Tag Archives: emotion marketing

A lesson in listening

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Listen to learn, not to defend!

by Andy Swingley
Regional Manager
Thomas & King
Applebees Restaurants
http://www.fohboh.com/profile/AndySwingley

 

 One of the skills we should all take time to be better at everyday is listening. Many opportunities pass us by each day when we don’t engage in “active” listening. There is a positive benefit to be gained from everyone you interact with on a daily business especially in your career or business. In the competitive world of business, people occasionally view listening, learning, and changing as a vulnerable or weak value. Some would say, well if I don’t stand up for my position or prove my point, I will get walked on or miss the next big chance. Every person you engage with achieved the level of their current position with an attribute or skill that is worthy of understanding!

So slow down, look the person in the face and listen. Close your mouth and open your ears. Slow your mind down and really try to understand the message that is being given to you. Set aside proving the idea that is coming out of the other person’s mind is wrong or needs corrective coaching from you. When engaged in active listening, practice these mental behaviors:

What is the outcome of this conversation? Are you here to learn something, be sympathetic to a plight, or help solve a problem – ask the person talking to you which one it is – this will give you a better foundation to listen from

What is the topic?

Why does the subject mean this much to the person delivering it?

How can I better listen to understand what this person means?

Validate points back in the conversation – what I hear you saying is….. Then the person talking to you can determine if you are getting it and agree or reframe the discussion to present it better for you

Ask for specifics when the discussion gets off course or “tangents” away from the outcome you discussed at the beginning

And, if you just can’t keep your mouth shut…..take pen in hand, scratch pad and take notes about what the person is saying. This will force you to hear and capture the message.

So………listen to learn and not to defend

When you become a truly great listener, you develop a “mentor” quality that attracts people to you.

When you become a truly great listener your relationships, both personal and professional, become deeper and more satisfying.

When you become a truly great listener, your quality of life improves.

When you become a truly great listener, you learn from others, and this is where the best ideas come from!

“Anything worth doing, is worth paying someone else to do.”

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This is one of my favorite quotes. Maybe because I’m the one who made it up.

It could also be that I love this quote because it deals with another major reason for failure in the restaurant world, and really, in every industry. Most managers don’t know how to delegate. That is a simple, but true, observation from years of seeing managers and owners struggle to scratch out a profit (or more commonly not make a profit), while losing their personal lives to their businesses.

I messed up by not listing this as one of the biggest reasons restaurants fail in one of my best posts, The biggest mistakes restaurants make, and why they have a high failure rate. Yep, big oversight on my part.

I’m sure you’ve heard horror stories about 60, 80 or even 120 hour weeks restaurant owners are forced to work. They’re married to their businesses, and have to be there from open to close. They have to make sacrifices if they want to succeed, they can’t have hobbies or spend time with families. Their restaurants wreck their marriages and ruin their lives.

Well, I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t have to be that way. While I freely admit that long hours and no free time are the norm for independent restaurant owners, I also maintain that this scenario usually does not yield a successful, profitable restaurant. Profitable restaurants are run by owners and managers that know how to delegate. If it were mandatory for owners to be in their restaurants all the time to make them successful, multi-store chains wouldn’t exist. In reality, they thrive. Every one of those multi-store chains started out as one restaurant. Every single one of them. The difference between them, and the majority of restaurants out there, is that the people who owned them realized that they couldn’t do everything themselves if they wanted to be successful. They needed to create systems to make sure the work got done, and got done the same way every time, whether it was by them or by someone they paid to do it. Only by freeing themselves from the everyday rigors of running a restaurant were these entrepreneurs able to grow.

If you’re a restaurant owner, or a future restaurant owner, I want you to ask yourself a few questions.

  • “If I am washing dishes, who is watching the till?”
  • “If I’m cooking the food, who is building relationships with my customers?”
  • “If I am filling in for servers, who is spreading the story of my restaurant?”

