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The Library...

We scour the internet daily to find the most helpful and pertinent information for you and your business, always keeping our eyes and ears open for new ways to help promote your success.

Here is a collection of some of the best ideas and knowledge that we have found... 

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Marketing Strategies

  • Six Restaurant Marketing Trends For 2012

    By Carin Oliver  What’s in store for restaurant marketing in 2012? We see six key restaurant marketing trends that will lead this next year’s efforts to gain market share, better understand the customer and turn a profit in 2012. We also believe there is one trend that will consume marketing dollars in 2012 but will turn out not to be influential in driving consumers into restaurants.
  • Seven Strategies to Increase Your Restaurants Traffic and Profitability in 2012

    Joe Welsh – CORE Restaurant Marketing As 2011 comes to a close, it is time to think about your marketing plan for 2012. Have you considered how you are going to increase traffic and improve the profitability of your restaurant next year?
  • Why You Should Use Facebook and How to Get Started

    Let's start this talk with a little bit of meditation. Close your eyes and think about the last time you used advertising to get new customers. How did it work? Which media channel did you use? How much did it cost you, and how was the return? Now open your eyes. What do you see?
  • How to Manage Online Customer Reviews

    These days, it seems like everyone is a food critic. Once thought of as a job for professionals requiring years of experience and palette refinery, not to mention a thorough understanding of restaurants and cooking, the craft of "critiquing" has boiled down to, in some cases, a few online sentences denoting a restaurant as good, great, bad or really bad.
  • Social Media Strategies for Success

    Source: Ron Ruggless  Social media has grown into an increasingly important tool for restaurants, experts said Wednesday during a Nation’s Restaurant News webinar, making the strategies behind those efforts a key driver of brand success.
  • Stretch Your Marketing Budget

    Most small businesses have modest marketing budgets, which means you have to make every dollar count. Here are 5 ways to get big results from a small budget:
  • Marketing Speaks to get Your Customers Listening
    Your restaurant exists on a particular street in a particular spot. Like your neighbors, you want more business. Resources are limited, budgets are tight and so is your time. Grass roots marketing has its place in the business world, and for good reason. It can literally be the defining element to your success.                                                                                 
  • 7 Reasons You Might Want To Give Groupon A Pass

    Groupon, the three year old coupon company, has been all the hype across business sites lately. The company is the largest of its competitors and claims it distributes online coupons from merchants in 500 markets and 44 countries. Facebook and Google, in an attempt to get a piece of the action, have recently rolled out similar services.
  • Social Marketing Takes Hold, But Traditional Marketing Still Thrives

    The practice of using social media to promote a business, known as social marketing, is now being used by nearly three-quarters of all small-business owners, according to a new survey from Constant Contact, a company that facilitates social marketing. 

  • 10 Pros and Cons for Using Groupon

    Group buying may be all the rage among consumers. But does is really make good business sense? It can if you design the promotion just right for your company.
  • 3 Reasons a Slow Economy is the Best Time to Grow Your Business

    The first reason should be almost obvious: none of your competitors are promoting their business, so if you do, you’re way ahead of the game. Everyone is in the same boat, and the new tighter economy has everyone in a conservative mood. So if you take a more aggressive stance and put energy into growing your business, your efforts can attract a wider audience with less resistance and for less money.
  • 13 Ways To Win Regulars

    Source: Restaurant Business Building customer loyalty is a great way to build a regular, reliable customer base. Here are 13 ways to win regulars.
  • Report Offers Facebook Tips for Restaurants

    Source:  Mark Brandau (Nations Restaurant News)  Marketing to customers on Facebook is an art many restaurants are still trying to master, but knowing what to post and when to post it can help brands boost engagement with their customers, according to social-marketing firm Vitrue.
  • 10 Menu Mistakes That May Be Costing You Plenty...And How to Avoid Them

    Source: Excerpts, Mark Laux for Restaurant Startup & Growth  A menu should be your most effective marketing tool. It should suggestively sell products, describe your offering in a poetic way, entice an upsell and, most importantly, be a visual representation of your brand. In addition, it is the place your guests will find what they want to order, so it is also your catalog.  
  • 5 Free Ways to Drive Restaurant Sales

    With the economy down businesses need to work harder to drive sales with less. The good news is that there are a number of free services that can help you promote your restaurant.
  • Gain More Repeat Business

    In Pate Dawson's May 4th Marketing Webinar, we discussed at great length the effectiveness of growing sales through your current customer base. Reaching out to your customers is also the most efficient means of investing your marketing budget.
  • Social Media Measurement: A 10-Step Guide

