Advice needed - How to save a failing Restaurant
- Thread starter james t kirk
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Is the owner English?
Or the chef?
Or any sort of minority?
If so, that's you're answer right there why the business is failing.
Or the chef?
Or any sort of minority?
If so, that's you're answer right there why the business is failing.
Tell him you're getting advice from TERB. That will end that relationship, no? When I posted my "google question" 'bout how do I get 2 columns of links in Google, no one answered. So I'll answer your question here.james t kirk said:
If you advertise, it takes 6 weeks for the customers to start coming in, literally. People advertise to try and get customers in now, but it doesn't work that way. Word of mouth brings in people to a restaurant. You said the owner is an asshole and his GF hates working there. Problem number 1. Shape up the owner and have the GF show her tits, or get out. That is what has to happen first. Even if you have terrific food, if the management sucks, the business collapses....because that's lack of organization, which shows lack of leadership and a business cannot survive with a lack of leadership.
What to do and how to do it once management is better? Everyone says 'advertise'. Okay, good.....easy answer. How?
Newspaper ad? On-line website? Standing outside holding pieces of paper to come in? Maybe, but again it takes six weeks to get customers coming in that way.....and they are only the first ones and very few at that. You require a support clientele. Ask the big name hotels if you can get an ad for the restaurants listed inside their rooms. Target the clients you want. That doesn't work? Go to the local TV stations and ask for a reporter to review the restaurant as an news article. Like in the movie "Ratatouille". Maybe you'll actually need rats to save the restaurant. Still no?
Have a few one dollar coins on the floor in the restaurant. See who picks them up and if they do and you find them, request a swap coupon for a free appetizer if they return the loonie. You require those who come into the restaurant to return and bring their friends. That's the way to do it. That's it. Doesn't matter, if the food is a drug, people go through anything to get their fix.
I can come up with many ideas that work, but you're getting paid, so come up with better ones.
Gyaos Baltar.
Woah, there little buckeroo...Gyaos said:
I'm not getting paid. My client is not the restaurant. My client is in my industry and is a big fan of this local restaurant. My client LOVES good food, and good restaurants. When he comes to Toronto I take him to Blowfish, Kaji, Suser, Kultura and the like. Where he lives in the Gaspe peninsula, high caliber gourmet restaurants are far and few between. The restaurant in question is the exception. It rivals anything in Toronto or Montreal. The chef isn't a chef, he's truly an artist.
That may be the core of the problem.james t kirk said:
From your description, he's undoubtedly an outstanding foodsmith. But he's clearly not a marketing or business whiz.
Best thing he could probably do is two-fold:
- Get rid of the sour-faced servers, get new crew and pay them well (this is critical... if you pay bananas, you're gonna get monkeys);
- Either bring on (as a partner) or contract a marketing consultant to do marketing/ business development work.
Restaurant business? Been there; done that... one of the toughest of all businesses. 
The three essentials of a successful restaurant are food, service and atmosphere. After all is said and done, it is show business!
From what you say, he makes it on one out of the three. The other two is where he needs the changes and improvements.
Provided, of course, there is a sufficient market in the first place.
Perry
The three essentials of a successful restaurant are food, service and atmosphere. After all is said and done, it is show business!
From what you say, he makes it on one out of the three. The other two is where he needs the changes and improvements.
Provided, of course, there is a sufficient market in the first place.
Perry
Yes, the owner of this restaurant is truly the foodsmith. He has that covered.
A good idea would be a partner who can run the front office, while he runs the back office. His true talent is in the kitchen creating totally unique food. Any fool can follow a recipe, the skill comes into creating new dishes from scratch.
The guy in question is the owner and he is the chef. He is a French guy, not an Anglo, there's no political crap associated with this.
If he were to come to Toronto, I'd invest in a restaurant with him.
Because he is in a small city that most of the population considers fine dining to be the local Normandin, he has to work hard to market the place and he doesn't know or even have a clue how to do that.
There are some great ideas here and I have relayed them to my client as well as some of my own.
They include:
Improving the website (it is lame)
Getting his site to come up with a google search.
Having his site link to review sites (all of which I've read and are 4 stars)
Schmoozing the customers
Getting rid of the negative GF up front.
Finding a marketing partner
Marketing to the local hotels.
Marketing to the tourist information centres.
Opening on Sunday, including a Sunday Brunch
Corporate event hosting
Catering
"Artist Night" featurinng local artists such as musicians, painters, photographers etc. and serving lighter fare such as Tapas, etc.