You can’t spend your time performing tasks you can pay other people to do, and still have time to build your business. As an owner, marketing is the most important job you have. You have to have your time cleared to build relationships with your customers whether it’s by shaking hands, or by designing new service techniques that reinforce your unique selling point. Your time needs to be spent concentrating on ways to build communication and emotional bonds with your customers, not making the family’s “secret tomato sauce”.

If you are spending your time performing everyday tasks in your restaurant that other people could be trained to do, you are likely in the group of struggling restaurateurs that work long hours, have no social life, and are barely making a profit.

Learn to delegate. Build systems to do the things you do, so you can concentrate on the one thing that actually makes you money in your business, marketing.

Anything worth doing, is worth paying someone else to do.

The difference between a “reason” and an “excuse”

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As a consultant, and someone who talks to business owners on a daily basis, some who are clients and many more who are not, I’ve heard an incredible number of reasons why restaurant owner’s businesses are struggling or failing. 99 out of 100 times, that “reason” really isn’t a reason at all, it’s an “excuse”. There’s a big difference, and I’ll tell you what it is.

A “reason” is an explanation for why something is the way it is, with everyone involved taking accountability for their part in a situation. An excuse is an explanation for why something is the way it is, that always involves the blame being put on someone or something that isn’t involved in the conversation, and not able to share their side of the story. What’s the difference? The accountability.

Let me give you some examples. Common excuses for why restaurants, or other businesses, fail include:

  • Our employees were stealing from us
  • Our purveyors were cheating us
  • Our concept was too progressive for the market
  • The market didn’t appreciate good food 
  • Our landlord was unreasonable

The list is endless. There are as many excuses for failure as there are failed businesses. If a person were to take accountability for their decisions and their actions, those excuses could be seen as the real reasons for failure, and they would look more like this:

  • We didn’t have a reliable system for evaluating good help, and we didn’t supervise our employees as effectively as we could have, so we lost a lot of money from theft
  • We didn’t know anything about negotiating purchasing, and ended up paying prices we couldn’t afford to pay
  • We didn’t research our market well enough to find out what the market wanted, so we ended up giving them what OUR idea of good food was, not theirs
  • We failed to communicate what made us special compared to the competion, and the market didn’t respond  – or – We didn’t realize that our market doesn’t have the same ability to notice quality that we have, and we were really banking on them realizing our food was better
  • We didn’t negotiate a good lease

 You probably notice a trend here. For every excuse that an owner can give for a business failing, there is a real reason that points back to something THEY did or didn’t do.

 I’m sharing this information not to make anyone feel bad about their struggles or failure, but to help owners and managers realize that they are the only person that controls the destiny of their business. For every mistake someone else makes that affects your business, there is a procedure or a system you could have had in place to increase your chances of avoiding it.

Accountability. Until you learn to take it, you’ll be doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, everyone does, but only those that admit their responsibility in the mistake learn from it. Those are the people that can keep trying and eventually taste success. Those that only want to blame someone else for their failures are dooming themselves to a life full of them.

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Brandon O’Dell
O’Dell Restaurant Consulting
web: www.bodellconsulting.com
blog: blog.bodellconsulting.com
email: brandon@bodellconsulting.com
office: (888) 571-9068

The biggest mistakes restaurants make, and why they have a high failure rate

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The restaurant business is tough. Everyone in it knows it. Everyone looking to get in it ignores it.

The cold fact of the matter is that opening up a restaurant may be one of the worst investments you could make with your money. That’s a horrible, sobering statement coming from someone like me who’s in the business of helping restaurants succeed, but it’s the truth. Most restaurant fail. Oh, the failure rate isn’t the “90%” you may have heard from friends and family, but according to Cornell University, and the National Restaurant Association, 60% of restaurants fail within the first three years of operation. After five years, the number might be as high as 75%.

Uggghh!

Why the hell would anyone want to get into this business with a failure rate like that? Risk and reward my friend, risk and reward.

