Restaurant Manager Tips to Know: How to Best Manage a Restaurant

Whether or not you are a new or established restaurant manager, running restaurant operations can be daunting and may leave you asking yourself how to manage a restaurant. Your tasks often include everything from recruiting and managing staff, handling marketing outreach, running operations, crunching inventory and financial numbers, meeting customer expectations, and more! From prioritizing to delegating, restaurant managers need to tap into a variety of skills to be successful. Luckily, we’re here to help!

Is it Hard to Manage a Restaurant?

Managing a restaurant can indeed be challenging due to several factors:

1. Financial Management: Restaurants operate with slim profit margins. Effective cost control in areas such as food, labor, and overhead expenses is crucial. Managing cash flow, especially in the initial phases or during economic downturns, requires meticulous planning and financial acumen.
2. Inventory Management: Keeping track of inventory to minimize waste while ensuring the availability of ingredients is a complex balancing act. This involves accurate forecasting, supplier management, and regular stock checks.
3. Staff Management: Recruiting, training, and retaining skilled staff is a significant challenge. The industry is known for high turnover rates. Building a motivated team that delivers excellent customer service requires continuous effort.
4. Customer Satisfaction: Meeting and exceeding customer expectations in terms of food quality, service, and overall experience is vital. This includes managing online reviews and feedback, which can significantly impact a restaurant’s reputation.
5. Compliance and Safety: Adhering to health codes, safety regulations, and labor laws is mandatory. Regular inspections and training are necessary to ensure compliance and to maintain a safe environment for both staff and customers.
6. Market Competition: The restaurant industry is highly competitive. Standing out requires not just great food and service but also innovative marketing strategies and a clear understanding of your target market.
7. Adaptability: Trends in the restaurant industry can change quickly. Being adaptable and open to change, whether it’s updating the menu, adopting new technology, or pivoting business models (like incorporating more takeout or delivery options), is important for staying relevant.
8. Work-Life Balance: The demanding nature of restaurant management, which often includes long hours, weekends, and holidays, can make it challenging to maintain a healthy work-life balance.

How do you Best Manage Restaurant Operations?

We’ve got several restaurant management tips that will help you feel confident tackling the next steps to build your restaurant business.

1. Ensure Your Staff Feels Valued

It’s no secret that employee turnover is a problem for most restaurants, especially now. In fact, the average turnover for restaurant employees remains high at 6.9%. Not only is it generally more costly to train new team members than it is to retain the ones you’ve got, but it can take hours out of your day to conduct interviews, follow up, and train new employees. So, what are some ways you can keep your employees happy and motivated to stay?

If you don’t already have one, consider starting an “Employee of the Month” program. Make sure the winning employee gets a bonus check, gift card, or something valuable to signal their achievement and motivate others to follow suit. You can also practice open-book management to foster more loyalty among your staff. This is when a company is transparent to employees about the company’s financial information, profitability, profit sharing, and educational classes. It can also allow your staff to feel more valued by you as a manager.

Particularly during busy seasons, it never hurts to offer a free meal for employees working double shifts, or give everyone a gift card during the holidays as an incentive for a job well done. You can also set incentives for those who stay with you for certain amounts of time, like three months, six months, a year, and so on. It can be monetary, or something like being placed as first priority in staff scheduling.

2. Revamp Your Menu on a Seasonal Basis

Sure, having signature dishes is a great way to keep customers coming back — but so is switching things up with your menu. Even just updating your food and bev for each season helps your kitchen keep things fresh. Plus, it makes it easier to work with local farms and suppliers who grow different fruits, veggies, and herbs, depending on the season.

During summer, peaches and zucchini are great additions to a salad or appetizer. During winter, brussel sprouts and carrots can really liven up an entree or side dish. Using seasonal, local ingredients will not only keep your restaurant menu (or kitchen) from feeling stale, but you’ll likely be able to save money on transportation costs you’d normally pay to get these items.

3. Be Intentional About Marketing

Often, part of managing a restaurant also means helping to drive new customers through your doors. One of the most effective ways to do this is by having a solid restaurant marketing strategy. Social media, in particular, is ideal when it comes to restaurant marketing. It’s either free or much cheaper than more traditional marketing outlets, such as print ads. Not to mention, it’s relatively easy to maintain a good social presence.

It’s also wise to have a well-maintained presence on social media: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok. The ideal frequency of posts varies across each platform, but at least once a week is a good place to start.

Once you’ve got the handle of regular posting, don’t forget to interact with your customers who message, comment, and like your posts on these channels. It’s another way to convey the feel of your brand, make fans feel special, and show your authenticity. If you’ve got the budget, you can also leverage paid social media ads to spread brand awareness about your restaurant and target certain audiences. Social media ads are also easier to track — that is certainly a win-win.

4. Train Employees to Expect the Unexpected

“The customer is always right” is a classic phrase that is commonly thrown around in the restaurant business. But, depending on your customer’s demeanor, it can certainly be easier said than done. Your guests provide the revenue your establishment needs to stay afloat, so it’s important to do everything you can to ensure they have a positive experience.

