Tips to make the Restaurant successful

Three factor and its effect on restaurant business:

1. Location
2. Interior
3. Service(food quality, cost, variety, hospitality and other services)

The location play a vital role in success of a restaurant. It decide the mindset of customer what kind of customer will visit the restaurant.

Next is interior, if the location is decided then the next target is to decide the interior of restaurant that must match the ambience of location, at the same time interior is also connected with food menu. So you have to create a balance among these three factors.

Location ↔ Interior ↔ Services(Food Menu)

Once you find the balance among these three factors that can be below average, average and above average, your half job is done.

If you create balance that is average or above average you need to focus on services that attracts the customer.

Before moving to services, first I will list some basic thumb rule like

1. Nose: A sense to smell that creates hunger and attracts the nearby customer towards the delicious food. (Do this if you can manage the outside environment of your restaurant. Make a scent of delicious food in nearby environment to attract customer. Don’t do this inside the restaurant creating a monologues smell)
2. Ear: Once the customer is in, your next job is to work with his other senses. Play some soft music that matches the ambiance of restaurant & pleasant to customer. If it is a bar then play some rock music. (In small restaurant music suppress the noise→kitchen noise )
3. Eye: Get some eye catching element in your restaurant may be some amazing scenery or fish aquarium anything that attracts the customer.

If you win these three senses of customer, you are ready to play with the mind of the customer by your services.

The first job is to create eagerness in customer to stay longer at restaurant even if he finished the food. This can be done by providing some additional services like free Wi-Fi or story books that is popular among customer.

This also help in reducing the order delivery time. The fact is you can’t reduce the order delivery time. But waiting for something make the time span longer than the exact time. So this just play the role of diversion, a hungry customer order the food and after that get involve in other kind of activity(does not wait for food). I had seen that some restaurant put puzzle book next to menu and many customer got stuck in that.

The logic is to attract customer by developing hunger in them by smell of delicious food and then divert his mind from hunger to something else until his order doesn’t get ready. And finally serve the customer with delicious food.

Few restaurant provide additional service as in form of low cost gifts. Like giving balloon to small children when the customer is about to leave.

Recently, another feature I noticed is traditional attraction: A recent trend. Few restaurant put their traditional item on sell that attracts customer who had interest in tradition. Once I was in Turkish restaurant and I found they put Turkish scarf on sold in the restaurant that attracts the woman. On another incident I found an Indian restaurant put something on sell that is correlated to cosmetic. A small size item that women use on their forehead as explained by the restaurant owner.

Now, let’s move to the change, rule of nature.

Tell me one thing how long you can listen the same song (Favorite song) continuously or how long you can listen the same song non-continuously (switching to other song with time).

Even your favorite song become boring with a time of span. So change is the rule of nature. If you have regular customer, remember regular not occasional customer.

So there is possibility that regular customer get bore with same place but its chances is quite high that they get bore with same dishes/cooking style.  So it will be good to change the interior & menu after long time that is concerned to regular customer.

But you can add new service by creating change in interior like giving special privilege for children (new chairs for children) or creating space for pet by changing in interior.

Doing all these will definitely add value to your restaurant business, but it can’t guarantee for good sales/business of restaurant.

As the restaurant business is strongly affected by competitor. And it’s quite complex to define the parameter correlated to competitor in generalise manner. Different competitor add different factor in different manner. So this time you have to decide how to tackle with competitor. I can only say just be good with your services.