O'Dell Restaurant Consulting Blog

This is probably the most often asked question by restaurant owners, managers and chefs. If you are smart enough to be calculating your actual food and liquor costs by performing a physical inventory, then you are half way there.
This article will discuss a very important part of controlling food and liquor costs, one that most restaurants [...]

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One of the most frequent questions I hear soon-to-be, and existing, restaurant owners lament, is how much to pay a manager.
“Most” owners asking this question are working owners. After being in the business for awhile, owners start to realize that they can’t be in all places all the time, and still be able to market [...]

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In order to effectively convey what it takes to create an effective logo, I think it is important to outline the qualities of an effective logo.

An effective logo is easy to recognize, even at a glance or at a distance
An effective logo is easy to remember
An effective logo tells people who you are
An effective logo [...]

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This may be the most important question you can answer when designing a restaurant concept. It is definitely the most important question to answer when creating a marketing plan.
One of the biggest mistakes restaurants make is trying to appeal to everyone. If you think that your target market includes everyone, you are setting yourself up [...]

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Charlie said….. Marla said….. Patrice said…..
He said, she said. It’s a game that gets played in a lot of businesses. Not having a defined “pecking order” that is understood by every person in your organization can lead to a lot of unneccessary headaches. Here’s a quick lesson about avoiding this business pitfall.
Who is in charge [...]

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High failure rates for restaurants. Yes they’re exagerated, but they’re still high. According to recent studies from Cornell and Ohio State universities, 59-60% of restaurants fail within the first three years. As many as 75% may fail within the first five. Why are they so high? For a list of the six biggest reasons, see [...]

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The bigger a city gets, the more small restaurants with great food and dirty bathrooms there are it seems. I noticed this phenomenom recently when visiting Kansas City from Wichita, Kansas. In Wichita, we have a shortage of independently owned, small, interesting restaurants. There are a load of chains here, and plenty of restaurants to [...]

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O’Dell Restaurant Consulting would like to announce the opening of it’s online webstore! In our store, you’ll find lots of on-site, email and telephone consulting service packages to help you solve the most pressing problems in your business. You’ll also find some great Microsoft Word, Excel, .pdf and graphic file restaurant tool downloads, most available [...]

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One thing I’ll never forgive formal culinary schools for, is teaching new impressionable would-be chefs to use a budgeted cost percentage to price food menus. Chain restaurants share an equal responsibility for perpetuating this bad practice by focusing their managers on food cost percentages without letting them in on the secret that the cost percentage [...]

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One of the primary reasons that some businesses training programs work, and some don’t, is in the method their managers and trainers use to teach new skills. This seems to be especially true in restaurants and food services, due to the prevelance of leaders without formal educations. Sorry if that offends anyone, but it’s true.
While [...]

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