One of the quickest ways to increase your sales is to get your customers to spend more by increasing their average spend per head when they come in.
Sounds easy but if you are reading this article you probably aren’t thinking about it. What it comes down to is training your servers or cashiers and a little creativity on your end. Continue reading “How to Increase the Average Spend Per Customer in Restaurants”
As an independent restaurateur, we are always trying to find resources that can help us improve our operation. However, we don’t always have the time needed or wanted to search for these resources. So I thought I would share some of the resources we regularly follow to save you some time.
While you can spend hours scouring pages of Google results, start with these right here. There is plenty of information to keep you busy for a while. These top 10 restaurant marketing blogs can be great resources, that is, if you have some spare time to read them!
These are going to be listed in alphabetical order as not to show favoritism, they each are great in their own way. Many of these blog owners are consultants who have spent many years in the restaurant business. “They have seen it all” sort to speak.
You should subscribe to these blogs as you don’t want to miss what they have to say!
Aaron Allen & Associates are a global restaurant consulting firm serving customers in over 100 different countries. However, Aaron Allen spent his time focusing on marketing after working in several high volume operations.
He started his consulting in 2001 and by 2008 had reached over 10,000 clients! Many of these were very large well known chains. Now he is one of the most sought after sources for the industry and lecturer as well.
Best Restaurant Blogs is different from the rest of these. They let their readers (other restaurant professionals) share stories that they have found. They have several categories including our favorite, restaurant marketing!
Check it out and see what others are sharing or if you find something of value you can submit the article to the site.
Paul Barron is the founder of this site and he also wrote a book called the Chipotle Effect which is a great read. On the fast casual blog you can find articles written on all kinds of topics about restaurants including catering & marketing. They also have good information on different suppliers you might need for different aspects of your business.
Of course we have to mention ourselves! As you may or may not know we like to focus on using catering and direct marketing to grow your overall restaurant sales. Check out our free eBook for over 70 pages of useful information.
Michael Hartzell specializes in inbound marketing for his clients. Focusing on low cost ways to grow sales. On his blog you will find not only hundreds of articles about restaurant marketing, but dozens of free forms that you can use in your restaurant business.
Brandon Hull founded this website with a focus on digital marketing including social media, email, mobile and even optimizing your website. This website has over 300 articles to keep you up late at night as well as a free digital marketing guide.
Brandon O’Dell is an industry veteran growing up in food service since he was 14. His blog has a pretty strong following and has many articles in regards to restaurant operations as well as marketing. He also has a download store with many helpful documents and spreadsheets for nominal charges.
David Scott Peters is the restaurant expert! He has a history of turning around restaurants and growing sales. His websites free resources offer valuable information for both operations and marketing. We even took advantage of a free report one time and just that alone was great!
OK so this isn’t technically a blog but a podcast but rules are meant to be broken right? Eric Cacciatore is the host of this show and he is constantly interviewing industry veterans so you can learn from their stories, check these out when you have a long drive in front of you or maybe when you are in the gym.
OK, so now you have plenty of homework to do! There should be enough reading, watching and listening here to keep you busy for months.
Just make sure you take action on these tips and advice. It is one thing to read about these ideas and it is another to actually put them into practice. You will be glad you did.
Booking more catering sales starts with having a professional looking proposal. Think about it, if your potential client gets two proposals, one that is simply an email with the total cost or one that looks like this catering proposal sample…which company do you think is off to a better start?
First impressions go a long way, so make sure you set yourself up for success with a professional looking catering proposal. Continue reading “Catering Proposal Sample Guaranteed to Book More Sales!”
Starting a catering program and wondering how much tip to expect for your delivery drivers? I wish I could say a ton but that is not always the case! Continue reading “How much tip to expect for your catering delivery driver?”
You cannot operate a profitable restaurant without knowing your food costs, but what is a good food costs percentage?
I’m going teach you how to calculate food costs in this post as well as tell you where you should be.
I cannot stress how important it is to know your numbers for every week or every pay period. If you want to make some real money with your restaurant then you need to operate like the big boys, who calculate their numbers constantly.
Continue reading “What is a good food cost percentage and how do you calculate food costs?”