And I love the idea of a grand "re-launch"
Thanks for all the ideas guys, I hope they work. This guy is getting pretty desperate and my client is too at the prospect of him closing shop.
A good idea would be a partner who can run the front office, while he runs the back office. His true talent is in the kitchen creating totally unique food. Any fool can follow a recipe, the skill comes into creating new dishes from scratch.
The guy in question is the owner and he is the chef. He is a French guy, not an Anglo, there's no political crap associated with this.
If he were to come to Toronto, I'd invest in a restaurant with him.
Because he is in a small city that most of the population considers fine dining to be the local Normandin, he has to work hard to market the place and he doesn't know or even have a clue how to do that.
There are some great ideas here and I have relayed them to my client as well as some of my own.
They include:
Improving the website (it is lame)
Getting his site to come up with a google search.
Having his site link to review sites (all of which I've read and are 4 stars)
Schmoozing the customers
Getting rid of the negative GF up front.
Finding a marketing partner
Marketing to the local hotels.
Marketing to the tourist information centres.
Opening on Sunday, including a Sunday Brunch
Corporate event hosting
Catering
"Artist Night" featurinng local artists such as musicians, painters, photographers etc. and serving lighter fare such as Tapas, etc.
And I love the idea of a grand "re-launch"
Thanks for all the ideas guys, I hope they work. This guy is getting pretty desperate and my client is too at the prospect of him closing shop.
Restaurant
Call in Chef Ramsey Im serious He has done WONDERS for some restaurants.
I watch his show Restaurant Disasters all the time.They allways says if you saw the back of a restaurant you wouldnt eat in the front again!!!
Call in Chef Ramsey Im serious He has done WONDERS for some restaurants.
I watch his show Restaurant Disasters all the time.They allways says if you saw the back of a restaurant you wouldnt eat in the front again!!!
There have been some excellent suggestions here, and most of them would be what you'd get from something like Restaurant Makeover and Ramsay (and I mean that as a good thing).james t kirk said:
But this comment of yours jumps out at me. Is the problem that he doesn't know how to market his restaurant, or that there ISN'T a real market for his brand of restaurant. He could make the best food in the world, but if the locals aren't interested in what he's selling, the best marketing campaign in the world isn't going to help him. If people want Le Normandin, they aren't going to suddenly start wanting fine dining just because his marketing improves.
Something Ramsay has done on more than one occasion is to completely overhaul restaurants. He has turned fine-dining establishments into pubs and vice-versa because that's what the local market wanted and would support. The question this chef may need to answer is does he want to run THIS restaurant, or does he want to run A restaurant in this town. If he wants to keep the haute-cuisine, he may need to look at relocating to a market that can support it. If he wants to stay in this town, he may need to look at re-assessing his product.
Is he the kind of chef that decorates his dishes with tons of herbs, leaves and other eye catching things that make it look like a modern art painting?james t kirk said:
If so a small town is the wrong locale. The other day a friend of ours said 'I hate when they put strange things and fruits in my salad, just give me normal food and regular potatoes and I'll be happy'.
For that same reason an East Side Marios will always do well in small town, but not a fancy venue even if the prices were similar.
Forget for a moment that it happens to be a restaurant. It's a business. And like any business, the owner must take a long, hard look at his revenues and expenses.
Let's start at Industry Canada's Strategis website, or more specifically, the Performance Plus tool. Create a report (customized is fine, if you'd like to include your own expenses in the report for comparison), for Quebec, and expand the NAICS selection to select 72 (Accomodation and Food Services) -> 722 (Food Services and Drinking Places) -> 7221 (Full Service Restaurants) -> 72211 :: Create Report.
You also have the choice of expressing values in % of revenues, or in absolute $$.
The report will show, for example, that a restaurant with revenues in the range of $146k - $319k typically pays 6% of revenues in wages plus 25% in labour costs, 38% in cost of goods sold, 9% in rent, etc, for a net loss of 2.8% - the same as the 2.8% average amortization and depletion expense (probably implying that investors are taking their money out of the business in ways other than profit).
After a deep analysis of this business' expenses compared with industry norms, he must consider what options he may have to adjust areas where his expenses are higher than normal. Each is with its own risk.
He might try to improve revenues (reducing rent as % of revenue) by offering a wider variety of more moderately-priced fare to appeal to a wider customer base. He might try to raise prices (if his customer base is there for the quality, and is less price-sensitive - and if his COGS is higher than the industry norm). Both could be done to protect margins on COGS.