Make sure all of your staff know how to respond when someone asks about menu modifications for dietary restrictions. They should also know what to do in response to angry customers. Restaurant managers have to handle it all, so the more you prepare your team for a variety of scenarios, the better.

5. Host Private Dining and Events

As a restaurant manager, you’re affected by how much revenue your restaurant brings in. Looking for creative ways to give your bottom line a boost? If you have a private or semi-private dining area that can hold groups of eight or more people, you should consider reserving those spaces for events. Events can quickly fill up your calendar if you’re struggling to meet sales goals. In order to balance events and regular customers at the same time, you can always start off by only hosting events during times you’re normally closed or it’s a slower day/time.

If you’re just starting out and want to drum up some initial interest through introductory deals:

• Give a discount to customers who want to rent out your space on a weeknight
• Offer 10 percent off to someone who books a party within the first three months of your new events program launching
• Send a gift card or a nice bottle of champagne if a referral books within three months

To make sure your customers know about an existing program, you can just add a page on your website with the latest event info and photos of previous events held in your space (with permission from your customers of course). This page is also a great place to highlight that your space is ideal for multiple event types, like rehearsal dinners, birthday parties, and corporate events. You could even slip a small, well-designed event 1-pager into check presenters, to encourage diners to host events in your space.

6. Make Tracking Sales and Inventory Easier

Number crunching is often part of a restaurant manager’s day-to-day work life. In addition to tracking sales from dining reservations and events, you have to keep up with food and bar inventory, customer counts, payroll costs, and more. One way to help you accomplish this in an organized way is through a point-of-sale (POS) system. Depending on the type of system you choose, you can change menus, access up-to-date reports, manage online ordering, and predict future sales trends, and more all in one place. Additionally, if you are managing private dining or events, Tripleseat offers a simple solution to manage leads, analyze trends, and build your event sales. These tech systems are cloud-based, which means you can work on the go instead of being tied to your desktop. Advances in tech mean you can automate the process, which saves serious time and increases margins to boot.

7. Experiment with Fun Promotions

If you’re in a state that permits hosting happy hours, this can be a prime opportunity for your restaurant to bring in additional sales. Happy hours, which typically fall on weekdays between 4-7 p.m., are ideal for people who are getting off of work and looking to meet up with coworkers or friends for a quick drink before heading home. Come up with a few easy-to-make drinks and appetizers that are discounted to entice customers, like half-off nachos or $5 margaritas. You can even go as far as to create full happy hour menus.

You can also work with restaurant coupon apps to help raise more awareness for your brand. You’ll bring in more customers through your doors, and they might even tell their friends about it. Many restaurants have seen success through creating special promotions based on things like:

• Sporting events
• Holidays
• City-specific themes
• Seasons
• Pop-culture references (a Taylor Swift-themed cocktail to celebrate her latest tour? Yes, please.)

8. Pay Attention to Online Reviews

As a restaurant manager, your company’s reputation should be something you keep tabs on. Did you know that word of mouth and website reviews are the biggest factors that help people choose a restaurant? Knowing how to get and leverage positive reviews while making a good impression on your customers can have a huge impact on your online presence.

Make sure your Google My Business, Yelp, TripAdvisor and Facebook pages are all up to date, then read through what your customers are saying about you. Word of mouth can be both positive and negative, so staying on top of it and checking reviews on a daily basis (and responding when appropriate) will help you have a good handle on your brand perception.

9. Save Money Where You Can

Monitoring cash flow is a big part of a restaurant manager’s job. And one way to tangibly showcase that you’re doing your job well is by finding creative ways to help your restaurant save money. For example, you can:

• Create and stick to a budget for inventory, staff, and resources
• Evaluate menus and try to reduce cost and improve profitability
• Staff appropriately and make sure to train staff to work to save money as well.

Look at your menu as an area of your restaurant that can help you cut costs. Are there items that aren’t selling well? Remove them, and refresh on your offerings.

10. Find a Mentor

It’s no easy task to manage a restaurant alone. One of the best tips we’ve heard is to partner with someone who has experience as a general manager and who can guide you through the process. From handling upset customers to the easiest ways to train your staff and make sure they stay happy, they’ll have some tricks up their sleeves that they can pass down to you. If you can’t think of anyone who you can meet on a regular basis to teach you the ropes, the internet is your second-best bet. Using Facebook groups or forums to ask people in the restaurant industry their advice is sure to help you become a better restaurant manager.

11. Make Work Fun!

Plenty of experts taut the importance of fostering bonds with your team members and ensuring they feel valued from day one. And while no efficient workplace is all fun and games, if every employee is dreading their shift, something is very wrong. Do casual pulse checks, be open to thoughtful criticism, and truly listen to what your team is saying about their job experience.

No restaurant manager is perfect, and there’s no way to be prepared for all the unexpected challenges that can occur at your restaurant. But there are certain strategies and traits you can adopt that’ll help make sure you’re doing your job to the best of your ability — and to the benefit of your staff and the company as a whole.

Next Steps to be the BEST Restaurant Manager

Now that you know how to be a great restaurant manager, see how our software can help you manage your events program. Schedule a demo at a time and date that works for you to learn more about how Tripleseat can help you build and streamline your events and private dining business.