As with other high risk investments, opening the right kind of restaurant in the right kind of market can pay off very well financially. Some of the better chains can see average net profits approaching, and even exceeding 30% of sales. That’s a great return! While the risk of opening a restaurant is huge, the reward can also be huge. If you happen upon the right concept, and manage it well, you could see your investment paid off in 3 years or less, and have lots of residual cash flow to boot.

Certainly there has to be some sort of magic formula you can follow to make sure your restaurant gets these incredible returns, isn’t there?

Unfortunately….. no. There is no magic formula. Experienced operators have businesses go belly up every day, and just as often, novices open up with no clue of what they’re doing, and make a killing. While experience does give you a better chance of succeeding in the high risk world of restaurant ownership, I’m going to give you some points of consideration even more important than experience.

These are the top reasons why restaurants fail.

1) No unique selling point

Your customers need a reason to come to you instead of your competition. While I know you’d love to think that your food is so good that people will line up out the door to eat it, you’re mistaken, just as millions of mistaken restaurant owners before you who are now out of business.

Good/great food and/or service is NOT a unique selling point. “Isn’t that the reason people go to great restaurants?”, you ask? No, it’s not. Now, I don’t want to understate the importance of great food and service, but it isn’t the reason someone is going to try your restaurant. Having great food and/or service is not a UNIQUE selling point. While you may honestly believe that your food is better than your competition’s, I guarantee you your competition thinks the same thing, and they are telling everyone they know. This means that your profession that your food is better sounds just like the message of every one of your competition. THAT is not unique. If you don’t believe me, just step back and listen to all the other restaurants out there. They make a lot of the same claims, don’t they?

If you want to offer something truly unique, you need to move past food and service. Yes, you need to have great food and service, but by having great food and service, you are only meeting the minimum expectations of your customers. You are not giving them a reason to eat with you that your competition isn’t claiming as well. What you need is something original to sell. Something other than the best food or the best service. Your need a UNIQUE selling point.

Sonic offers “nostalgia” with their 50’s style drive-in and car hops.

Burger King offers “accomodation”. “Have it your way!” they tell you.

Applebees markets themselves as “Your favorite neighbor”. They put up local memorabilia when possible, and build in smaller towns. They use stained glass fixtures and tacky decor you might find at that old couple’s house next door.

Hooters sells “sex” with cute waitresses in tight tops and shorts.

A truly unique selling point isn’t the best food or service. It’s an emotion you offer to people, whether it be nostalgia, accomodation, sex or something else. People remember emotions long after they remember food and service. If you make a real, emotional connection with your customers, they will remember how you made them feel for decades to come, long after they forget what they ate and who waited on them. Food and service can support a unique selling point, they just can’t be a unique selling point.

2) Too large of a menu

This is a VERY common killer of independent restaurants. As an independent operator, you’ll get pressure from customers to have certain items on your menu. You’ll also have pressure to keep certain items when you make a menu change. You’ll get requests. You’ll get complaints when you change things.

You have to realize that this is all part of the process. YOU CAN NOT PLEASE EVERYONE. It’s a waste of time to even try because you’ll lose your own identity in the process.

Large menus create several problems within an operation:

