Opening a restaurant is a popular business idea, particularly if you love food. Those of you with an eye for food and some culinary talents may wonder why on earth you shouldn’t open a restaurant. Especially if friends and family have always told you your food is delicious and they’d pay for it! Restaurants open opportunities for people that have moved from a different country, letting you show your new hometown some of your traditional cuisines.
Are you interested in running a restaurant business? It can be enjoyable and profitable, but also very stressful. There’s a lot for you to worry about, and here are the four biggest problems you’ll face most days:
Food waste
You will have a lot of food in your restaurant, and this means a lot of waste will follow. A tough problem is figuring out how to deal with all the food waste. Firstly, you need tactics to reduce the amount of waste produced. Secondly, you need solutions on how to remove it from your restaurant. A lot of food waste – such as things people left on their plates – can be recycled as compost. So, get a compost bin and make sure all the food goes in there, and you can dispose of it correctly.
In terms of reducing food waste, you can focus on looking at your orders and seeing if you can reduce the quantity of food you order in. Also, maybe send out slightly smaller portions if everyone leaves a lot. Another idea is to donate a lot of unused food ingredients to those less fortunate who could use a free meal.
Employee schedules
You can’t run a restaurant without a whole range of employees helping you. There’s the kitchen staff, then the front-of-house staff. A big struggle is working out how to schedule everyone in so that people work shifts every day. You need to ensure it’s fair, allowing your employees to work the number of hours every week that they sign up for.
In reality, the best way to deal with this is by getting your hands on restaurant scheduling software. Plenty of options exist, and the idea is that you can schedule your employees on a rotation every week, and they can put themselves down for their preferred shifts. It’s easy for everyone to see when they’re working and who they are working with. Then, if shifts need to be swapped, you can do so and everyone will see the newly updated shift via the software app. It’s a lot better than having a piece of paper stuck in the staff room.
Speed
Even though your restaurant is not advertised as a fast-food chain, modern eaters are impatient. We expect our food to be cooked and served to us extremely quickly, or else we get restless.
Therefore, many restaurant owners struggle with unhappy customers and poor reviews because of the service. It’s suggested that their service is poor because it takes too long for food to come out. As a result, you need to find solutions to ensure that your food is cooked quickly, but to a high standard, and while retaining its freshness. Part of this involves having enough chefs in the kitchen to keep you productive.
Competing restaurants
Lastly, your biggest daily problem will be all of the competing restaurants in your area. How do you ensure that people choose your restaurant over the others? Firstly, pick a cuisine and then ensure you are the best at that. Select popular dishes on your menu that people like, but also include ones that none of your competitors have. This means that, if someone is craving a certain thing that you provide, your restaurant is the only place they can get it.
Another way to handle competing restaurants is by providing more options for the paying customer. Instead of dining in, you might let them come and collect an order to take home. Or, even better, you can get your restaurant on a delivery app and offer at-home deliveries. Now, people can choose your restaurant over some of your rivals if they want takeout but your rival restaurants aren’t offering this!
At the end of the day, a restaurant business is always going to be tough work. When done correctly, and with a bit of fortune involved, it can be a hugely profitable venture. There will be concerns, and the four things listed above are arguably the biggest problems you will face every day as the owner of a restaurant.
