Financial and operational planning for a new restaurant starts before the grand opening

You’ve made the life-changing decision — you are going to be a restaurateur.

It can be an overwhelming challenge to walk into. Running a restaurant of any size involves a myriad of obstacles and hurdles that take valuable time, energy and patience to overcome. Added to that pressure is that misstepping on one obstacle compounds and runs over into the others. Finally, you’re on a time limit — the grand opening is only a set amount of time away, and you need to have everything together by then.

The good news is that modern technology is there to simplify the ins and outs of restaurant management before the grand opening. Where owners used to grapple with an array of disconnected management tools, current systems centralize your operations to your point of sale (POS). These features include:

Menu options
Vendor management
Inventory management
Cloud-based services
Payment options

Selecting the menu creates a unique dining experience

The food you make is the core of your restaurant. Understanding the cost of your menu is the key to making it work. This is normally a tedious process of working between various spreadsheets, balancing overheads and having to make difficult decisions about your business’s profit margins versus the desirability of your items.

Technological advances, however, have made this process exceptionally easy to track and calculate. Here are a few ways in which the process of menu organization can be streamlined through your POS system:

Above all else, the streamlined process of managing item cost fluctuations offers simplicity. Instead of going back and forth between inventory checklists and spreadsheets, restaurant managers and owners now have the option of doing everything through the use of a single, user-friendly interface. In addition, it also lets you keep track of your vendors, fostering a better relationship with the people who provide those ingredients to you.

Vendor management: Who are you working with?

If your food is the heart of your business, vendors are the lifeblood. It doesn’t matter how solid your restaurant business plan is — without their routine and on-schedule deliveries, your operation falls apart. This means that keeping your vendors content is one of the most important parts of keeping your restaurant alive and kicking.

In the past, maintaining vendor relations often meant referring to a separate set of handwritten notes about their preferences. Modern solutions integrate these notes (and additional boons) into your POS to make your interactions that much easier to work with.

Any restaurant business plan worth its salt prioritizes the relationship with its vendors. This means using the tools available to you to ensure that they are kept as happy as possible. This fosters a healthy business partnership further down the line and potentially opens the doors to other contacts they may be able to provide you.

Getting customers through the door

The survival of your business depends on people walking through your door. A central part of your restaurant business plan, then, should focus on bringing in new customers as well as ensuring that existing customers keep coming back. This is a specialty in itself, with large businesses employing entire teams to find ways to catch the attention of prospective diners.

Lucky for you, modern POS solutions offer highly accessible options to accomplish the same goal. A few of these options include:

Your staff is putting in the hours and energy to make your restaurant business plan come to fruition. As the owner, you owe it to them to make sure that you are providing the best tools to ensure they are treated accordingly. In addition, your staff will be the ones using these systems and many of the ones listed above — giving them access to a centralized, user-friendly interface will make business operations go as smoothly as possible.

Going digital — an online presence is essential

If the last two years have taught us anything, it’s that a good restaurant business plan requires a strong online presence. Potential customers are more likely than ever before to look up reviews of your restaurant before going, so you need to be engaged with your online community just as much as you are your physical one. Modern POS systems offer some unique options to manage your restaurant’s reputation, including:

Bringing your business online means more visibility — not just for you, but also for your customers. The way that you use this opportunity to respond to reviews — even bad ones — creates a sense of transparency between you and your clientele that will encourage them to give you a visit.

Bring your restaurant business plan to life

Your restaurant is your dream. It deserves a winning strategy backed by proven technology that makes your restaurant business plan achievable. Bringing that dream to life is remarkably simple with the features available in cutting-edge POS technology.

Optimizing your new restaurant can often feel overwhelming. The POS solutions developed by  talech are designed to help restaurant owners through the challenges of optimization through affordable set tools. Furthermore, we make our systems entirely customizable to meet the unique needs of new restaurants of every variety. Contact us to learn more about our restaurant business plan options or to take part in a free demo.