When I hear of a restaurant whose sales are trending down, there are a few things I look at specifically. The first thing to consider is whether or not the quality of your food has slipped. Have you started cutting corners to cut costs by buying cheaper ingredients or doing too much prep ahead of time? Has there been a major kitchen employee change that could have affected the consistency of your food? Is your food coming out of the kitchen as fast as it used to? Has your level of service declined for some reason?

When asking about quality, the owner or the chef is probably the last person who should be asked. Normally, your opinion is going to be very biased because your pride is involved. You need to get input from other professionals in your area, or directly from the people who are eating in your restaurant, and not just the regulars.

If your sales are declining, people are coming in but not coming back. There is a reason why people are not coming back and you need to find out what that reason is. Don’t trust your gut. Swallow your pride and survey your guests, all your guests. Do you have a comment card program? That would be a good place to start. Put out comment cards with every tab. Encourage your servers to instruct the customers to fill them out. Have the customers rate your food, service, and facility, then track the results. Watch for trends in the satisfaction of your customers.

I would bet that if your sales are dropping, there is some aspect of your business that isn’t what it used to be.

Once you have whatever problem is causing the decline fixed, THEN you can work on a plan to better market your restaurant and increase the customers. Bringing more customers in before you find out why the existing customers aren’t coming back is like trying to row a sinking ship. Better to plug the hole first.

Within a recipe, some items like cheese are measure in weight ounces instead of fluid ounces. When you find the perfect sized spoon or scoop for your portion, measure how much a portion of cheese weighs. Divide the total weight of the cheese you are buying by the portion size to find out how many recipe portions there are per purchase portion. Account for any waste (called shrinkage) also. This will give you the amount of recipe portions per inventory portion. Since you’ll have the price you are paying for the inventory portion, you can divide it by the number of recipe portions yielded to get a recipe portion cost for this item. This will help you calculate total recipe costs.

I have an inventory spreadsheet available for purchase in my download store on my website that helps you automatically calculate the recipe portion costs. Find it here

Read my article about pricing food here:
Pricing food: Why you’re doing it wrong and how to fix it

I have yet to see a restaurant with 53-58% COGs keep their doors open.

The next question is, “Are you calculating your Ideal Food Cost to make sure that you aren’t losing product to theft or waste?”.

The only way that you can truly know if you are managing your costs properly is to calculate your ideal food costs (what your product SHOULD HAVE cost you to sell), and compare it to your actual food costs which are calculated by taking your beginning inventory, adding purchases and subtracting your ending inventory.

First, when your restaurant isn’t directed at a particular segment of the market, you have to pay to market to everyone. Marketing to everyone is expensive. Since most marketing budgets are limited, you get a lot more out of your limited marketing dollars when you market repeatedly to a smaller group instead of less often to a larger group.

Next, having a concept that tries to appeal to more people usually results in a lack of focus in that concept. In addition to trying to tell your message to too many different people, you also have a message that requires too much detail to say who you are and what you do. If you can’t say who you are and what you do effectively in one short sentence, then neither can your customers. This makes it very hard for them to recommend you to others, or to even remember what it is you do themselves.

A good, focused concept will reach people outside of your target market. You should still focus on marketing to a smaller group though, without that group being too small. In my experience though, concepts that try to appeal to too broad of an audience don’t usually connect significantly with any of them.