Every decision we make on a minute to minute basis can have effects on our restaurant that are both obvious and imperceptible at the time. The effects of these decisions can be immediate or take a very long time to come to fruition. This can be deliriously over whelming at times. Choosing to look at the situation from the stand point of your guests can help give direction and purpose, particularly during a busy time or about a confusing subject. This seems like it should be an obvious point of view but can be fleeting when it should be most considered. Some decisions can be outside of what someone might consider a guests perception but in small ways every choice can find itself noticed by your guests. The guests being the most important reason that most of us work on a daily basis they allow us to perform our profession and they provide the resources for us to continue. Their perception drives the success or failure of our endeavors. With that in mind all of our decisions affect their perception is some way making their perception of our operation the goal that we strive for on a daily basis. Our goal then should be having the perception of every person that walks through our doors line up perfectly with the idea that we envision as our restaurant.
From the appearance and performance of our staff to the small wares and cooking utensils that we use everything should be considered. Of course attending to every detail takes time and may need to be tweaked after you have opened. Learning from your choices is important as well so keeping track of how everything is received by your guests should be a constant priority. Developing a system for tracking this growth and development of your restaurant should be a priority early on. There are many tools available online, many free alternatives as well, that can facilitate tracking the information and thoughts on a daily basis. For example most of the restaurants I have worked for use some kind of shared documents where all the managers have access. Google docs is popular, simply emailing a chain of logs has been used, or a few places used systems that were developed in house. Each of these systems have their pros and cons, from access to costs of maintaining.
Controlling your costs is a basic business practice. The costs that you incur from each decision has to be considered so that you don’t end up trying to run a successful concept while still loosing money. Almost every decision can end up costing something one way or the other. Most of the costs that you will see are direct costs, for example the price of getting better product. Other costs are harder to see or indirect, these examples can be as simple as guests not taking to the change or a reduction in the performance of staff. Being able to recognize these costs before hand is helpful but not required to chose a particular option. The comparison of options can still take into account these unknown costs with some educated guessing and being aware of what any changes affects.
There are many topics to cover in decent detail available for discussing. This site is intended as a platform for building tools for restaurant managers to use in their day to day as well as covering as many thought processes for making these decisions. I will get into more detail on many more topics in the future. Currently my list of topics to write about include: smallware, staffing/pay rates, menu development, staff management, table layout, and the grind.