Updated: Jun 21, 2020
The restaurant is not an easy industry. It is one of the most competitive enterprises in the world of business.
What could be the hardest part of owning a restaurant?
Perhaps you are thinking that it could be either the food or the customer, but they are not.
There are two hardest parts of the restaurant business, and these are the money and your people.
Money is indispensable!
Let's talk about money. Owning a restaurant is expensive. You need capital, you need to pay expenses for rent, labor is high, taxes, insurance, all kinds of stuff that goes into the restaurant industry.
If we are not making money, and every month, we are losing money, sooner or later, we are going to run out of gas and we need to close our doors.
It is a vicious industry, many restaurants don't make it because the stats are outrageous, and it's heart-breaking.
Money is indispensable. You are in business, this is a restaurant, we need the money to sustain everything and whatever money we have, we need to keep most of it.
It is critical to be obsessed with our numbers, whether it's labor, whether it's food cost, there is every dollar going.
The profit margin of the restaurant is not the highest so you need to be focused on the numbers.
We are not generating money, we are not sowing seeds, who is going to do that for us? We need to be marketing our restaurant and engaged in money-generating activities.
That is why as restaurant owners and managers, you must dedicate lots of time to money-generating activities. Activities that are going to produce money over and over for us.
People matter!
The second hardest part about being in the restaurant industry is your people. We spend 98% of our time thinking about our people since we have already survived the money part.
People come and go, some of them quit, and some of them stay. Some are going through a rough season in life and their performance goes up and goes down.
But one thing remains true, and that is we need them, we need our people and we can't do business without their help.
They play an indispensable role in our success so we must always find ways of keeping them in our company, especially the good ones.
It only justifies why they should be taking a lot of our time, especially if you want to do this business well.
It is critical that when you glance at your calendar and you look at your week, you must have blocks of time dedicated to your people.
Setting a regular meeting with them, reviewing their performance week after week, and documenting how things are going exactly.
Training your people should be one of your obsessions. Training how are you going to take them to the next level every single week must always be on top of your to-do list.
What is going on in their lives, how can you help whatever that is going on so they will serve our customers better?
You must be constantly hiring employees, regularly documenting their performances, and sadly, continually firing people.
One of the best things in our company is that we are passionate about having a strategic training system and we guarantee that everybody gets some sort of training every week.
It doesn't matter how long the staff has been working in our restaurant, everybody must keep up with the training to ensure that no one is left behind.
The two hardest parts of the restaurant business are again, money and your people. These two can be your greatest liability and greatest assets.
Let me reiterate that we need to have tons of time devoted to marketing our business every single week, no matter if things are going well, no matter if things are going bad. We also need an enormous amount of time to always interact with our people.
We must be committed to meeting our staff regularly, talking to them one-on-one or sitting down with the two or three of them to communicate intensively. Training all the time is our goal.
If we get to manage these two things very well, if money is going good, and people are doing great, they are trained and we don't need to babysit them, life is going to be much easier for us restaurant owners.
Having a restaurant that thrives without you as a restaurant owner being physically working on the operational side of it because you have the people in place who know exactly what they need to do.
This has been the status of our restaurant presently and we want you to experience the same in your company.
Focus on how you can generate more money through your marketing strategy and other activities. Focus on your people so that they will perform well and contribute to the success of your company.
Money and people matter, both are indispensable so you must exert a tremendous amount of time and effort to keep them.
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