Money talks. It says a lot about you, your business, and where your priorities lie. With so many businesses managing around budget constraints, empowering yourself to see above the bottom line will help you stand out and succeed in the long term. Master your restaurant expenses, and you’ll watch your business thrive.

Create Staff Groups

You’ll often find statistics online like “labor should only cost X percentage of your revenue”, but that figure is often lacking in nuance. 

If you’re looking to cut down your restaurant labor costs, you can’t do it generically. Do you hire fewer servers? Or cooks? Group your employees based on some common trait you’d like to measure; it can be based on role, though it could also be something like salaried vs hourly-paid employees. 

Groupings like this can give you a better picture of where your funds are going, and where efficiencies can be found to optimize your restaurant’s expenses.

Workforce Optimization

When minor changes fail to make a dent in your bottom line, it might be time to rework things on a fundamental level. But the goal here isn’t to overwork employees, it’s to build a business that needs fewer employees to operate at full strength. Restaurant labor costs are a major investment, but it’s only as expensive as you make it.

But how can you do this? You don’t need to massively overhaul anything, you can offload that work to another source. If you can pick up a good online ordering platform that includes white label delivery, then that’s two parts of your business taken care of – orders and delivery. This saves you money, time, and energy that’s better spent elsewhere.

Image from pixabay (free for commercial use)

Watch Your Patrons

As much as it hurts to see, food waste is an inevitable part of business. Your whole operation is based around selling food, so each trashed pile of leftovers is money down the drain. 

There’s a few ways to optimize food longevity in the kitchen, but not many people know this tip: keep an eye on what your patrons are leaving unfinished. Even if that food has been sold to the customer, it can still be wasted if it’s too much for them to bear. 

Smaller portion sizes might work better if customers aren’t eating everything – that food would have been better placed on another plate! That’s more meals sold for fewer ingredients, which is profit in the purest sense.

Upsell Every Order

As said above, oversized plates can be problematic. But, there’s some important nuance here.

While trashed food is wasted money, refrigerated food has the opposite effect. Uneaten delivered meals can be easily saved for later, which makes the upselling “pitch” more appealing to customers. The only money sink here is an un-optimized order. 

If you aren’t maximizing your Average Basket Size, then you’re losing out on extra dollars each time you send out an order. It’s another small restaurant expense that will add up over time, but if you have the know-how, you can ensure that each dollar stays firmly within your grasp!

increase-average-basket-size

Live the Digital Life

Contactless dining is becoming more and more popular, and each automatic device is another bit of human labor you can shift around to more important parts of your business. Having a good online ordering platform on your side can save you time and money, and arm you with knowledge to help grow your business in the long term.

About Smooth Commerce

Smooth Commerce is an all-in-one digital commerce and customer marketing platform for restaurants that combines online and mobile ordering, delivery, loyalty, and powerful marketing tools to help you grow your business, while giving you access to your customer data to help grow your restaurant. 

If you would like to learn more or talk to a representative from Smooth Commerce about how our platform can help you meet your loyalty goals, contact us at learnmore@smooth.tech.