Survive & Thrive | Why You Should Be Investing in Your Restaurant Now More Than Ever
“Inaction is the riskiest response to the uncertainties of an economic crisis. But rash or scattershot action can be nearly as damaging.” - Harvard Business Review
Owning a restaurant is challenging enough; add in a pandemic and it’s completely overwhelming. Well, here we are, smack dab in the middle of just that. So, as a restaurant owner how do you respond? Actually, how did you respond? Think deeper than surface level responses. When we talk about inaction, we don’t mean a crafty COVID - 19 safety response, we mean growing your brand and putting strategic pieces into action for your future.
A completely natural response to uncertainty is to freeze up, to protect what you have. It happens all the time in when people enter “crisis mode”. What most people don’t realize is that inaction during a crisis can be so incredibly damaging to a brand. Put yourself into your customers shoes for a moment. They are terrified, holding on to their money and refusing to trust anyone or anything with it. In our last blog we spoke about investing in your customers, make them feel safe. If you failed to reassure them, there’s more damage to come. If they weren’t a regular of yours in the past, you aren’t registering as an option for them in the present. Your consumers are protecting their assets just like you. They are spending their money at places that they know and trust. They aren’t trying new places, hardly at all, and that’s the mentality we are here to break.
So, what does that mean? What should you do? There’s a lot to this; even the smallest of actions could result in growth. Marketing is a great spot to start. By increasing your marketing during a recession, you can improve your restaurant’s traffic upwards of 6.5%, per the last recession. You have less noise in the air, your competitors may not be marketing either. Your dollars go further and those dollars you spent will help retrain your customers to trust you. Let’s go further.
Ask yourself these questions:
· Is my website up-to-date and superior to my competition?
· Have I optimized my menu, operations, and training to make things easier for my team members and customers alike?
· How is my digital presence? Do I have a social media strategy for the future?
How’d you do on the quiz? If you feel confident in your actions, cheers! That is amazing and you are ahead of the game. But let’s look at the flip side. What happens when you’ve taken action? Even more important, what happens when you put the wrong pieces in motion?
There’s two schools of thought here:
1. You froze early on and now you’re making rash decisions to survive.
2. You decided to take action, bravo! But are you confident in the actions you’ve gone with?
When you make rash decisions for your brand, you are potentially creating a new reality for your company and not necessarily a positive one, for example, coupons. We know, we know, everyone has a love-hate relationship with them. If you heavily discount your brands offerings to get people back in, you will no doubt see an immediate benefit. But what happens when your consumer wants to come back? They look for coupons and one of two things will happen: they’ll realize you’re not offering discounts and boom, all the sudden you seem more expensive than in the past or on the flip side you’ll be required to keep the promotion going, losing sales due to discounts. It’s hard to keep a consumer, strategy is so important.
Here’s an option for you.
Restaurant Consulting is full-proof way to invest in your company get results. You may not have the money to hire a full-time position, so why not use someone who can do the job in a few weeks? There are experts, like Altered Concepts Group, that can create change for you. In our next blog we’ll dive into the “fractional” positions: utilizing a third party to temporarily fulfill your senior level needs.
At ACG, we own optimization and provide immediate results for you. Results that bring money to the bottom line, that very day. We are experts in Marketing as well, building websites, digital presence, social media, etc. I mean, truly think about it. You need a Director of “X” but can’t imagine spending the money to hire and train someone, or worse wait for results to show. Some restaurants are mere weeks away from doomsday. Altered Concepts Group can get you to a spot where you can survive and thrive. Immediate results to the bottom line, keeping you profitable and able to grow your business.
Let’s set up a free 30-minute call to find out how we can help you survive and thrive.