  • Large menus lack focus. When you try and offer EVERYTHING your customers like, you aren’t giving them more choices and more reasons to come back, you are confusing them. They don’t know what your specialties are, what you supposedly do well, what they should order, and how to describe you to their friends. If your message is focused and easy to convey, more of your customers will convey your message.
  • Large menus take longer to order from. The more choices you have on your menu, the longer it takes each table to peruse that menu, and the longer it takes for them to order. For every minute they are NOT ordering, you are NOT making money for the seat they are occupying. Take this statement to heart if you want to be successful in the restaurant business: You will only ever be as successful as your peak period of service. 80% of revenue, and 100% of profit is made during peak periods. Anything that limits your ability to serve customers and collect money during your peak periods is limiting your potential for profit.
  • Large menus require more inventory items. The more items on your menu, the more ingredients you need to buy to make those items, and the more items you’ll have on your shelf. Every item on your shelf represents a possibility for loss. It can be stolen, it can be mishandled, mis-prepped or stored incorrectly and spoiled. The less inventory items you have, the less waste you’ll have. The less waste you have, the more profit you’ll have.
  • Large menus require more equipment and personnel to produce. The more items you have on your menu, the less opportunity your staff has to cook multiple orders at once. Less multiple orders means more burners, grill space, fryer grease, and hands are required to produce the same number of dishes. All these additional tools cost you money.
  • Large menus mean longer ticket times. When you have too many different dishes cooking at once, and less multiple orders in the same pans, it means more time to produce whatever is being ordered. Beyond the fact that Americans are no longer willing to wait 45 minutes to have their dinner prepared for them, you should be thinking about how long ticket times limit your ability to process people through your dining room. The longer it takes to serve each table, the less tables you can turn during peak periods.

It is inherent in people to assume that somehow offering people more will make you appealling to more people. It’s just not true. When you try to be all things to all people, you end up being very little to very few. People need to know what you’re about. Keep your menu focused.

3) All talent and no brains

So you can cook. Your food is fantastic, and everyone you cook for confirms it. You’re ready to open a restaurant then, aren’t you?

NO!

Not to burst your bubble, but a lot of people are excellent cooks. Many of them have original ideas and fantastic food that no one has ever offered in a restaurant before. That doesn’t make them, or you, a good candidate to open a restaurant.

Owning a restaurant isn’t about cooking. It’s not about having good food. While those things are components of a good restaurant, they are not the reason for it’s success.

Once you have the perfect menu for your market, knowledgable staff to serve your market, a trained line to reproduce your food, and plenty of booze to ply your guests with, you’re 1/3 of the way there. “WHAT?”, you say? “That’s it! I’ve got all the pieces in place! I’m ready to go!”. No, you’re 1/3 of the way there.

What most new restaurant owners don’t realize is that having good food and service is only 1/3 of the battle. The other 2/3rds include marketing their restaurant and managing their restaurant. We’ll talk about marketing after this, but managing is a very important piece to the puzzle that most new restaurant owners overlook. Beyond making good food and selling it to people, you need to know how to collect data and analyze your business to make sure you have the necessary information to run a profitable business.

You need to know:

  • How many people I’m feeding each day/shift/hour
  • What items they’re buying, and how many of each
  • What gross profit those items are contributing
  • What those items should have cost me to sell
  • What my actual cost of selling those items is
  • What my labor is compared to my budget
  • How many labor dollars I spend per sales dollar
  • How many labor hours I spend per sales dollar
  • What I purchase each day, and how to categorize each purchase for analysis
  • What my sales are compared to what they should have been
  • What my profit and loss is for EACH WEEK

That’s a lot of things to worry about, and that’s only the tip of the ice berg. There are many other managerial concerns. This is why I’m telling you that your great ideas for a menu, and incredible talent for cooking will only get you 1/3 of the way to operating a successful restaurant.

4) Poor pricing strategy

Strategy? Yes, strategy. You need to have a method for pricing your menu. You can’t just look at what everyone else is charging, and charge the same. The financial picture of your business is different than every other business out there, and you need to have a pricing strategy that takes your unique financial situation into account.

When considering pricing strategy, I first need to tell you what is being done out there now, in restaurants all over the country, even the world, because the point of this article is to tell you what mistakes everyone else is making.

The predominant method to pricing menus in the food service industry is to use a budgeted cost percentage to formulate prices that will yield that budgeted percentage when the sale of all your different items is taken into account. This method assumes that if you sell X dollars of food, and Y percentage of those dollars go to pay for the food, then you will get Z profit.