    (by Chris Lake) Social media measurement is a tricky subject, not least because not everything can or should be measured, and in some ways social measurement is a bit like measuring the impact of TV ads on brand awareness: it's a slightly softer area than, say, paid search.
  • Foursquare: Restaurants' Next Social-Media Frontier
    (By Allison Perlik)  "Location, location, location"-the old adage about the key to business success gains new meaning in the context of the latest social-media opportunity for restaurants: location-based social networks.
  • Why Google Is The Future Of Restaurant Marketing

    (By Greg McGuire)  “Favorite Places On Google” is a new feature that provides maps, directions, reviews, and photos of 100,000 businesses across the U.S. Many of these businesses are restaurants, and that’s significant because eventually users will be able to post reviews and other information about your restaurant and have it display on Google.
  • Your Crew Is Your Brand

    (By Christopher Wolf)  Think of your crew training as a marketing project and your brand experience will benefit.
  • How to Use Twitter for Restaurant & Bar Marketing

    Modern marketing is about conversations, not just one-way broadcasting.

    Twitter is a great tool for online or 'social media' marketing: it's free, and only needs a small time commitment. It's also a good way to 'find your voice' and practice writing short sales messages. If you have time to write one promotional text message each week, you can manage Twitter!

Best Practices

  • The Case For Theoretical Costs

    By Mark Kelnhofer, MBA  More than likely, restaurant operators are familiar with the benefits of utilizing theoretical costs for benchmarking their store locations’ performance. 

  • The Easiest Way to Cut Your Food Cost 10%

    While there are few absolutes in this business this is one - "Engaging in ongoing competitive bidding practices to get the lowest prices actually leads to higher food costs, not lower."

  • Sharpen Your Menu IQ

    Many operators either don't realize or underestimate the profound influence the menu has on their profitability. Here's a collection of menu practices that can either hurt or enhance the profit-making potential of your menu.

  • Ways to Disguise Price Increases

    You've made the decision to raise your menu prices. We give you some great tips to avoid making the price changes obvious.

  • 4 Traits Common to Great Hourly Workers & How to Identify Them in Your Job Candidates

    Bill Marvin, The Restaurant Doctor 
    To give you some ideas in this area, consider the findings of a study conducted by a very large, multi-unit restaurant chain. The goal was to identify the common qualities and characteristics found in the company's highest performing employees to help in the interviewing and selection process. They found that the following four traits were consistent in their best employees:

  • Subtle Changes Bring About Restaurant Success

    If your restaurant business is stagnating, the best thing you can do is try to look at it with fresh eyes and identify small things to change that will make a difference. Here are some simple ways to give your business a lift.

  • 11 Social Media Mistakes Your Company Must Avoid

    Using social media for marketing is easy, right? Not necessarily. Facebook and Twitter's ubiquity can lead to the assumption that using them is foolproof. In reality, there are common mistakes that business leaders unfamiliar with social media marketing seem to stumble into. These errors reveal a lack of social media savvy and often negate the effectiveness of those marketing efforts. 

     

  • A look at rising menu prices

    The challenges of rising commodity costs, paired with an improving consumer environment, are together giving restaurant operators some needed justification to raise menu prices.

  • 12 Ways to Teach Your Team to Think Like Owners

    One of the best ways to Focus your hourly team on how to improve service, sales and costs is to align their thinking to the manager or owner mindset.  Of course, crew can't realistically be expected to amass all the insight that managers and owners have--they know a lot.  But there are mindset basics that everyone on the team should share. Here's a list of the 12 essentials:

  • 13 Basics Guaranteed to Build Same Store Sales

    by Jim Sullivan  CEO Sullivision.com/Copyright  2011  We work in a chaotic industry whose success-or failure-is often determined by pennies earned or pennies lost on a shift by shift basis. Here are 13 common, creative and quick tips, tricks, and techniques to help build your bottom line every day.

  • Hottest Food Trends for 2011

    Source: Small Business Trends   Even in a tough economy, Americans like to eat out making food one of the bright spots in the past few years, with new food and restaurant concepts cropping up fairly often. To help foodservice entrepreneurs get a jump on the future, Technomic recently announced its 11 top trend predictions for 2011. Take a look at what made the hit list.

  • What's In a Menu Description? Everything!

  • Seven Tips for Lean Times

    The economy may still be chugging forward, but runaway interest rates and energy costs are pecking away at profit margins for restaurant operators in all market segments. Raising menu prices to make up the shortfall is not an option--not when your guests have to be cajoled into venturing out for a meal.

