RESTAURANT MANAGEMENT TIPS RESTAURANT CONSULTANTS OF AMERICA™
Wanted: Restaurant Management Skills
Somebody has to run this restaurant. Somebody has to manage these people. Somebody has to make all the decisions. Guess who that somebody is? Once you’ve made the decision to become a restaurant owner, you need to be prepared to manage three core things: yourself, your people, and your business.
Tip Jar: To learn about how a restaurant works and whether the lifestyle appeals to you, get a job on someone else’s payroll. Although working for someone else is not the same as running your own place, the experience can be a great education.
Manage Yourself
People who are great at leading themselves are usually great decision makers. Confidence garnered from knowledge makes it much easier to make smart decisions. Lack of data and information can cause you to make an uninformed and therefore bad decision. So use your head. Collect practical information and ask questions. Use your heart as well: See how you feel about your conclusions. Use the clock, too: Once you have the required data, don’t be afraid to take a 24-hour cooling-off period to make a quality decision. If you’re still torn about your decision, don’t ignore your feelings. They’re telling you to go back and do more research.
Another part of managing yourself is being able to assess your talents and personality honestly. Do you like risk? That’s a major test of this dream of yours because your life becomes a risk when you take an entrepreneurial leap. An entrepreneur is able to endure and even enjoy risk as associated with a working business. Risk is part of the game. Winning strategies reduce risk.
Manage Your People The restaurant business is a people business. The number of people it takes to create one positive dining experience can be mind-boggling.
The core of building any team or relationship begins and ends with trust. The word trust itself is also a helpful acronym for the elements necessary to build a successful team:
Truth: Be truthful to yourself, your people, and your vision. If you always tell the truth, even when it would be easier to go another route, you will never have to remember what story to tell.
Respect: To be successful in any business you must respect the people who work for you, the people who work with you, and the customer who pays you.
Understanding wants and needs: Understanding the perspectives of others will help you. If you know the goals, wants, and needs of others, it will help you build a more substantial and long-term business relationship.
Solidifying team goals: Goals are wonderful—team goals are powerful. If the team gets the opportunity to set their own goals and build action plans to achieve them together, you will see more team spirit and significantly better performance.
Touching hearts: Leading people and engendering excitement within people begins by touching their hearts. It is not enough to merely understand. You must care.
Manage Your Business
In order to manage your restaurant business, you need plans: business plans, financial plans, marketing plans, and operational plans. You cannot just wing it.