The major problem with this pricing method is that most operating expenses within a restaurant do not fluctuate as a percentage of sales. The rent of a restaurant is not always 5% of sales. If sales are down, the percentage goes up, if sales are up, the percentage goes down. Simply achieving a target food cost percentage does not guarantee that a restaurant will make the profit they priced for.

The common sense alternative to pricing by a target percentage is pricing according to the markup you need to cover the expense of doing business, leaving you with a profit you find acceptable. This method is called pricing by gross profit dollars. The basic principle of this method states that you can assume, through calculation, how much every person that walks through your door will cost you to serve, and that with this number you can price your menu to yield an average gross profit greater than the cost necessary to serve every person who walks through your door, in addition to your needed profit. Adjusting these prices according to market price points yields a gross profit that will cover your operating costs, your product costs, and the profit that you decide you need to make for this venture to be worth your time.

Pricing by gross profit is the only method of pricing that takes into account every cost of operating a business, including profit.

5) No marketing skill

This may be the biggest restaurant killer of them all. I’ve talked to hundreds of restaurant owners in my day. I have yet to meet ONE that didn’t underestimate the importance of marketing. As I stated earlier, marketing is 1/3 of the reason you succeed or fail. I may even have to give marketing the extra 1% of the 100% possible when splitting reasons for success into 1/3rds, and say that it is even more important than good food and service, or management skill.

If I have a catch phrase about marketing, it’s this:

“No matter how great your food is, if no one knows, it won’t sell.”

The worst fallacy I see new restaurant owners buy into, is that they can market their new restaurant through “word of mouth”.

Yes, word of mouth marketing is fantastic. New customers are more likely to act on the recommendation of a past customer than they are an ad by you. That much is true.

The problem with assuming word of mouth marketing is going to make throngs of people do the Tennessee Waltz through your door is that when you’re new, NO ONE KNOWS ABOUT YOU! You CAN’T depend on word of mouth marketing until you’re established!

For this reason, a marketing program driven by “word of mouth” marketing for a startup restaurant is a recipe for failure. You need a better plan.

While I won’t go into great detail as to what that plan should include in this post (you can certainly pay me to tell you though), I will tell you that the absolute best marketing tactic you can employ in any retail business or restaurant, is to gather contact information from EVERY person that comes through your door, and market to them. Marketing to existing customers represents an exponentially greater opportunity for increased sales than spending dollars trying to reach new customers. These existing customers are a better source for new customers than any marketing method out there targetting people who haven’t been in your restaurant and aren’t already familiar with your product.

6) Bad negotiation skills

Most new restaurant owners don’t know what they SHOULD be paying for the services necessary to successfully operate a restaurant. That’s a problem.

Every vendor out there, whether they be a food distribution company, point of sale software provider, chemical company, paper goods, linen, liquor, beer or wine distributor, or a credit card processor, has clients who get great deals, and clients who get taken advantage of.

Normally, the difference between a vendor giving you a good purchase rate, and taking advantage of you, is your knowledge of the goods your buying, and what other people are paying for them.

Two thing are a given in negotiating a purchase contract:

  1. If you don’t know what other people are paying for the same goods you’re buying, you’re not getting the best price
  2. If you aren’t making your purveyors COMPETE for your business, you aren’t getting the best price

While there are other negotiation tactics to consider when trying to get premium pricing from a vendor, these two are the most important to remember.

Know this. There is a sucker in every negotiation. If you don’t know who that sucker is, it’s you.

I realize there are other important factors to operating a successful restaurant. These are the six that immediately come to mind while writing this article. I see these six problems in most restaurants and food service ventures I see fail. Keep these six in mind, and maybe, just maybe, you won’t become one of the majority of restaurant owners that fail.

