RESTAURANT MANAGEMENT 101

Yeah, I said it.  You can send dozens of pounds of food to the garbage, or have ten too many people on the floor if you have phenomenal sales.  While this certainly isn't an excuse to run crappy food and labor, you can get away with it, for a little while...

Your boss is happy when you make your sales goals, and you'll probably bonus.  If you work for a chain restaurant you get to brag to all of the other location's managers about how much you beat them by.  Sales are a very good thing (and they pay the bills).

There are only three ways to build sales, but there are millions of ways to apply these three things.  The key then, is to ask yourself which method your actions fall into.  Once you have a clearer understanding of which direction you're heading in, you can fine tune your tactics.  These three methods are get new customers, increase customer frequency, and increase ticket average.  Sounds simple, right?  It is.

Let's look at this point first since it's the most difficult.  Every restaurant has its own marketing plan which may or may not involve you at your current level.  Always keep in mind that every person that you see is a potential customer, and first impressions last a lifetime.  Follow your marketing department's directive or read this page's sister site Restaurant Marketing 101 for more.

This is where your role as a restaurant manager comes in.  Give your guests a reason to come back.  Add value to their visit.  Talk to them.  Run great operations.  If your customers have a great visit, they will come back.  Their great visit is your responsibility.  If your restaurant is executing like it has the potential to, people will return.  See to it that happens.

This is the role of the entire management staff and the FOH staff.  Secondary sales add up fast.  Do you think McDonalds lost money when you Supersized your #2?  You're damn right they didn't!  They made billions on your 39 cents.  Do the quick math - Increase ticket average by 50 cents, while averaging 500 transactions a day for a year.  What did you get?  $91250.  That's a lot of cash, and all you had to do was teach your cashiers to sell a large soda instead of a small.  

It's really easy to overlook the things that you can do inside the store to boost sales when doing field work seems so exciting.  Your ROI will be insanely higher though when you focus on the customers that you already have.