Four Time-Saving Tips for Restaurant Owners/Managers !!!

How much time do you spend each week growing your restaurant business as opposed to running it?

If you’re like 99% of restaurant owners and managers, your answer is probably “not nearly enough.”
After all, running a restaurant is a huge job that can keep you busy from the start of your day until late into the night. So it’s no wonder you can’t find the time to focus on marketing strategies that can help you grow your business.
The good news is, an effective profit-generating marketing plan doesn’t have to take weeks to plan and execute.

Today I’d like to share my top 4 time saving-tips to help you set up an effective marketing plan that will help grow your business huge – working less than 5 hours a week on it.

… And yes, you DO have 5 extra hours a week to spend on your marketing, and we’ll show you where to find them.
Time-Saving Tip 1: Schedule 1 Hour a Week for Planning
The best time to do this would be every Sunday afternoon or early Monday morning, when business is slow. This allows you to create a schedule for the week ahead that identifies all the important tasks you need to accomplish and blocks off times when you can work on them.
We suggest you schedule your “planning hour” for the same time every week, so that you create a rhythm that allows for maximum productivity.
Time-Saving Tip 2: Spend 30 Minutes 3x a Week on Marketing Communications
In order to effectively market your business, you are going to have to stay on top of regular marketing communications tasks such as:

• Updating your restaurant website/blog
• Responding to positive and negative reviews of your restaurant on popular review sites such as Yelp.com and CitySearch.com
• Creating coupons and free gift cards to hand out to your customers in order to encourage repeat business
• Writing up posters announcing your upcoming special events
• Creating newspaper ads to promote upcoming events

The best way to manage this process is to schedule 30-minute blocks three times a week for yourself to work on these tasks. Again, if you schedule these 30-minute blocks for the same times each week you’ll  create a rhythm that will help you to be more productive.
Time-Saving Tip 3: Always Keep a Pen and a Notepad in Your Pocket
As a restaurant owner or manager, you spend a lot of time on the floor, dealing with your staff and customers. And all that time on the floor is time you’re not spending at your desk, working on your marketing plan.
… Or is it?
The truth is, when you’re in the thick of it, listening to your customers and overseeing your staff—that’s when some of your best marketing ideas can come to mind. You might suddenly think up a status update you’d like to share with your Facebook followers. Or maybe you’ll come up with a great idea for an upcoming promotion or special event.
If you jot your ideas down as they occur to you, then you don’t have to bang your head against the wall trying to remember what they were when you finally have a moment to sit down at your desk.  This will save you a lot of time and aggravation and will help you maximize your efficiency.
Time-Saving Tip 4: Schedule 15 Minutes for Facebook Every Day
Facebook can be an incredibly powerful marketing tool for your restaurant. Best of all, it’s free. It only takes a few hours to set up an effective Facebook Page for your business – and once it’s up, you can rapidly grow an audience and establish a strong connection with them.
And you don’t have to spend more than 15 minutes a day on it.
We recommend you schedule your 15-minute “Facebook Break” for the same time every day – maybe early in the morning when you first get into the restaurant, or in the afternoon once the lunch rush is over.
During your fifteen minutes, here’s what you can do:

• Send out a status update telling everyone about your specials for the day.
• Respond to any comments, messages, or Friend Requests you may have received.
• Spend 5 minutes searching for people you know on Facebook and asking them to “Like” you, in order to grow your audience
• Write a status update letting people know how preparations are going for your next upcoming event. It personalizes your business at the same time as it reminds people about your event. comment that everyone can relate to, say, about the weather, or an upcoming holiday.

By implementing these four tips, you can get an enormous amount of marketing work accomplished every week. All you have to do is create a regular schedule for yourself and then stick to that schedule. You’ll be amazed at how fast you’ll see results!

How to Drive Traffic to Your Restaurant !!!

Online marketing can boost a restaurant’s brand and attract new customers.

• Restaurants that use online marketing tools such as emails, daily deals or websites tend to be viewed by consumers as “modern” (67 percent emails, 59 percent daily deals, 65 percent websites) and “popular” (63 percent, 59 percent, 63 percent).
• Restaurant owners say the most effective ways of attracting new customers are websites (90 percent), TV ads (87 percent), social media (84 percent), restaurant emails (82 percent) and daily deals (77 percent).

