos.

Provide Boilerplate Information

Your address, phone number, website, email address, links to your social media accounts and hours – make sure they are there and are easy to find. Awards or special mentions? List them. Great Yelp reviews? Provide a link. Make it easy for people to find out more about you and to get in touch.

Make Each Newsletter Unique

Yes, the boilerplate information is important, but this is a “news” letter! If you said the same thing to a friend every time you connected with them, you probably wouldn’t be friends for long. Be sure you share something new each time — a program or special event, a new service or an upgrade, a thought about your food or an experience in the restaurant, a featured staff person or customer, a new award.

This is a “news” letter!

Provide A Call To Action

What do you want people to do in response to this newsletter? Share it with three other people? Bring a friend to dinner? Order lunch for an office? Come to the restaurant during a particular week or for an event? Be specific, and offer an incentive.

If your newsletter is honest, informative, attractive and easy to take in, if it reminds your customers how much they like your food and how much they enjoy visiting you, it will be a great success.

You might also like…

Experience Sirvo for yourself

Sign up now to find hospitality jobs and hire top industry talent.

Sign up
How To Motivate Your Restaurant Employees

How To Motivate Your Restaurant Employees

by | Jul 29, 2016 | Business Toolkit, Management

A thriving restaurant is driven by happy, motivated employees. When your staff is motivated, it shows in their work and in your cash register. Keeping workers motivated may appear a daunting task at first, but it’s really quite simple. With a little creativity, there are countless ways to motivate your restaurant employees!

Hold Competitions

Humans are competitive creatures, no matter what job sector they’re in. Restaurant owners can tap into that drive as a way to improve sales and provide incentives for recommending specific menu items and offering top-notch customer service. It doesn’t require a lot of money, and yet it can be a very powerful tool.

Restaurant owners can tap into competition as a way to improve sales and provide incentives for recommending specific menu items.

It’s called gamification and it can help boost and even exceed goals. Try putting together menu bingo cards and hand them out to the servers. Encourage them to recommend the menu items listed on the cards. When they sell one of those items, they can mark off the spot on their card. The first one to get bingo wins a prize.

Managers should make it their duty to oversee these competitions and ensure the prizes are being fairly distributed. Also, make sure the staff isn’t being distracted from their jobs. Some games and drawings will work better for some employees than others, so feel free to experiment and figure out which ones motivate your team the best.

Ongoing Training

Some employers fail to see the value of continuing training beyond the onboarding stage. They think workers are either not interested or don’t need additional instruction.

Receiving ongoing training helps the staff to feel more valued as individuals and improves the overall morale.

On the contrary, receiving ongoing training helps the staff to feel more valued as individuals and improves the overall morale of the establishment. It also demonstrates an invested interest from management for employee success and advancement. If an ongoing training program is not in place, consider adding one.

Celebrate Your Staff

Employees like to feel like management cares about them as individuals rather than simply as workers. Anytime a staff member reaches a milestone, such as celebrating a birthday or completing a training course, make it a point to celebrate the occasion. It doesn’t have to be a big fancy party – providing drinks, a free meal, or a cake is sufficient.

It doesn’t have to be a big fancy party – providing drinks, a free meal, or a cake is sufficient.

Provide Bonuses

To encourage employees to stay with the restaurant, consider offering an annual bonus or a raise for every year a worker stays on. Regardless of hourly pay rates, employers can give regular bonuses based on how many years the employee has been working for the establishment. Even if there are few opportunities for growth, it can still serve as an incentive for your staff to stay on the team.

Close Early

Whenever holidays come around or a staff member celebrates a major life event, such as a wedding, it’s not a bad idea to close the restaurant early. This way the entire team can celebrate the occasion without some of them having to stay behind and work. Doing this will also allow for employees to better manage work with their personal lives without having to burn themselves out.

This way the entire team can celebrate the occasion.

Implementing even just one of these tactics will surely improve your team’s overall attitude towards their job. Your staff will not only become more motivated, but they will begin to enjoy their work and be much more pleasant to interact with.

You might also like…

Experience Sirvo for yourself

Sign up now to find hospitality jobs and hire top industry talent.

Sign up
From Food Truck to Restaurant: Establishing Your Brick-and-Mortar Business

From Food Truck to Restaurant: Establishing Your Brick-and-Mortar Business

by | Jul 29, 2016 | Management

Your ultimate dream was to open a restaurant, but you didn’t have a lot of money. So instead you opened a food truck – and it’s been a soaring success. Your customers love your food, and you feel confident in moving forward to bigger things. So what’s the next logical step? Opening that brick-and-mortar store, of course! And, here are a few things to keep in mind.

Review your original goals

Why did you want to open a food truck in the first place? Was it because you wanted to be a chef while being your own boss? Maybe it was a step forward in your strategy to grow your business. Whatever the reasons, successful food truck owners should consider how they want to grow professionally before pursuing brick-and-mortar options. If it doesn’t fit in with your plans, perhaps you should stick to the truck. But for those looking to expand, moving on to a restaurant could be a great idea.

You might discover that a particular location is too crime-heavy for your tastes, or it may prove better than you expected.

Consider various locations

Take advantage of the mobile nature of the food truck. Use it to scope out the neighborhoods where you’re considering opening an established restaurant. You might discover that a particular location is too crime-heavy for your tastes, or it may prove better than you expected. It’s also a way to test whether your customers will follow you to purchase your food. If so, then chances are they’ll go out of their way to check out your new restaurant.

