If you read my first post you may have read about how many new restaurants that open up in the first year do not make it pass that year. Then I continued with ways in how to avoid that situation. If you are a restaurant that was fortunate enough to make it pass the first few difficult years of business then you are definitely going to want to continue reading. This post will focus on how to continue to make your business grow using data science and other methods. Growth within in a business is important. If you are experiencing no growth then maybe you have stop and think about what it is you need to fix.
A dysfunctional leadership team, people who are not adjusted to the core values of your business and a poorly defined core customer/target audience are a few examples that small restaurants/businesses would need to fix in order for there to be room for growth. Nothing kills a company's growth prospect more than people who fight and do not share a common set of core values. Also by choosing a core customer you increase your chances of success because you make it easier to optimize, streamline, train, and communicate.
Continuing on the use of data science for the growth of your restaurant. Many restaurant owners ask questions like: How is analytics going to grow my business? How is it going to increase my revenues in a positive way?
Analytics can help you understand your customer.
You can better understand trip segmentation within customers. See what are the most popular kinds of meals that people are ordering or different kinds of drinks ordered. Also you will be able to narrow down the time patterns of all kinds of customers which will affect the items you include on your menu during that specific time. If you start to notice that a particular item is not selling remove it. Understand the price strategy among your customers too. Identify which items are being purchased by price sensitive customers and upmarket customers.
Now while reading through analytics there will be different kinds of metrics. These provide a real-time snapshot of how your business is doing and growing. A few useful ones are:
Sources:
A dysfunctional leadership team, people who are not adjusted to the core values of your business and a poorly defined core customer/target audience are a few examples that small restaurants/businesses would need to fix in order for there to be room for growth. Nothing kills a company's growth prospect more than people who fight and do not share a common set of core values. Also by choosing a core customer you increase your chances of success because you make it easier to optimize, streamline, train, and communicate.
Continuing on the use of data science for the growth of your restaurant. Many restaurant owners ask questions like: How is analytics going to grow my business? How is it going to increase my revenues in a positive way?
Analytics can help you understand your customer.
You can better understand trip segmentation within customers. See what are the most popular kinds of meals that people are ordering or different kinds of drinks ordered. Also you will be able to narrow down the time patterns of all kinds of customers which will affect the items you include on your menu during that specific time. If you start to notice that a particular item is not selling remove it. Understand the price strategy among your customers too. Identify which items are being purchased by price sensitive customers and upmarket customers.
Now while reading through analytics there will be different kinds of metrics. These provide a real-time snapshot of how your business is doing and growing. A few useful ones are:
- Average sales per day/week/month/quarter/annual
- Average menu items sold per day/week/month/year
- Revenues of each segment of customer--daily/weekly/monthly
- Percentage of repeat visits of customers--weekly/monthly/yearly basis
- When do you get the most traffic?
- peak hours in sales which will help with staffing
Sources:
- Eckfeldt, B. (2018, January 24). 5 Problems Small Businesses Must Fix Immediately to Overcome Growth Plateaus. Retrieved from https://www.inc.com/bruce-eckfeldt/5-problems-small-businesses-must-fix-immediately-to-overcome-growth-plateaus.html
- How to use data science to grow your restaurant/cafe business ? (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-use-data-science-grow-your-restaurantcafe-snehamoy-mukherjee/
Hi Olivia!
ReplyDeleteGlows:
- You offer specific helpful advice, like "If you start to notice that a particular item is not selling remove it." Maybe this seems like common sense to some, but to others I think this would be really powerful. Food, and thus restaurants, tends to be such an emotional topic, and I think when running a restaurant, you have to rule with your head (and your calculator) rather than your heart. Blunt advice like this is helpful.
- You give good ideas of where restaurant owners can focus to understand the spending and dining trends of their customers.
Grows:
- I was attracted to your blog post because of the title -- I love eating at restaurants and I'd love to learn more about how the business side of them work. However, I didn't yet see your first two blog posts. Rather than me dig through the Blogger page to find them, it'd be smart to link to them when you mention them in Paragraph 1. That way, my visit can result in three pageviews instead of one!
- I liked this quote: "A dysfunctional leadership team, people who are not adjusted to the core values of your business and a poorly defined core customer/target audience are a few examples that small restaurants/businesses would need to fix in order for there to be room for growth." It was interesting to learn why restaurants fail. However, it'd be helpful if you provided some examples of name-recognized restaurants this happened to in order to make this sentence more powerful and relatable. A sentence like "for example, ..."
- Your picture at the end is too small for me to read. Is it crucial for understanding your blog post? If so, maybe consider making it bigger.