How Important Is Your Host Staff

The host staff is the first and last impression your guests have of the restaurant.
It is very important that your host staff is genuinely outgoing, with a great personality and can make your guests feel warm and welcome. If all this is not genuine, the guests will see right through this and it will be meaningless.This will make the restaurant feel very inviting and that first impression they make on your guests will be lasting.
They must possess great knowledge of the restaurant and including good menu knowledge. Since part of their job is answering the phone, they will be asked various quests that they must be able to answer. Otherwise, they have to get a manager for every guest question and this will take them away from managing the operation.
It is very important when the guests are leaving that the hosts say good bye, ask them how everything was and tell them to have a wonderful evening.
If the Host staff is in tune with the guests, they help acknowledge any potential unhappy guests and get the manager involved so they do not leave with their negative experience as the last thing on their mind.

Motivational Quotes

It is very important to keep your staff motivated. There are various ways of doing this, but sometimes a simple quote posted on the board or talked about at line ups can help. Below is a list of quotes that I like.

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started” Mark Twain

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Aristotle

“It is hard to fail, but it worse never to have tried to succeed.” Theodore Roosevelt

“The only man who never makes mistakes is the man who never does anything.” Theodore Roosevelt

“Simplicity is the key to brilliance.” Bruce Lee

“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” Henry Ford

“You will never possess what you are unwilling to pursue.” Mike Murdock

“He who controls others may be powerful, but he who has masters himself is mightier still.” Lao-Tzu

“The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind.” William James

“To move ahead you need to believe in yourself…have conviction in your beliefs and the confidence to execute those beliefs.” Adlin Sinclair

“People underestimate their capacity for change. There is never a right time to do a difficult thing. A leader’s job is to help people have vision of their potential.” John Porter

“People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents.” Andrew Carnegie

“Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.” Jim Ryun

“Motivation is a fire from within. If someone else tries to light that fire under you, chances are it will burn very briefly.” Stephen R. Covey

Building sales and employee morale at the same time.

A good way to build sames within the four walls of the restaurant is to run server contests that focus on selling items that can increase your check average, help get rid of high inventory items before they go bad (this works great in the case of over ordering which also helps combat high food cost), help increase sales in an area that may need a little help such as wine or liquor, and can also help build sales on slower nights.
If you provide great contest prizes this can have a huge impact on employee morale and can help generate competition amongst the servers and once everyone is on board it can be fun and everyone wins.
Here is a list of some on the contest I have done or seen done in the past:
Bingo-fill out a sheet of paper with a bunch of squares listing the menu items or drinks you would like sold. The first one to complete it wins.
High category sales, such as appetizers, wine, dessert etc…
Highest check average.
Wine feature contest for a month based on highest sales. Usually, three winners; first, second and third place.

Here are some the prizes I have offered in the past.
No closing duties or side work.
They get to write their own schedule for the next week.
Trade outs with other restaurants or local businesses.
Beer, wine and liquor purveyors can also give some really good prizes.

Anytime you can get your employees to compete with each other, can create a positive fun atmosphere where they can win some really cool prizes it a great morale builder.

What are bloggers saying about your business?

Knowing what is being said about your business on the internet is very important as positive things are great and good for your business and negative things can be very damaging.
Lets face it, just about everyone goes to the internet for their source of information and if they were just visiting your web site, then you could paint the picture about your business that you want everyone to see and know about you, and that would be all there is to it.
However, there are so many places on the internet for anyone to go and review your business, positive or negative. Blogging is now such a large part of the internet and has gained a great deal of popularity and credibility that a negative write up on your business can be very damaging and in the hands of the right blogger can go viral over the internet.
I use Google alerts to let me know whenever anything is written about the business I manage. You can set up these alerts here http://www.google.com/alerts and it seems to work very well, it even picks up my tweets from twitter. There are other sites that you can use, this just the one I use.
So far I have only encountered positive writings and they are great to share with our staff to help keep morale as high as possible. But if and when I encounter a negative one, I will be able to at least address it before it spins out of control and reaches to many people. Blog alerts can play an important part managing the business and I work way to hard to allow anything negative to go unaddressed.