  • Review Your Prime Cost On A Weekly Basis

    Prime cost is the cost of sales (food and beverages) plus all payroll-related costs, including gross payroll of all management and hourly personnel and payroll taxes, benefits and workers' compensation. Prime cost usually runs 60 percent to 65 percent of total sales in a full-service restaurant and 55 percent to 60 percent of sales in a quick-service restaurant.

  • Money Mangement: Control Your Cash

    Source: monkeydish.com  Running a cash flow positive restaurant is challenging even in the best of times. But in this Great Recession, marked by customers spending less and banks tightening or even shutting off access to funding, cash flow problems can invade your business, turning your dream of prosperity into the nightmare of barely surviving.

  • Costing Out Soda & Free Refills - How to Price Soda

    (By Wilton Marburger)  A traditional box of syrup or B- I- B (bag in the box) holds 5 gallons of syrup. Let's say a five gallon BIB of your favorite Cola costs $50.

Food Safety

  • Rare, Red Burgers on the Black Market

    Food Policy & Law:  Rare, Red Burgers on the Black Market

  • Safety Tips For Cooking Meat

    (By Bill Tomson)   Meat cutters at grocery stores aren't necessarily trained to address health issues regarding meat. But harmful bacteria like salmonella and E.coli are often present on raw meat. Here are some ways to remove the threat.

The Bottom Line

  • Oct 1st Durbin Amendment Will Lower Debit Card Fees: Make Sure YOU Get the Savings NOT Your Processor

    Source: Jim Laube  On June 29, 2011 the Federal Reserve announced that they have issued a final rule establishing standards for debit card interchange fees and routing restrictions.

  • A step-by-step approach to effective service training
    Source: Elissa Elan  The more comfortable your front-of-the-house staff is with their knowledge of product, policy, and service procedures, the more confident they will be at the table.   
  • How Low Can You Go? Winning the Menu Pricing Game

    Determining the lower end of the pricing continuum requires careful consideration of all costs involved in bringing that item to the table, including the costs involved in preparing and presenting an item, or bringing customers in the door, for that matter. You cannot base your pricing solely on cost; however, you better know your actual costs before embarking on your pricing journey.

  • Why OpenTable Is A Lousy Deal For Some Restaurants

    by Matt Rosoff  OpenTable, the online and mobile restaurant reservation system, is great for consumers -- it lets them look at a bunch of different restaurants, see which one has the most convenient available reservation time, and book the reservation without ever picking up a phone. But some restaurant owners hate it.

  • Consider the Psychology of Your Menu Design

    Menu design is all about human psychology.

  • How to Cut Transaction Costs on Customer Purchases

    Tired of high credit-card processing fees? Here are three ways to save when accepting payments.

  • Increase Revenue Through Creative Ingenuity

    There are ways to increase revenue – and profits – without poking the customer in the eye when they open your menu.

  • 10 Tips on Restaurant Guerilla Marketing

    If you're restaurant is suffering a financial backlash because your customers are suffering from cabin fever - as most Northern Californians are after 22 days of rain - it may be time for a guerilla marketing campaign. A well planned campaign will increase business and, if effectively executed, will enable you to compete in a market flooded with competitors with their eyes on your dining dollars.

  • USDA updated its consumer price index (CPI) for 2011

    The USDA revised its food price forecast to rise 3% to 4% this year. Both food-at-home and food-away-from-home prices are also forecast to increase 3% to 4%. Beef prices are projected to increase 3.5% to 4.5% and pork prices 5.5% to 6.5% in 2011. See Graph.

  • State of the Plate

    N.C. is projected to post strongest restaurant-sales growth in 2011. North Carolina is expected to post the strongest restaurant-sales growth in 2011 at 4.2 percent, according to the National Restaurant Association's 2011 Restaurant Industry Forecast. Watch this Video Preview: The 2011 Restaurant Industry Forecast includes economic, workforce, consumer and menu trends, as well as information for restaurant operators to overcome the current economic challenges and position themselves for future growth.

  • 2011 Food Cost Outlook Released

    USDA has released its food cost forecast for 2011.

  • Restaurants to Gain Pricing Power in 2011

    Source: Ron Ruggless (Nation’s Restaurant News) Analysts expect chains to pass menu price increases to consumers. As commodity prices rose through 2010, restaurant operators kept one eye on increasing costs and the other on the tight grip that recession-battered consumers kept on their wallets. Now they may be able to at least blink.

  • Distributors Continue Growing In Operators' Minds

    Operators continue to acknowledge their tenacious, consultative distributor-partners for contributing to their success thus proving that their high standing in last year's Foodservice Elite report was not a fluke.

