If someone were to ask what you do for a living, what would you tell them? Would you answer, “I’m a restaurant manager”? If so, a change in outlook may be in order.

As manager or owner of a restaurant, you realize your job is about more than just monitoring the daily minutiae and putting out fires within your operations. Your job is to develop, maintain, and support a system upon which everything can run smoothly, effectively, and efficiently. Without that system, you really are just managing a restaurant. What you want to aim for is something bigger, something that really speaks to what you’re striving for: the management of a business.

How to Run a Business

TechCrunch recently published this article talking about the “restaurant OS”. Author Chris Caliz likened a restaurant’s operations to an operating system: “Just like the operating system (OS) for your computer, a restaurant needs a logical set of systems that allow it to do business efficiently.”

For those of you looking to make that leap from running a restaurant (and getting bogged down in the day-to-day) to running a well-oiled operation (with a constant focus on improving your business… to the delight of your guests), you’re going to need a strict set of systems and tools upon which you can run all aspects of your business:

• HR: Recruit the right talent and develop a comprehensive onboarding, training, and support plan for each role.
• Scheduling: Set your team and restaurant up for success by creating the right schedule for each shift.
• Training: Create a training plan for each role in your restaurant and bring consistency and a high-level of service to everything you do.
• Operations: Control all pieces of your business, and in every location, related to the menu, bar, personnel, safety, facilities, inventory, and equipment.
• Finance: Keep tabs on how much you’re spending and on how much you’re making. More importantly, find a tool that will allow you to track trends, note operational inefficiencies, and predict areas for improvement.
• Menu: Produce the very best and the very exact menu your customers are looking for, every time, with a menu management tools that ensures consistency, quality, and cleanliness in your food offerings.
• Sales & Marketing: Give your restaurant and team ways to sell your product through a variety of channels—in person, by word of mouth, on your website, on social media, and more. Train your team accordingly so they can support these sales initiatives, and in a consistent manner reflective of your restaurant brand.

It’s not surprising that anyone would make a comparison between the way a computer operates and the way a business does, considering how techno-reliant we are these days. With technology comes increased speed, agility, consistency, and efficiency—exactly what a business needs to support all of its systems and to ultimately succeed.

So for management and owners looking to accomplish just that, restaurant technologies are the tools to help bring order out of the chaos. Just remember that these technologies are meant to simplify restaurant operations. While there may not be a one-size-fits-all solution available, there are more comprehensive operational offerings that will help you keep control of as much of your business as possible from one place.

If you’re looking for assistance and want to find out how Better Chains can help you more easily run your business, get in touch today.