Customized marketing messages tailored to the customer’s preferences lead to more sales.

• Some 87 percent of consumers would visit or order from a restaurant if they got a savings offer; 95 percent of restaurant owners believe savings offers are effective marketing tools.
• Consumers would go to or order from a restaurant if they received customized marketing messages that: referenced past visits (68 percent), allowed them to make reservations (66 percent), and identified them by name (64 percent).

Restaurant owners know what marketing tools work; they just need to implement them.

• 84 percent of restaurant owners think restaurant-specific marketing emails help increase revenue, and 78 percent of consumers say an email from a restaurant motivates them to visit that restaurant. Some 63 percent of restaurateurs say they plan to use such emails in the next year.
• 78 percent of restaurant owners say daily deals boost revenue for their restaurants, and 69 percent of consumers say getting a daily deal email motivates them to visit the featured restaurant. Forty percent of restaurant owners plan to use daily deals in the next year.

Online advertising and social media were less effective.

• I was surprised by this response, but consumers say the least effective ways to get them to visit a restaurant are online advertisements (58 percent), social media (56 percent) and radio ads (56 percent). Apparently, these methods still aren’t perceived as personalized or targeted enough.

3 Smart Ways To Market Your Restaurant On Pinterest !!!

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As a restaurant owner, you’re most likely always on the lookout for ways to market your establishment and get new diners in the door. Sometimes this comes easily via word of mouth from current patrons and other times we‘re sure – it’s a bit of a challenge

However there are numerous restaurants experiencing nice growth due to new web marketing trends such as social media. Many restaurant owners mention that they’re getting an influx of new customers due to efforts on Instagram, YouTube and the newest social media darling; Pinterest. Yes! Pinterest. But how are they driving traffic from this image based network to their doors? This article covers a few good tips and how you too can benefit. Read on.

# 1. Restaurant Photos

If you have a groovy place, by all means show it off to the world. Better yet let others show it off for you via photo pins on Pinterest. Take as many shots as possible of all areas of your restaurant; including indoors, outdoors, popular seating areas, your top dishes, etc and pin them on a board you could call “restaurant gallery” or something similar. Just be sure the photos are nothing short of stunning, creative or interesting as this is what will compel others to share and pin with their friends.
Feel free to continuously update this board with new photos as time goes by. Popular nights at your restaurant and or big parties are a great opportunity to take photos for this board.

# 2. Customer Involvement

Nowadays one of the best ways to keep customers engaged is to involve them. With Pinterest this would take the form of creating a board that allows others to join and pin in it. They call them group boards and essentially these are collaborative boards where you allow others to join and pin as a group.You could ask customers to submit photos of their favorite meal and best one wins a prize or you could ask customers to take a photo when they come in for their birthday party and so on. The ideas really are endless.
At The Menu Shoppe we try to take advantage of as many social media marketing efforts as we can and so far it is indeed paying off. Pinterest group boards are an excellent way to get new or current customers involved and engaged with your brand; and therefore your business.

# 3. Food Videos

Pinterest is known for images but they also allow videos and the savviest “pinners” know that videos do well when it comes to food, recipes and such. You know the old adage “if an image is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million”. This could not be truer in the food niche, as would be customers want to see and experience foodie delights as if they were there sitting at a table.
So get your video camera or smartphone out and take videos of your food, your restaurant, your staff and anything else that takes the customer virtually “there”. Be sure that the videos are shot with good lighting, are crystal clear and short. Keep each video under two minutes long as anything longer than this will make you potentially lose viewers. And pin pin pin them to your video board.
Pinterest is an extremely popular social networking site that is mostly made up of females who love to drool and share food related items. So this makes it an ideal destination for your strategic marketing efforts. Try one or all of our tips above to get new foot traffic in the door or keep current customers coming back for more.

Biodegradable tableware !!!

Chinese designer Giyun Deng is the creator of graft — a set of disposable tableware referencing the textured skins of fruits and vegetables. This ideal creation for kids is made from a bioplastic derived from renewable resources. The series of utensils is completely biodegradable, solving the environmental problem typically prevalent in disposable products. The project blends the texture and color of culinary items into the cutlery, visualizing their source materials: the leaf of an artichoke becomes the bowl of a soup spoon, a stalk of celery transforms into the handle of a fork, a pineapple stem is the blade of a knife, and a whole carrot acts as the grip of a small spoon.

