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10 Reasons Why Your Restaurant is Not Thriving

Updated: Jun 21, 2020




Are you struggling to grow your restaurant sales every day? Do you know the reason why you are not being successful in this business?


You must identify the reasons why victory seems so hard to achieve for you to be able to finally have that favorable outcome that you've been longing for your restaurant.


Here are 10 possible reasons why your restaurant is not growing fast enough:





1. Having great food

You believe that your food is great. How about the people who got the chance to taste it, did they enjoy it?


Well, you don't have to wonder about it, what you need to do is to check your online reviews and see what people are saying regarding it. What is their verdict, is it a thumbs up or thumbs down?



Always remember, to have a thriving restaurant, your food must be good all the time. It's all about providing good food consistently. Consistency will lead to sales growth month after month.


2. Speed of service

Does your food take forever to come out and received by the customers? Is it sometimes fast, or usually slow? Do you have standards that you follow concerning the speed of service? Speed of service does matter a lot.


We live in a "microwave" society, people want their food now. If they need to wait for 40 minutes to have their food, they would have cooked it at home. Your food is good, but is it taking too long?



You need to assess if your service is fast enough to lead to repeat business first to grow your sales.


3. Friendly service


When you look at your restaurant operations, observe and assess, is your service friendly enough or are there some of the areas that you need to work on?


Are the customers getting greeted immediately the moment they come into your doorstep? Are the staff always smiling?


The friendliness of service is very important, we must be overly-friendly at all times.


Just being friendly enough is not going to cut it, we need to be on top of it and it is possible, we need to smile, we need to greet our customers consistently.


Look over different aspects of your restaurant to make your service very friendly in a memorable way that can keep customers from coming back and grow your sales eventually.


4. Obscurity

When we started our restaurant, we did not have a remarkable sales, and we always had been focused on improving our dishes, training our staff to be friendly and provide a great speed of service, etc.


We worked very hard and exerted so much effort on these things without realizing that the basic reason why we did not have good sales was obscurity. People didn't know us that is why we didn't have enough customers.


 


 

As small restaurant owners, we need to get out there and kill obscurity.


Every single time, we need to get this word out of our business, offline, online, every possible opportunity we get because the odds are against us.

So it is obscurity, there are not enough people who know your restaurant, that makes your sales not progress.


5. Marketing


You may not be marketing your business enough that is why your sales are not growing. It has to be an investment, you need to consider marketing as though it's an investment in your business.


In our case, honestly, it's like you put a dollar in and you get 600 to a thousand dollars back per customer that you acquire in a year.


What are our average weekly sales and what is the average we spent weekly on our marketing?


Look at the percentage of sales that you spend on marketing. Without marketing, we are not going to consistently grow.


Do the Math, perhaps marketing is the reason why you are not growing fast enough.


6. All about your focus

Maybe you are focused on the wrong things. As a restaurant owner, you and I must be obsessed with money-generating activities.