Common units of measure conversions

A lot of food quality, consistency, and cost issues are due the fact that cooks often do not know how, or forget to do the proper conversions when cutting a recipe to a smaller batch, or increasing a recipe to a large batch. Believe it or not, they also forget that the is a big difference in ounces by weight and ounces by volume. Here are some basic measurement conversions.

1 T. = 3 t.

1 C. = 16 T.

2 C. = 1 PINT

4 C. = 1 QT.

2 PINTS = 1 QT.

4 QT = 1 GALLON

1 GAL. = 128 FLUID OZ.

8 FLUID OZ. = 1C.

1C. = .24 LITER

1PINT = .47 LITER

1QT. = .97 LITER

1 GAL. = 3.8 LITERS

Customer Service Quotes

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit”-Aristotle

“The road to success is paved with well handled mistakes.” – Neiman Marcus

“Everybody makes mistakes. It’s what happens next that matters.” – Danny Meyer

“It’s easier to keep a customer than get a new one.”-Allan Keller

“Good customer service costs less than bad customer service.”-Sally Gronow, Welsh Water

“Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it.
It is what the client or customer gets out of it.”-PETER DRUCKER

“Customers don’t expect you to be perfect.
They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong.”-DONALD PORTER

“Being on par in terms of price and quality only gets you into the game.
Service wins the game.”-TONY ALESSANDRA

“People expect good service but few are willing to give it.”-ROBERT GATELY

“Choose to deliver amazing service to your customers. You’ll stand out because they don’t get it anywhere else.”-Kevin Stirtz

“Customer service is not a department, it’s an attitude!”-UNKNOWN

“Although your customers won’t love you if you give bad service, your competitors will.”-KATE ZABRISKIE

“In business you get what you want by giving other people what they want.”-Alice MacDougall

“Customer satisfaction is worthless. Customer loyalty is priceless.”-Jeffrey Gitomer

“If you don’t take care of the customer someone else will!”-Raffaele Ciarla

“Under promise and over deliver.”-Toby Bloomberg

“Your customer doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”-Damon Richards

These Customers are impossible! Ever hear that? Are They really?

How many times have you heard a server or cook say this guest or customer is impossible? What about a manager? Ever heard them say that? Ever felt like that yourself?
There are times that it seem no matter how hard you try, can not make some customers happy and you end up comping the entire check which sometimes can be rather large. Yes, sometimes it seems like they are just looking for something for free and some people probably do that. What really gets me is that employees and management alike try to find excuses to not comp anything for the guest. A lot of times it’s not even us they are upset with, they are just having a bad day, or are fighting with their spouse and every little thing seems to be wrong and we just seem to get the bad end of the deal. It is our job to make sure they leave happier than when they came it.
What employees never think about and what management seems to forget is that we have spend marketing or advertising dollars somewhere to try and get them in the door. How bad can they hurt us with negative word of mouth comments about us? A lot!
If your customers have access to send comments to your corporate office and most companies allow that access, how much time and money does it cost to take of them once they get to corporate? A lot more than if you could have taken care of it in house.
In fact some of our most loyal customers are one that we made a mistake with and went above and beyond the competition to make it right.
When it comes to taking care of the guest, this is one area that can absolutely set you apart from the competition.

Staffing For The Season

Seasons vary in different markets and staffing for the busy season is very important in order to properly execute the increased business.
Improper staffing in the dining room caused false waits and empty seats in the dining room. At least if you are going to give proper service to the guests. Improper staffing in the kitchen creates long ticket times, or improperly executed recipes and of course, in the end they can both kill your business in the future.
It is imperative that you do some research if you don’t know your market very well. If your timing is off when you start to increase your staff, it could cost you a lot of unnecessary dollars if you hire to early. This can also hurt employee morale as there won’t be enough hours to go around.
I have had the opportunity of working in several different markets and from my experience it usually pickups around November and gains momentum through December, and January is usually pretty strong as well. in areas that are populated with a lot of “snowbirds” February and March are typically the two busiest months of the year. Then restaurant sales seem to steadily decline April through September with August and September being the two slowest months of the year.
Entering the slow season has yet another staffing challenge as you try and balance available hours to the staff. Obviously, your best employees are the one you want to keep, but it is still difficult cutting peoples hours that need to work. However, they usually find a way of getting rid of themselves.