  • How Health Care Reform Will Affect Independent Restaurateurs

    How will your restaurant have to adapt its business practices to abide by the newly passed Health Care Reform Bill? What costs will you incur?

  • How to Make Catering Work for You

    Adding a catering arm maybring in the added revenue stream you're looking for.

  • Measuring ROI For Social Media Initiatives

    Source: Restaurant Startup & Growth  One of the most talked-about challenges for businesses when it comes to the social media arena, aside from putting aside the dollars, time and staff to engage in it, is figuring out a way to track or document any success with those initiatives.

  • How to Renegotiate Your Lease

    Source: Larry Green, Esq.  You have no more good ideas about how to stop taking on water. You are too busy plugging leaks and bailing the flooded mess. Until the consuming public regains confidence in itself, you can't depend on increasing revenues. Relief, if any can be found, must come from reduced expenditures.

  • Focus On Retaining Loyal Guests Instead Of Fighting For New Ones

    Traditional mass marketing depended on interrupting customers with repeated broadcast messages. Mass marketers relied on "bribes" to sell products when using discount offers. These were the ways to leverage TV, radio, newspapers and other forms of mass media: trumpet a one-size-fits-all message and coax consumers to buy products with coupons.

      

  • Waiter, Bring Me a Fresh Idea - 10 strategies that are working in the tough restaurant economy
    (By Jason Daley)  It was about 20 years ago that the casual dining boom got started in the United States. It was a golden, batter-dipped age: We were lured in by the novelty of mozzarella sticks and artichoke dip, marveled at the cluttered walls and uniform flair and gulped down two-liter mango margaritas like every night was Friday.

Service

  • Five Steps to Improve Customer Service

    So are you ready to do five things to ensure your customers return to your restaurant and spread positive word-of-mouth advertising for you? It might be as simple as learning and following this five-step circular process:

  • Dumb things wait staffs say, and why it hurts business

    Source: Elissa Elan  It starts with, "Hi, my name is Jordan, and I'll be your server tonight."

  • 7 Ways to Lose Good Employees

    by Jim Sullivan, CEO Sullivision.com  Finding outstanding team members is hard enough, so don't waste all that time, money and effort by then losing someone tjhrough bad management or poor leadership. Here's 7 common ways you lose employees you shouldn't...

  • Ten @ 10: Trite Sayings Your Server Says

    Source: Bill Daley Tribune Newspapers   “Are you still working on that?” This is just one of the many trite phases servers dish out at restaurants. Makes me wince every time. I asked my Stew colleagues for their personal hates and, voila!, here’s the 10 most heinous pieces of verbiage that a smart restaurateur should drop-kick to the curb during staff training.

  • Listening To Customers

    Guests have plenty to share, if you take time to listen. And if you don't, they may go online and share it there! How many of these 'secrets' ring true for you?

  • Ways to Improve Service

    Do you need some quick "Back-to-Basic" ideas to re-affirm your service standards? Check out this short video.

  • Identifying and Hiring People Who Have the ‘Hospitality Gene’
    Just as it’s impossible to create five-star meals without exceptional ingredients, creating a service staff that takes exceptional care of guests requires identifying and hiring the right kind of people.
  • 21 Customer Service Tips from Industry Publications

    You have to set standards to motivate great customer service.  If your mission is top-notch customer service, you need a strategy. Give your staff specific rules on how to behave with customers. Be sure to include:

  • The Basics of a Good Server Training System
    A well-trained service staff is often what makes the difference between the most successful restaurants and the also-rans. In this competitive market, your guests are going to grade you based on your food and service. In addition, proper server training can reduce your potential legal liability.
  • 1 in 5 Value Good Service Over Good Food

    Source: Karlene Lukovitz  While no one sets out to find a restaurant with bad food, one in five Americans actually say they value good service over good food.

  • Readers: Top 5 Restaurant Service Complaints

    Source: SYLVIA RECTOR, FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

  • 8 Ways to Build Full-Service Sales

    (By Ron Ruggless)  While full-service restaurant sales aren't expected to rebound as quickly as in other industry segments, the National Restaurant Association offers eight ways that table-service operators can weigh the odds of recovery in their favor and build much-needed sales.

  • 100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do

     (by Bruce Buschel)  Here is a modest list of do's and don'ts for servers at the seafood restaurant I am building. Veteran waiters, moonlighting actresses, libertarians and baristas will no doubt protest some or most of what follows.

    They will claim it homogenizes them or stifles their true nature. And yet, if 100 different actors play Hamlet, hitting all the same marks, reciting all the same lines, cannot each one bring something unique to that role?