Setting goals is a crucial part of being a restaurant owner, whether you’re a newcomer to the industry or a seasoned veteran. Goals provide a roadmap for your business, offering direction and focus for your operations. While it's important to aim high, setting unattainable goals can lead to frustration and demotivation. Good goals should be challenging but realistic, pushing your operations further and motivating your team to strive for even greater success. No matter if you're looking to increase profitability, enhance customer satisfaction, or expand your operations, knowing how to set effective and measurable restaurant goals is essential to success in a busy and competitive industry.
What Are SMART Goals?
One effective method to ensure your goals are well-defined and achievable is by using the SMART framework. The SMART acronym stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound, providing a structured approach to goal setting. You can use it to evaluate prospective goals and formulate new ones, ensuring everything you set out to do makes sense given the context of your business.
- Specific: Specificity provides focus in terms of what you want to achieve and what actions you'll take to achieve your goal. Think of it as creating a mission statement, offering a clear and concise direction of where you want to go. Consider the who, what, where, when, and why of your goals and how they relate to what you want to accomplish.
- Measurable: This aspect refers to the need to quantify your progress and success. Identify which metrics will be key performance indicators to demonstrate success, as well as which metrics aren't relevant to your objectives. In some instances, there won't be a specific number or unit of measurement that fully reflects your success, meaning you'll have to devise creative criteria to serve as indicators of your progress.
- Achievable: While it's important for goals to be challenging and push you forward, they should still be within reach. Take the time to analyze how you can accomplish your goal, assess whether you have the resources and capabilities to achieve it, and determine what additional steps or resources may be necessary to make it a reality.
- Relevant: Taking a big-picture approach when analyzing relevance is key. Ask yourself whether the objectives you're setting contribute to the overall health and longevity of your business. Relevant goals align with your overall business plan and objectives; consider whether your expectations are sensible given the context of your industry and the overall needs of your business.
- Time-bound: The time you allocate to achieve your goals will impact your success in reaching them. Evaluate whether your goals are short-term or long-term undertakings, emphasizing a realistic timeline given the busy schedule that most foodservice operations have. Assess the amount of time you have available to dedicate to working towards your goals. Striking a balance between them keeps you from focusing too much on one goal over the other.
Goals vs Objectives
While the terms objectives and goals are typically used interchangeably, they have two entirely separate meanings. Understanding the distinction between them leads to effective strategic planning and execution within your organization, ensuring you stay on track and continue progress towards your ultimate vision.
- Goals: Goals are what an organization wants to accomplish. They encompass the overall targets you want to aim for, determine the direction of your business, influence your planning, and typically have a long-term impact. They set the overarching purpose and vision for your business, providing a roadmap for success.
- Objectives: Objectives are the specific benchmarks you want to achieve along the way to realizing your goals. Objectives should be measurable and will often be more time-bound than your overall goals. They take a short-term approach, breaking down larger aspirations into actionable steps that can be tracked and evaluated.
Types of Restaurant Goals
Restaurant goals can generally be divided into two main categories: short-term goals and long-term goals. While both types are distinct, there can be an overlap between them. In many cases, the actions you take to achieve in the short term can contribute to long-term initiatives. A successful restaurant always keeps an eye on short-term performance without ever losing sight of its long-term aspirations.
Short-Term Goals for Restaurants
Short-term restaurant goals are focused on the daily, weekly, or even monthly performance of your establishment. These goals are designed to target improvements that can be made in the moment and results that can be evaluated sooner rather than later. Whether it’s enhancing existing procedures, implementing quick monetary gains, or making operational adjustments, short-term goals exist to support your restaurant on a day-to-day basis.
1. Boost Sales
One of the most common and easily measurable short-term goals a restaurant can set is to boost its sales. In particular, many establishments look to increase their daily net sales, which refers to the total revenue a business earns in one day after accounting for discounts and price adjustments. Some sales-boosting strategies don’t work overnight, meaning you’ll need to measure their effect over a period of time, such as a month, to properly evaluate how effective you were at achieving your goal. Common approaches to increase restaurant sales include:
- Optimizing price: This involves strategically setting prices to attract customers while ensuring profitability. By analyzing pricing data and trends, restaurants can adjust menu prices to maximize their profit margin and, by extension, their net sales.
- Emphasizing upselling: Encouraging customers to add extra items or upgrade their orders increases the average check size and overall sales. Training staff to upsell effectively and making suggestions that enhance the dining experience can drive sales in the short term.
- Running new promotions: Whether it's offering limited-time discounts, launching special menu items, or hosting themed events, promotions create excitement and attract customers. Promote these initiatives through available channels to generate buzz and drive traffic.
2. Increase Table Turnover Rate
Table turnover rate indicates how efficiently you're utilizing your restaurant space by measuring how many times a table is used by a new group of guests within a specific time frame, typically a full day. The higher your turnover rate, the more customers you can serve, which directly impacts your bottom line. A higher turnover rate can help you reduce wait times, leading to improved customer satisfaction. However, it's essential to strike a balance as you can't rush guests or pressure them to leave before they're ready. Focus on optimizing your operations to maximize table turnover rate while maintaining a positive dining experience.
