Most hospitality managers would agree that food service is the most challenging part of their operations, but recognizing that knowledge is power, there are a number of management disciplines that will enhance any operation’s bottom line.
1. 
Benchmarking revenues, cover counts, and average check by day of week and meal period. This will help you schedule staff more efficiently, monitor sales trends, and allow you to track the success of new menus and efforts to upsell.
2. Benchmarking payroll cost, hours worked, and average hourly wage by pay period. This essential discipline will allow you to stay within budget, monitor overtime, and control your most significant expense.
3. Formal forecasting by using historical cover benchmarks and knowledge of upcoming events, external factors, and optimum staffing levels, you can ensure expected service levels in the most cost-effective way.
4. Timely and accurate inventories and benchmarking of inventories. This will ensure budgeted cost of goods sold and identify any adverse anomalies or trends for investigation. A further discipline that will yield significant benefits is to identify and inventory high value items weekly.
5. Sales mix analysis. This discipline will help you understand your members’ dining preferences while protecting profit margins.
6. Basic dining policies. Well-thought out and advertised dining policies will give all members an equal opportunity to enjoy the dining services while ensuring the highest service levels for all customers.
7. Consistent pre-shift meetings with a purpose and continual On the Go Training. There is no better way to prepare and train your staff for service.
8. Product knowledge and upselling training for servers. They can’t sell what they don’t know and servers well-trained in upselling techniques will increase your operation’s average check while enhancing your customers’ dining experiences.
9. Upselling feedback. If servers are provided daily sales goals and feedback on their efforts to upsell, they will be far more engaged, enthusiastic, and effective in increasing their average checks. You just need to provide the numbers to them on a daily basis.
10. Tools to Beat Budget. This powerful discipline will ensure your bottom line, make you more knowledgeable about your operation, and make preparing future budgets a breeze.
Food service managers must make these disciplines part of their daily and weekly routines. Once these disciplines are instituted and mastered, a number of them can be delegated to properly-trained and motivated subordinates. When consistently applied, these basic and commonsense disciplines will ensure both profitability and customer service. What more could you want for your operation?
Thanks and have a great day!
Ed Rehkopf
This weekly blog comments on and discusses the hospitality industry and its challenges. From time to time, we will feature guest bloggers — those managers and industry experts who have something of interest to say to all of us. We also welcome feedback and comment upon the blog, hoping that it will become a useful sounding board for what’s on the minds of hospitality hardworking managers throughout the country and around the world.
Hospitality Resources International – Management Resources for the Hospitality Industry!
Arrive on time according to the work schedule.
Call a meeting of the support department heads and explain the concept of internal customers and how their support of the operating departments enhances the overall enterprise performance.
Seasonal Hires. When business conditions dictate (i.e., when the forecast shows business levels surpassing thresholds), supervisors should begin bringing in seasonal hires. They can be people who you have already interviewed, hired, and trained such as former employees or employees hired specifically for seasonal work. In either case, these new hires should be given some indication of how many hours they can expect to work each week and how long they’ll be kept on the payroll.
In my recent reading I came across the term “mental environment” to describe the feeling one gets, almost subconsciously, in different physical spaces. For instance, consider how you feel in the midst of a quiet meadow and compare that to how you’d feel in Grand Central Station during rush hour. The point is that every space we inhabit has a different mental environment made up of the attitudes, moods, activities, and pace of the people occupying that place. Contrast the difference between an NFL stadium during Sunday’s game with that of an empty cathedral, or a doctor’s waiting room as compared to an airport with anxious travelers rushing for their departures.
If you are interested in advancing your career, the easiest and quickest way to do so is to add value to your employer. When you consistently demonstrate your ability to take initiative, solve problems, and make your boss’ job easier, you will be recognized as one who adds value to the organization. “Personal Leadership” will allow you to stand head and shoulders above your peers and will ultimately lead to greater and greater successes in life.
A long-recognized best practice is to develop an onboarding plan for your operation’s new hires. The purpose of such a plan is to ensure that new employees are welcomed to the enterprise, receive the appropriate orientation and introductions, and are indoctrinated into the organizational culture, as well as receiving a basic review of enterprise information, employee benefits, operating policies, and work rules. When the onboarding process is formalized and consistent, all employees have an appreciation for the story of the organization, an awareness of their job requirements, and a common understanding of expectations for their conduct and performance.
If you cannot accurately measure your current operating performance, how would you know where to best apply your corrective efforts? Or even if those efforts were working or not? This, in a nutshell, expresses the necessity of detailed benchmarking of all aspects of hospitality operations.