He might find his labour costs are high, and spend more effort to schedule fewer staff except during busier hours (asking them to keep busy with side duties before they become busy serving tables), and cutting staff as soon as the busy time is winding down.
By contrast, if his labour costs are already lower than the norm, then asking them to do more could cause them to depart, or for customer service to suffer.
Being closed three days a week, he may find his rent costs are higher than norm (along with any other fixed costs he faces). Which he might renegotiate with the landlord and insurance company (based on lower wear-and-tear on the property, against the risk that the landlord wants to displace him and bring in another tenant), or he might consider other ways to get his fixed costs back in line.
If he doesn't find ways to control his own environment, he could try to expand his customer base by advertising more widely (an extra expense), to increase his revenue.
Let's start at Industry Canada's Strategis website, or more specifically, the Performance Plus tool. Create a report (customized is fine, if you'd like to include your own expenses in the report for comparison), for Quebec, and expand the NAICS selection to select 72 (Accomodation and Food Services) -> 722 (Food Services and Drinking Places) -> 7221 (Full Service Restaurants) -> 72211 :: Create Report.
You also have the choice of expressing values in % of revenues, or in absolute $$.
The report will show, for example, that a restaurant with revenues in the range of $146k - $319k typically pays 6% of revenues in wages plus 25% in labour costs, 38% in cost of goods sold, 9% in rent, etc, for a net loss of 2.8% - the same as the 2.8% average amortization and depletion expense (probably implying that investors are taking their money out of the business in ways other than profit).
After a deep analysis of this business' expenses compared with industry norms, he must consider what options he may have to adjust areas where his expenses are higher than normal. Each is with its own risk.
He might try to improve revenues (reducing rent as % of revenue) by offering a wider variety of more moderately-priced fare to appeal to a wider customer base. He might try to raise prices (if his customer base is there for the quality, and is less price-sensitive - and if his COGS is higher than the industry norm). Both could be done to protect margins on COGS.
He might find his labour costs are high, and spend more effort to schedule fewer staff except during busier hours (asking them to keep busy with side duties before they become busy serving tables), and cutting staff as soon as the busy time is winding down.
By contrast, if his labour costs are already lower than the norm, then asking them to do more could cause them to depart, or for customer service to suffer.
Being closed three days a week, he may find his rent costs are higher than norm (along with any other fixed costs he faces). Which he might renegotiate with the landlord and insurance company (based on lower wear-and-tear on the property, against the risk that the landlord wants to displace him and bring in another tenant), or he might consider other ways to get his fixed costs back in line.
If he doesn't find ways to control his own environment, he could try to expand his customer base by advertising more widely (an extra expense), to increase his revenue.
True...thompo69 said:
However, the guy who owns this place used to be the head chef at another restaurant about 30 minutes away that was successful, however, that restaurant catered mainly to tourists (it closed for the winter). He quit to start his own restaurant as I've described.
The town that he is in has a lot of tourists in the summer, but it's still a small city at the end of the day. The population is about 40,000 people in town, more in the surrounding areas.
If he was in Toronto, they'd be pounding down the doors to get in. Seriously. My client has even said that he would be an investor in a restaurant with this guy if he located to Montreal, or Toronto.
Many salient points have been made except for one I do think. This may be on a wee bit of a tangent but while I believe that most people would prefer to have an excellent meal made for them from fresh, regional products by a superb chef, there are many who really don't give a rat's ass about that. This is rather unfortunate but we have been living in a society that for generations has valued quantity over quality. Like cows we wander to our "local" Super supermarket to buy products that literally took days to get to us rather than buying something that just came down the road. I have friends who are amazing chefs with unbelievable resumés but have a hard time making ends meat because some palooka would rather eat at Montana's.
One of the things that Ramsay always rails about is that the Chefs of the restaurant never seems to be buying locally. Well, in Ontario, there is a constant battle between "local" and the "bottom dollar." We have, as I stated earlier, been living in the latter as opposed to the former. This may sometimes impact the success a restaurant regardless of how good the food is (at your friend's place) because customers will almost always bemoan a dinner with a higher price even if they know that what they are eating is better.
One of the things that Ramsay always rails about is that the Chefs of the restaurant never seems to be buying locally. Well, in Ontario, there is a constant battle between "local" and the "bottom dollar." We have, as I stated earlier, been living in the latter as opposed to the former. This may sometimes impact the success a restaurant regardless of how good the food is (at your friend's place) because customers will almost always bemoan a dinner with a higher price even if they know that what they are eating is better.