Bar Costs

In most casual upscale restaurants, I would guess that average bar (alcohol) sales are probably about 25-30% of the total sales. As with food cost the bar has several factors that need to be taken into in order for anyone to properly manage the costs costs of a bar. They include good purchasing practices, proper pouring of drinks, a good draft beer system, proper storage of wine, eliminating theft and making sure your bartenders are ringing everything up and not stealing from you.
This is an area that you absolutely do not want to over purchase any high end wine or liquor as these tend to run several hundred dollars and are slow movers. That is a lot of money sitting on the shelf and unnecessary inventory on hand can lead to miscounts and theft. Track your purchases and utilize your product mix reports when placing purchases.
Ensuring the bartenders are properly pouring drinks is essential. I use a marked wine glass with either tape or a measured amount of water next to the area the bartenders are pouring drinks so they use it as marker when pouring actual wine. If you use jiggers it is important to make sure the bartenders are using them on every drink and they must know their recipes to use the proper jigger size. If you are a free pour bar as we are, then the bartenders must complete a pour test sheet so you can see how accurate they are on different size pours. They must also know their recipes. Over pouring kills you liquor cost while under pouring kills your business as weak drinks will not bring your guests back.
It is important to have a good draft beer system complete with keg savers. I have found that Keg savers help prevent air getting in the lines by allowing you to bleed the line after tapping a new keg. This helps prevent the 3-4 pitchers of foam that is poured off after each keg and believe me, this ads up and some beers pour off more that 4 pitchers of beer. I also like to use the Beer Blast system that makes Nitrogen from the outside air. It replaces the Nitrogen tanks that you need for Guinness and also mixes a little bit into your regular kegs that I have found helps to ensure they are empty. (It is important to keep a back up of Nitrogen just in case the system goes down, but this has not happened to me in 5 years in three different restaurants) How many times have you thought the kegs were tapped to early as you shake the empties feel what seems to be a lot of beer left in them? This adds up as well.
Improper storage of wine causes it to go bad sooner than it would if it were stored properly.
Theft is a concern in every restaurant and as much as you would like to trust every one you simply can not. I like to keep every thing locked up except what is in my back bar. If you have an overnight cleaning crew, it is important to keep an eye on your draft beer as that is a perfect opportunity for them to steal beer. I have heard and seen some keg handle locks, but have personally never used them.

Hiring

Hiring and staffing could be considered one of the most important and difficult aspects of running a restaurant, with out the staff you can not execute the business.

First of all it costs a large amount of money to hire and train new staff members so it best to retain them, but it is almost impossible to never lose employees. Second, all applications should be screened and considered.  Then during the interview it is very important to try and figure out whether or not they possess the experience, personality and charisma that you want to put in front of your guests. It is also very important that the expectations be clearly set here, at the interview. This will sometimes weed out the individuals that will not be able to live up to your expectations and do not care, and in fact I tell them that if they can not live up to the expectations to not even bother wasting their or my time, because I will not hesitate to let them go if I feel they do not live up to their interview(a lot of people can talk, but not all can walk that talk.) Of course they will tell they can and will, but then they simply do not show up to orientation. This is great because it saves you a lot of money.
It is important that if you have any interview procedures you use to check their skills, that you apply them to every interview to avoid any possible discrimination issues. For example, I like to have a prep cook show me their knife skills by having them cut some vegetables so I can observe how they do before I actually hire them. For broiler cook I have them cook me a burger or steak to a certain temperature and so on.

Then at orientation, it is important to make sure all paper work, both legally required documents as well as any company required documents are filled our properly. This will save a lot of time and head ache in the event that you are audited.

I also belive it is important to make sure you reinforce the job expcatations and that you sincerely welcome them to the team. For a lot of people their job is their home away from home, so make them fell at home. I know I spend more time with the people at work than I do my family. Then it is time for the training to begin.