- Offer great service: Regularly check in with guests to ensure their needs are met and that they are enjoying their dining experience. Make sure your servers are checking in with their tables to address their needs promptly.
- Implement new technology: Invest in technology solutions such as QR codes for fast menu access or table kiosks for quick ordering and payment processing.
- Efficiently bus tables: Keeping your dining area clean and ready for the next group maintains a smooth customer flow throughout the day and contributes to a higher turnover rate.
3. Maximize Recipe Consistency
Ensuring that every dish is prepared with the same level of care and attention helps every guest has an equally delightful dining experience. Inconsistency in food quality not only lowers the chance that customers will return, but it can also result in negative word-of-mouth, impacting your restaurant's reputation. This short-term goal is easy to measure and requires sharp attention to detail from your kitchen staff.
- Standardize your recipes: Developing standardized recipes for each item on your menu provides a clear reference point for your kitchen staff. These recipes should outline the precise ingredients, measurements, cooking techniques, and plating instructions to guarantee uniformity in every dish.
- Ensure equal portion sizes: Implementing clear portion sizes is essential to prevent variations in the appearance and quantity of dishes. Customers expect consistency in the size and presentation of their meals, so maintaining portion control is vital to meeting their expectations.
- Conduct quality checks: Appoint a supervisor to conduct internal quality checks before orders are sent out so that each dish meets your restaurant's standards, identifying and addressing any deviations from the recipe before they reach the customer.
- Emphasize proper ingredient storage: Keeping ingredients stored at the correct temperature and humidity levels will prevent spoilage and preserve the integrity of your dishes.
Long-Term Goals for Restaurants
Long-term goals should be centered around sustainable growth, brand recognition, and profitability. By setting long-term goals, you are emphasizing the importance of your decision-making process, strategic planning, and future outlook. This ensures that you are making the right choices, not only to stay in business, but to thrive and succeed for years to come.
1. Build Brand Loyalty
The key to the long-term success of any business, including restaurants, is attracting and retaining customers. When a customer develops loyalty towards your establishment, they are more likely to recommend it to their friends and family, generating positive word of mouth. While loyalty itself isn’t something that can be quantified, you can establish a variety of performance indicators to measure the effect of your actions.
- Utilize your loyalty program: Measure how many people sign up for your loyalty program and how many regularly use it. This data will give you insights into how engaged your customers are with your brand and what incentives are driving their repeat visits.
- Implement new customer offers: These promotions can entice guests to try your restaurant and hopefully convert them into repeat customers. You can use unique coupon codes or e-mail marketing campaigns to track effectiveness, showing how many people took advantage of the offer.
- Monitor customer reviews: Monitoring customer reviews on sites like Google or Yelp provides valuable feedback on what you’re doing well and where you can improve to keep loyal customers satisfied.
2. Optimize Your Staff
Your staff plays an immense role in the day-to-day operations of your restaurant, and your long-term hiring strategy significantly impacts your overall performance. The cost of training a new employee is high, not just in terms of the financial investment, but also in the time it takes to get them up to speed. Employee turnover is inevitable, but creating an environment where employees feel valued and want to stay can help reduce this turnover rate.
- Reduce turnover rate: This metric is a key indicator of employee satisfaction, measuring how often employees leave the company in a given time period. Curate a positive company culture, offer unique perks, and invest in the long-term happiness of your employees to entice them to stay.
- Devise a long-term hiring strategy: Build a detailed projection of your hiring needs so you know exactly how many staff members you'll need in the future. Overhiring for short-term relief may seem tempting, but it can result in budgetary constraints and scheduling issues in the long term.
- Improve your training program: By keeping track of how new hires perform and measuring the effectiveness of your training materials, you'll keep your staff well-equipped to succeed in their roles. Regular assessments and feedback can help you identify areas for improvement and make necessary adjustments to enhance the training process.
3. Open a New Location
Some restaurant owners are content with operating one location, but others strive to expand their business. However, it’s important to note that expansion isn’t for everyone. The process isn't something you can do overnight, and it requires intricate long-term planning. Identifying the right time to expand is essential if you hope to open a new restaurant location someday, and having a set of goals in place to keep track of your progress and ensure your vision becomes a reality. You can measure your progress and stay on track using the following methods:
- Set a strict budget: One essential benchmark is sticking to a strict budget to verify you have enough capital on hand for expansion-related expenses. Set clear savings goals and monitor your business credit to stay on track.
- Perform an SWOT analysis: This analysis accurately assesses your restaurant’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as the opportunities and threats in the market. Using this analysis, you can develop a strategic plan for your new location and address any potential challenges proactively.
- Assess competitors: By evaluating how well your competitors are performing and analyzing market trends, you can gauge whether there is sufficient demand and space in the market for your expansion.
By setting clear and achievable goals for your restaurant, you can create a roadmap for success and drive your business forward. Whether you're looking to increase profitability, enhance customer satisfaction, or expand your operations, setting goals that are realistic and aligned with your business objectives is key to achieving long-term success.
