The 6 Reasons Your Restaurant Is Losing Business & How To Avoid Closing The Doors

If you want to keep customers coming in the door you have to accept, change, and move on from these six hindrances. This will ensure your restaurant stays open and profitable…

1. You Haven’t Mastered the Hospitality Industry

What draws people to your restaurant? What is your best signature item? Determine what it is and get really good at it. A great restaurant cannot be everything to everyone, particularly when you’re not the best at it.

With a competitive environment consumers are more quality-driven than ever, mastery is what will win. Chick-Fil-A has mastered the quick service chicken sandwich, McDonald’s has mastered the hamburger, Papa Murphy’s has mastered the carry out Take-N-Bake Pizza. Every system, process, and procedure they have in place is designed around their core product offering.

• Define your core item promote IT! Don’t mess with the other 50% of your menu that represents 10% of your sales, just be the best at that one thing, but do it better than anybody else.

2. Your Staff Doesn’t Care

It’s hard to find good staff. Much of the younger generation doesn’t know what it takes to physically work hard they seem more focused on technology.

Many Managers have become unmotivated to train and when you aren’t motivated yourself, it’s hard to teach others to be enthusiastic about their work and providing customers a great experience.

So how do you fix it.

• Make your restaurant a fun place to work. Offer incentives.
• Create better systems and tools so that it’s easier for everyone.
• Better initial training and ongoing training, if you aren’t good at that, hire someone who is!
• Hold staff and managers accountable and be a hands-on leader.

If you don’t incentivize employees for being a top performers, your customers will ultimately suffer. Embrace challenges…

3. Your Food Quality Needs To Improve

You need to have GREAT food because good isn’t good enough anymore.

People want a reason to leave their home for better food. If your food is not amazing, a customer will go down the street to your competitor or stay home. Don’t lose the battle to poor food!

4. Your Prices Proceed The Value

If your prices are higher than the other fine dining or casual restaurants then you need to show value in your quality of food.

• Remember visual is a great tool. Presentation is critical.
• Food preparation is taking too long.
• Food is not prepared according to the way it was ordered
• Offer healthy substitutes and vegetarian dishes

Most customers aren’t angry with the “price” they are angry that they spent so much for something that was not perfect or took too long. They were okay with the price, so long as their expectations were met or exceeded.

Think about value, think about distinction, originality, difficulty to duplicate, atmosphere, and a friendly staff. All the little things that contribute that contribute to the overall perceived value of the customer’s experience.

5. Your Restaurant is Inconvenient

This isn’t all about location but about all the little things your restaurant can do to make a customer want to return.

• Are you willing to let a customer substitute an item for something they don’t like or is unhealthy to them?
• Will you split checks if asked?
• Do you have enough parking?
• Does your staff smile and have a welcoming, and genuine demeanor?
• Is the menu easy to read or is like a book?
• Does your staff know the menu well so they can answer questions and make recommendations without needing to “ask the chef?”

If your restaurant is not exciting, joyful and welcoming then why should a customer choose your restaurant over the one down the street?

6. Your Customer Experience is Poor

• Staff unfriendly
• Staff unprofessional
• Restaurant not clean
• No manager visible
• Too loud, uncomfortable temperature, poor lighting

You Don’t Need More Marketing… You Need The Best Experience For Your Existing Customers

To wrap this up, Monty Moran – the Chief Marketing Officer for Chipotle – has been quoted saying “The best marketing we do, is the experience a guest has when dining in our restaurant.”

If you improve your customer experience and your operations, you can spend a lot less time and money on marketing.

If you want to move to improve your customer’s experience and ensure your restaurant stays open and profitable, WE CAN HELP!

Contact Debbie Hart at The Hart Experience, Debbie@thehartexperience.com 602.717.3271, www.thehartexperience.com

Please feel free to send me your good or bad experiences I love to publish customers comments…