In a general trade lifecycle, every business must experience a period of slump in sales. This period not only aids businessmen to take a step back and re-evaluate their approach, but also helps with enforcing multiple changes in the business model. Sadly, most businesses view this as a threat, rather than an opportunity for your restaurant to emerge stronger and better in every single aspect.
A similar situation has arisen upon the restaurant industry along with the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic due to enforcement of lockdown in most parts of the world. Sales at every restaurant is impacted brutally and restaurateurs are trying everything, in an attempt to try and match at least their break-even points. Let’s not shoot in the dark. We formulated this article to better help restaurants tackle major concerns in these unprecedented times. Let’s have a look.
1. Not to Panic and Take Hasty Decisions
Panicking and making hasty decisions will only lead to bleeding of resources, with little to no returns on the same. On the contrary, making sure that relevant changes are enforced while minimizing costs is one of the best ways to approach this situation.
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2. Find Areas Where Costs can be Saved
This is a period of little to no profit for your business. Hence, we suggest that you sit down with a pen and paper, with your accountant on a video call, and do a cost analysis. Figure out all those unnecessary expenses and immediately cut them off. For instance, due to the lockdown, most people will order food online. Hence, keeping your local restaurant closed and operating from only the kitchen will aid in cutting electricity, dishwashing, and conveyance expenses.
3. Focus on Digital Promotion
Owing to the lockdown, digital media is the only way to reach your audience base. This situation also has presented higher engagement and a better reach to a wider consumer base. Interacting with your consumer-base will allow you to stay relevant and maintain your brand image.
4. Maintain Consistency in Quality
The only thing that keeps a diner loyal to a restaurant is quality and taste. Therefore, even when operating from your virtual kitchen, it is important that you maintain your quality and unique taste parameters. This way, you can maintain loyalties of existing customers and build new ones as well.
5. Adopt Restaurant Technology
This pandemic has enabled us to realize the importance of digitization in various industries, including the restaurant industry. A higher focus on restaurant technology will aid in not only operating efficiently with existing staff, but also enable you to expand operations with the same resources, in a post lockdown economy. Further, it also makes way for contact-less dining, making it safer for everyone.
6. Offer Promotional Deals
Design promotional deals that enable customers to order food that is within budget and allows you to gain better sales. Apart from that, creating offers that give discounts on the next order will motivate the customer to order again, aiding new sales.
We hope these pointers have given you a direction to think in and apply different tactics in your restaurant to tackle this period of slump in your restaurant business.