The process began with the decision to use plant skin as a textural medium. first, deng picked vegetables and fruits with special tactile features and reproduced their skins with resin to find a proper application. the textures were carefully copied to make sure they could seamlessly interface with the 3D printed parts.

Why do you want to start a Restaurant? !!!

Why do you want to start a Restaurant? The “Why” question is really critical as all the next steps you will need to take and the decisions you will need to make, will be driven by the “Why”?

The “Why”?

What could possibly be some of the reasons you want to start a restaurant business?

1. I am tired of sitting in front a computer all day along – I want to do something different. The restaurant business seems easy enough and attractive.
2. I want to be an entrepreneur and create the next big brand/company.
3. The food business in India is expected to grow significantly over the next several years and I want to ride the wave.
4. It could be a “Recession Proof” business – as the food is a basic need and will never lose money
5. It seems to be a very profitable business – most people I talk to tell me that I can recover my investment in 3 years (That turns out to be a 33% annual return on the investment – fascinating)
6. I have a passion/strong interest in this business and want to be seen as a restauranteur.
7. Other Reasons you may have

Reactions to the “Whys” 1 & 2.

• I am tired of sitting in front a computer all day along – I want to do something different. The restaurant business seems easy enough and attractive.

The best way to convince yourself that sitting in front a computer all day along is absolutely worth the effort and the best possible option for you (Return on investment for the amount of work you will put in and the sacrifices you will make), then I would encourage you to quit your job and start a restaurant. You will find yourself running back to the same cubicle you came from, sooner than you can imagine, and this time, you will use Araldite or something even stronger to hold on to your job.

• I want to be an entrepreneur and create the next big brand/company

I find the phrase “I want to be an entrepreneur” very confusing. If you have access to a lot (a few Crores of easy-to-get money – by this, I mean money that you can use to fuel your dreams) – could be your savings, could be from a rich father/father-in-law/wife etc. Essentially this will be money you can use at your will, without having to really tell anyone what you plan to do with the money. Now if your reason is to be an entrepreneur and try to create the next big/brand company, a restaurant business should feature in your evaluation.

If you are want to be a true blue entrepreneur (bootstrapping approach), then I believe there are better opportunities available – ones that are more Venture Capital friendly. With external investment your chances of building a large brand and a business is tremendously accelerated. Professional investors, who invest in start-ups, generally pick businesses where the founders already have some experience in the same business area. Plus they like IP (Intellectual Property) creating businesses, where scaling requires much lesser investment compared to the revenues/profits that can be generated.

I believe that the restaurant business fundamentally is NOT a Angel Fund/Venture Capital friendly business. Why?

Like I mentioned earlier, Angels Investors and VCs seem to like businesses that can create a product/solution/offering using the initial money they invest, that can then be scaled at a rate that is positively disproportional to any additional capital investment. For a restaurant business, even if your first unit is very successful, to grow, you would need a lot of capital again and again. If "x" is the investment for the first unit, to grow revenues by 100 times, you would need an investment of 100x (probably more if you need more money towards marketing/branding). VCs like businesses where if they invest “x” initially to create a product, then to grow revenues by 100x, they would probably need to invest 10x/20x, primarily towards sales, marketing and customer support. Having said this, there are quite a few restaurant businesses in India which have received VC funding so far. Plus with the market expected to grow significantly in the next few years, VCs may start getting more interested.

Poll Results: Time within which customers expect delivery orders to reach them !!!

The first poll I ran on this blog received 43 responses in about a week. Moving forward I am planning to run a poll every month and collect some emprical data on customer expectations, industry persepctives.

POll 1 Question:
If you order food for home delivery, what is the reasonable time in which you expect the food to be delivered to your home?

Analysis:
Though the sample size is small to make firm conclusions, it is apparent from the above data that 45 minutes is the maximum a restaurant business can take to deliver food to the customer's door-step, after the order has been placed, to create a good customer experience. This is not a easy thing to do consistently, especially during busy times (weekends).

Let this diwali burn all your bad times and enter you in good times !!!

O Ram! The light of lights, the self-luminous inner light of the Self is ever shining steadily in the chamber of your heart. Sit quietly. Close your eyes. Withdraw the senses. Fix the mind on this supreme light and enjoy the real Deepavali, by attaining illumination of the soul.