Brandon O’Dell
O’Dell Restaurant Consulting
web: www.bodellconsulting.com
blog: blog.bodellconsulting.com
brandon@bodellconsulting.com
toll free: (888) 571-9068

Do’s and don’ts for startup restaurants – vol. 3

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Do:
Make vendors compete for your business. If you chose a vendor without making them outbid other vendors, you didn’t get their best price. Competition is the most effective tool you have to keep your purchase costs down. When choosing a vendor, make a list of the top 20-50 items that make up the bulk of your dollar purchases. Send a list of these items to all the vendors in your area that deliver those items, along with a cover letter informing them that you are taking bids from all local vendors that provide these items. The cover letter should also let them know approximately how much dollar sales volume you do, and any issues pertaining to the supply of those products that you have. This bidding process needs to happen every year so whoever you choose to go with has to continue to compete on price to get your business. You should also require them to verify their prices on your inventory every 3-4 months.

Don’t:
Depreciate all build out costs at 30 years. Some capital purchases in your buildout, like wiring, finishes and equipment can be amoratized to depreciate at 5, 7 or 10 years. A faster depreciation schedule means better cash flow for your business.

Do:
Investigate buying groups. Through group purchasing organizations (GPO’s), a smaller chain or individual restaurant may be able to receive discounts on purchases of all types, such as food, paper goods, chemicals, linen, uniforms, equipment, maintenance supplies and more. Two of the larger buying groups out there are Avendra, Marriott’s buying group, and Foodbuy, the buying group for Compass. While a well negotiated individual purchasing contract can yield just as good, or better, prices than a buying group, many operators don’t have the experience to successfully negotiate such a contract.

Don’t:
Blame a particular advertising medium for the failure of an ad campaign. In most cases, advertising mediums don’t fail restaurants, restaurants fail their ad campaign. I’ll explain. The success of an ad campaign doesn’t depend on a particular marketing medium. Saying that “Radio/TV/billboards/direct mail/internet doesn’t work for us” is a cop out. Marketing mediums don’t fail. Marketing messages fail. While radio, for example, isn’t the ideal medium for every ad campaign, it does work for certain promotions if the message is formed right. All the advertising dollars in the world aren’t going to make a bad message effective on any medium. You can’t just pay to have your business’ name plastered on a TV ad every 10 minutes and expect it to bring people in. That’s not how advertising works.

Do:
Take a physical inventory weekly. Knowing your cost of goods sold on a weekly basis allows you to catch major problems sooner. It doesn’t do you any good to find out you had a cost control problem 4 weeks earlier. By then, there’s nothing you can do about it. The steps to figuring your cost of goods sold include; (1) create an inventory spreadsheet with all your current purchase prices for your inventory items, (2) count all your inventory items after the end of business on Sunday, and before the beginning of business on Monday, (3) enter your counts into your inventory spreadsheet to calculate how many dollars of each inventory item you have on hand, (4) add your purchases for the week in review to the beginning inventory for that week, which is the count you took the prior week, (5) subtract your ending inventory, which is the count you took this week, from this amount. The remaining number is your cost of goods sold.

Don’t:
Operate under the assumption that fired employees qualify for unemployment benefits. This is a common misnomer in every industry of business, perpetuated by uninformed employees and managers. If you keep accurate records of disciplinary actions taken against an employee, give that employee an opportunity to correct that action, then accurately record their failure to do so, you have enough evidence to avoid having your unemployment insurance being charged for that employee’s unemployment benefits. In most states, a terminated employee will not qualify for unemployment benefits, but the business has to show accurate records for this to happen.

Do:
Find some way to reward employees. Playing games with staff, and making them compete against each other is not only fun for the employees, but also profitable for your business. Have selling competitions with service staff. Have speed competitions with kitchen staff. Any issue your restaurant or food service is experience can be improved through the implementation of some sort of game or competition to improve that situation. 

Don’t:
Underestimate the impact of a clean bathroom. Your bathroom in your business is a reflection of the overall cleanliness of your business. A clean bathroom will make your guests confident that your kitchen, and the rest of your restaurant, is also clean and sanitary.

