These are proven hard hitting tactics that every truly successful Restaurant Owner lives by, in today’s economic times and ANY time!

It’s time for a change! Would you agree? Change can be a difficult thing for most everyone, including restaurant owners, especially during economically challenging times. Yet, if you are not seeing the results that you want to be seeing from the things you are doing… change is what you need to do. Just a bit of change can make a lot of difference. A lot of people make excuses for where they are, but in order to overcome the struggles, you need to climb over the hurdles and take responsibility for your actions. It’s imperative in order to have success. In order to make changes, you need different actions, different thoughts, different resources and different tools. You want fresh food in your restaurant… you need fresh ideas too. Make a fresh start!

TAKE ACTION ON THE RIGHT ACTIVITIES. A great idea without action is just still a an idea. It can not make money for you. Choose one idea to start with and start moving forward with the action. Don’t worry about making a decision; you can always make adjustments. But doing nothing is the usually the worst thing you can do. Learn from your mistakes and make changes. By taking actions on the right activities, you will see success!

INVEST IN, CREATE AND USE SYSTEMS TO REPEAT PROCESSES Don’t do everything yourself. You can delegate duties and measure responses. Make a list of all the things that you spend your time on that recur day-to-day or month-to-month. Pick the ones that use up the most amount of your valuable time. Develop a system and delegate or outsource these things. Base it on how much you want to earn in a year. If someone else can do it at a lesser cost, use that resource. You can’t focus on minimum wage activities (slicing, dicing, chopping) and expect to make big money on the other end. You should be managing the system, not being so wrapped up in the restaurants system that you’re a key part of it.

GUESTS, NOT CUSTOMERS At our restaurants, we want people to feel like family or friends visiting our home and to receive that extreme special warmth of hospitality while there. Stop looking at folks who dine at your restaurant as a one-time transaction, and instead start building an ongoing relationship. When guests have a WOW experience at your restaurant, they will tell at least 5 other people and at least one of them will become a loyal guest. Just that bit of a change from customer to guest can make a huge difference in the way people visiting your restaurant will feel. Your employees will feel the difference as well. Developing this on-going relationship and history keeps your guests wanting to come back to your restaurant.

When it comes to creating a menu... who is best suited to compose it for the restaurateur?

I've got a bakery in a high-volume, seasonal theme park. This is the 4th season I've owned it, and I've been tweaking the menu to make up for the fact that I have no "Home Run" food items. There is an extensive jurying process, and protection of items, so I am challenged to stay creative and either improve my existing items to a higher level, or come up with new items that no other food vendor here carries.