O’Dell Restaurant Consulting Blog

A 13 period accounting cycle has several advantages over a monthly accounting cycle. The two biggest advantages are eliminating month end labor accrual to straighten out your P&L, and recordkeeping.
With a 13 period year, holidays fall into the same week of the same period every year. Your weekly sales data can be accurately compared to [...]

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Here is a reply I once posted to an assistant manager’s inquiry from a foodservice operation. It deals with a common situation in the food service industry. One that I have not been asked for advice on before, but one that I do have a strong opinion about, especially considering the initial response of other [...]

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It’s common for startup restaurants to budget an initial 10% of their sales to go toward marketing in the first few months. If no one knows who you are, it can take some $’s to get known.
After that, it’s more common to see 2-4% of your sales being directed toward marketing. As far as how [...]

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Excerpt from a forum post to an Indian restaurant owner: 
A unique selling point stays away from claims about “better food” and “better service”. Those are minimum expectations of your customers, not reasons to choose you over your competition. Sure, you may be able to get that very small market of people looking for Indian food by [...]

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You won’t be able to find the answer as to what it is exactly that makes a restaurant successful in any forum. Without experiencing it for yourself, it’s tough to imagine that a restaurant is one of the most complicated businesses you can run. Most businesses are pretty simple. You buy a product, mark it [...]

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Have you taken advantage of your four walls and table tops to market this event? How about the wait staff? Price the event so you can offer five dollars for each reservation a member of your waitstaff brings in, guaranateed with a credit card. Market the event with table top print pieces and wall posters [...]

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A good employee party done right is a gift that keeps on giving. Even if it means closing down for a day, it’s worth it for the goodwill earned with your staff. The quickest way to lose that goodwill is to not have a party that you normally have every year. That sends the message [...]

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Food comping should only be used in extreme cases. By comping food, you train your customers to expect it. Then when you don’t, they’re dissapointed for not getting something they wouldn’t have gotten at another restaurant anyways.
A customer that simply orders something they end up not liking, not because it was bad, but because it [...]

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You don’t need an extra charge to cover packaging costs. It will only make your customer’s think you are nickel and diming them.
While you do have to pay for packaging to put your to-go food in, there are many expenses you are avoiding by not servicing that customer inside your restaurant. There are no chemical [...]

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I suggest only using one thing to base your incentives on, the only thing that really matters, which is profit.
Whether you are encouraging upselling or controlling food costs, the ultimate goal is more profit to you. So rather than encouraging different segments of the staff to concentrate on different parts of the P&L, and setting [...]

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