Is it a good idea to shrink our Italian restaurant’s menu by 15-30%?

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We currently have 60 entrees and 24 soup/salad/apps. We are known for our pizza, so we have a full pizza section which includes 6 sizes, 2 types of dough, 33 toppings, calzones, strombolis, 6 specialty pizzas, 7 sandwiches, beer, wine, and standard beverages.Which is better, 50 items or 100?

If you ask me, you need to eliminate 2/3rds of your menu. Big menus mean big waste, big inventory, big kitchen staff, big cost control issues, big ticket times and big confusion for your customers.

One thing to keep in mind with a restaurant. You are only ever going to be as profitable as your peak dining periods. Meaning….  when you have a large menu, you can not serve as many customers in any given period of time. With a large menu, people take longer to order. Big menus clutter POS’s, making the average time to input a ticket longer. They mean more prep for the kitchen, resulting in more kitchen employees in earlier to prep, and more employees on the line to produce too many different types of food. Even with more employees on the line, it takes longer to produce food when you have less multiple orders of the same items being made at the same time. All this extra time means you can’t serve as many people during your peak periods, which is where 80-90% of your revenue, and 100% of your profit is made. If you can increase your customer counts during peak periods by 10%, then you can increase your profit by more than 10%.

From a customer viewpoint, more choices doesn’t mean you’ll get more regulars because you have so much to choose from that people will keep coming back to try everything. That is a huge misnomer among owners and managers, that perpetuates the use of large, inefficient menus. More choices on a menu for customers means more confusion about who you are, what your specialities are, and why they should like you better than the Italian restaurant down the road.

Simply put, more choices isn’t better for business, it’s worse.

As far as what’s better, 50 items or 100? Neither. They’re both way too many. If you want to be known for having great food, you need to have a limited number of items, that stand out to people each on their own merit. If you have 4 or 5 great menu items that stand out from your others, people may remember them if there are only 10 or 15 surrounding them. If you bury them under 60 other items, people are less likely to remember what it was they had that was so great, and they’ll be less equipped to sell their friends on how great your food is. Confusing your customers isn’t good for business.

Stripping down a menu isn’t hard to do. The hardest part is convincing yourself it’s a good idea when you believe that more=better. Simply take your sales mix report, and eliminate most the items on the bottom half of your report that aren’t selling as much. Within the top half, keep all your top sellers, then make a list of what kitchen station those items are prepared in, saute, grill, fry, cold, etc. Use your top sellers, and a selection of the rest of the items you haven’t already eliminated to create a menu that balances your menu between each of your production stations. When you finish, I would suggest having NO MORE than 20 main course dishes, including sandwiches (10-15 would be better, I would eliminate the sandwiches altogether), 4-6 starters and 2-3 salads. If you are known for your pizza, then pizza should maybe make up 2/3rds of your main course selections. 6 sizes of pizzza is ridiculous though. Any more than 3 is complicating things unnecessarily. You could even think about going to only 1 individual adult size, and 1 individual kid size. This, and eliminating the sandwiches on your menu would greatly increase your average gross profit per item sold.

Stop worrying about trying to be everything to all your customers. While you should still accomodate special requests if possible, you should make sure you are charging a special price for that accomodation, and you also shouldn’t be encouraging them. Your servers and your kitchen staff don’t like it, regardless of what they tell you. It makes their job harder. If you cut your menu down, you are more likely to gain new customers, than to lose old ones. Take this statement to heart, THERE IS NO CUSTOMER OF YOURS THAT ORDERS ALL 60-80 MENU ITEMS. They WILL NOT be dissapointed enough about losing a few options to quit dining with you, especially if they are regulars, and especially if you train your staff to explain that your reduction in choices helps you give them better food, better service, and serve more people.

Discourage the ordering of those old menu items, clean up your POS, simplify your training, and make your operation capable of serving more people during your peak times. Your employees and your pocketbook will thank you.