Direction, goals and communication

Success in your restaurant.

The common denominator is working as a team, having a clear direction, and moving towards a S.M.A.R.T goal. 

Do you sometimes feel you work in a department that seems to run on its own without any cooperation or links to other parts of the company?

I think we have all been there. The bigger the company, the more difficult it is to feel anchored to the bigger picture.

Restaurants aren't any different, and they often feel like running without a clear direction.

What is a direction?

Everyone within their competencies works towards a common goal, a common denominator that helps businesses achieve things faster, cheaper and with a long-lasting effect.

The direction is the navigation towards the journey's end (the goal).

How to set that direction to achieve the goals?

Whether the goal is to increase sales YOY, increase market share, or remain flat and focus on customer satisfaction, leaders in the restaurant must understand that goal and map out how to get there.

Departments like marketing, reservations, finance, food, HR and operation must align their views and work together. For that reason, actual and compelling communication is the most powerful tool any organisation can have.

And sometimes, we lose the basics. Effective communication. Communication gets broken when the interest of each individual or department is above the company's benefit. Then direction is lost, and achieving the goal becomes more distant and difficult. We choose not to listen to others, always believe our department is the most important, and everyone should listen to what we have to say.

This approach does not fit well in a company structure, which advocates the principle of collaboration above individualism.  

Revenue management acts as an excellent tool to help restaurants navigate better. It evaluates the internal restaurant resources (offer) and the market opportunities (demand) and works to match them with the result (goal).

If we need to reach A, but each of us understands the journey differently, it might take longer to get there, be more costly and provoke friction.

For example, if our goal is to grow 5% YOY in sales, but we constantly struggle with staff, we cannot possibly push for more and more reservations as that might cause more significant problems. We will have to find a way to increase RevPash by having higher spending and compacted hours of operations. Revenue management can help with that.

Understanding what reservations generate higher spending by party size, time of the day or channel booked might help you choose the best demand for your specific goal. 

Understanding how the competition behaves will be fundamental to capturing the demand you need and going straight to the point. This knowledge can also support marketing to direct their work towards times or days where the ROI will be higher.

Things become much easier if we all understand the goal, have a clear direction and work together.

Coming back to the question: Do you sometimes feel you work in a department that seems to run on its own without any cooperation or links to other parts of the company?

The answer is: Are you contributing to this? If so, try to change it, and things will go better.

Thanks for reading.

Written by Carmen Mallo 28.03.2022