O’Dell Restaurant Consulting Blog

This may be the most important question you can answer when designing a restaurant concept. It is definately 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 [...]

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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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Long ticket times are a common problem in restaurants, and nothing will scare a potential regular customer away like having to wait 45+ minutes to get their food.
There are many factors that can increase ticket times. In this post, I would like to cover one of those issues, overloading a kitchen station.
Part of designing a [...]

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Who are we?
What do we want our restaurant to be known for?
What style of service do we offer?
What kind of food do we cook?
What can our customers get from us that they can’t get anywhere else?
How can we make our customers FEEL?
What is our color scheme?
These are all questions you should ask yourself about your [...]

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One of my favorite shows is Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. If you haven’t seen it, and you’re in the restaurant business, you’re missing out on a lot of free lessons.
Gordon Ramsay is a bit of bully. He likes to push people’s buttons. I think one of his other shows, Hell’s Kitchen, is just a stage [...]

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