Run the numbers

It’s no surprise that brick-and-mortar restaurants require many more additional expenses than the food truck. Besides renting the building, you would need to purchase decor and insurance as well as hiring additional staff. And that doesn’t include the need for more food. Consider the cost versus the profit, and look over past accounting records for your food truck. You’ll need to know what sells and what doesn’t as you consider your options.

Consider the cost versus the profit, and look over past accounting records for your food truck.

Plan your strategy

Reevaluate your menu and figure out if you need to add any items. Consider sticking to a simple menu to minimize potential food waste. You will also need to allocate your resources. Keep in mind the amount of time management required for scheduling future employees and food prep. If you decide to add new items, figure out the best places to purchase the food while keeping to your budget.

What about the truck?

If you open a brick-and-mortar restaurant that will be open year-round, you may need to re-examine what purpose your food truck serves towards the success of your business. Depending on your circumstances and location, perhaps the truck will continue its normal route as it has in the past.

Another option is to offer catering for special events, such as birthday parties or local concerts. Regardless of the truck’s new role, it will double as a mobile advertisement for your new location. Without needing to invest any additional funds, your food truck will become an indispensable marketing tool.

Regardless of the truck’s new role, it will double as a mobile advertisement for your new location.

You may also decide to run the truck only during the warmer months and keep your business strictly to your anchored establishment throughout the winter. If your area experiences regular cold and harsh winters, this move can be a boon to your business when previously you only had the truck. The brick-and-mortar establishment will provide a safe haven to your customers who may want to purchase your food but would rather not face the elements.

Don’t forget the legal issues

Leasing a property can be complicated. Remember to take care when negotiating lease terms and consider hiring an attorney to make sure everything is as it should be.

You might also like…

Experience Sirvo for yourself

Sign up now to find hospitality jobs and hire top industry talent.
Sign up
How to Create a Unique Restaurant Concept

How to Create a Unique Restaurant Concept

by | Jul 15, 2016 | Business Toolkit, Management

A good concept is vital for marketing a new restaurant. Given that there are over a million restaurants in the United States alone, it may seem impossible to find a unique, appealing new niche. The fact is, with enough creativity and passion, you can come up with a restaurant concept that is fresh and exciting. Whether you are in the brainstorming stage of your new business, or you are in the process of re-branding your current restaurant, follow these tips to create a winning restaurant concept.

Be a visionary

The first step in creating a unique concept is thorough brainstorming. Use open-ended questions that allow you to ponder ideas without restrictions. Take note of all the crazy and random thoughts that come to mind. Let yourself have fun with it. Once you have a long list of ideas, you are ready to mix and match them.

Create a scrapbook of notes and images. When you see an appealing design or art concept, take a picture and save it on your phone. As you go through the day, ideas will pop into your head. Whenever this happens, jot it down on paper or in a note app on your phone. At the end of the day, gather everything together into a folder and use it to fuel your next brainstorming session.

When you see an appealing design or art concept, take a picture and save it on your phone.

As you consider ideas, they will spawn other, even more interesting ones. After enough brainstorming, you will be able to pick out some shining nuggets and discard most of the lackluster ideas. Once you have a few great ideas, you are ready to put more practical thinking to work in order to narrow them down based on how unique and inspiring they are, along with their viability from a business and marketing perspective.

Also, be patient. Great ideas don’t happen overnight. Do research. Study the market and examine the trends. Take long walks and let your imagination wander. If that eureka moment doesn’t happen, take a night or two to sleep on it and you will have a fresh perspective and new ideas the next day.

Draw inspiration from others

Isaac Newton, the inventor of calculus and physics, famously said: “If I’ve seen further (than others) it was only by standing on the shoulders of giants.” This idea holds true for great restaurateurs as much as for scientists.

If I’ve seen further, it was only by standing on the shoulders of giants – Isaac Newton

The greatest ideas have been inspired by the genius of others. If your solitary brainstorming session doesn’t yield a true gem, why not look toward some of the most intriguing concepts that are out there and put your own personal twist on it? Also, a lot of the most successful restaurants took old ideas and just improved upon them.

Mix and match ideas

Think about all the most memorable experiences you’ve had in restaurants you’ve visited. One may have had delightfully eccentric menu items, and another may have had a fun and unique design concept. Maybe you had great service that felt genuine and down-to-earth while still exuding professionalism. Take all the best experiences you’ve had and combine them into one “dream team” concept for a winning restaurant.

Take all the best experiences you’ve had and combine them into one “dream team” concept for a winning restaurant.

On the other hand, you may have been to a place that was excellent, except for one blaring flaw. This means the market is in need of someone (you) to come along and do it right.kkl

Create a fantasy league of extraordinary chefs

When developing a great unique menu, imagine you could gather together all the world-renowned chefs you’ve admired over the years. Research and learn more about these icons.

You may be surprised at the ingenious ideas you come up with.

Think about what menu they might devise if they collaborated with each other, or what new fusion of world cuisines they might invent. You may be surprised at the ingenious ideas you come up with by doing an exercise like this, and it is bound to be fun as well.

Some important things to consider when making a final choice are: Would you be thrilled to dine at this restaurant? Is there a restaurant that you wish there were more of? Also, even if your concept is not completely new, if you are inspired by the idea it will have your individual flair that can’t be reproduced anywhere else. If you are passionate about your idea, the energy will be passed on to your staff and the customers will know they are in an exceptional restaurant.

You might also like…

Experience Sirvo for yourself

Sign up now to find hospitality jobs and hire top industry talent.
Sign up