Mirus Restaurant Solutions
Blog Demo Login

Restaurant Employee Contests: Fun, Profitable, or Both?

Posted by Chuck

Whether you are a franchisor or franchisee you want each of your restaurant locations and its employees to make more money. Challenges being placed on already thin margins make it difficult to keep up with the increased demands from labor, food costs, rent etc. And in today’s competitive labor market the cost of locating and training new staff members just adds to the challenge.

If you’re a table service oriented restaurant and you’ve gone to tip pooling or even ventured into the no-tip territory you may have already seen a difference in employee motivation or lack thereof due to these policies where the excellent servers are now making less in tips while the mediocre server is pretty happy. So now you need to find other ways to put the spark back in your team.

Read More

Topics: Restaurant Performance

Mirus Index: Restaurant Sales Rise In 2018

Posted by Dave

Improving Sales

As we head towards the end of the second quarter, it appears that restaurant sales are moving in a positive direction. Unless something dramatic occurs in the next two weeks, June will finish the first half of the year with 5 months of positive sales growth - only February has been negative this year. The current year to date Same Store Sales, as measured by the Mirus Index, is up 0.62%. Not huge, but at least positive, and the trend is improving. Same Store Sales for Q2 is up 0.82% so far and is up 1.8% for the first twelve days in June.

Read More

Topics: Restaurant Profit, Restaurant Performance

Restaurant Operations: Manager Expectations

Posted by Chuck

No matter how many restaurant locations you operate, it’s likely that you have a set of ‘best practice’ directives used to keep your locations running smoothly. The question is - How well do your managers know what you expect of them?

Expectations

To put this into perspective, your restaurant managers are responsible for guest satisfaction, food orders, hiring, training, coaching and more. It’s important that your managers understand what you expect of them. You also need to keep in mind how important it is that you inspect what you expect of them. This action will help ensure that they’re planning and operating in line with those expectations. While you likely hired these managers because they have an inherent ability to connect with those around them, your restaurant managers will greatly benefit if they have easy access to reports that key on the metrics tied to your expectations.

Read More

Topics: Restaurant Performance

3 Keys To Analyze Promotions For Counter Service Restaurants

Posted by Dave

Menu changes occur all the time in the restaurant business. You might add an item or two, change the price of existing items, run a promotion, or limited time offer. All of these actions generate, hopefully, the consequences you intended. But, most of the time those actions cause other changes you did not expect. These are the unintended consequences. In this post, we give you three important things to consider when evaluating the effectiveness of a promotion.

Read More

Topics: Restaurant Performance

The Blurred Lines of "Restaurant Management Software"

Posted by Mirus Marketing

Like many terms in the restaurant industry, "Restaurant Management Software" is widely used, creating a complex understanding of what it actually means. In this article, I'd like to briefly discuss why that is, explain what I have learned so far by studying its use in our industry and tell you how to get a clearer picture of what defines solutions that are classified as Restaurant Management Software.

Read More

Topics: Restaurant Performance

What Comes First: Smart Data or Smart People?

Posted by Dave

What Comes First?

Determining the reason why two restaurant reporting numbers are different can be a real challenge, like the chicken or the egg. In this era of big data, many restaurant companies are racing to improve their use and comprehension of the data they have locked up in their system silos. But, the question for this post is: Does data make people smarter or is it the other way around?

In 2017, same-store sales of all restaurants fell by -1.1% according to TD2NK and their Black Box Intelligence index. This index is computed on data from 30,000 restaurants, so it is a pretty good aggregation of data - about 5% of the restaurant industry. In this population, I think it is fair to say that some of the companies use their data aggressively and some do not.

Read More

Topics: Restaurant Performance

POS Reporting VS Above Store Reporting

Posted by Mirus

In the Beginning

All restaurants, big or small, depend on a Point of Sale (POS) system to keep track of their business financials. A POS system can generate reports based on sales and customer information and trends that allow the restaurant operators to examine sales data along different thresholds and create promotions based on popular items or slower day parts. POS systems provide useful information to executives as their restaurant business develops.

Read More

Topics: Restaurant Data Warehouse, Restaurant Operations, Restaurant Performance

Restaurants sell more using Mirus

Posted by Dave


Measuring success or failure of a system that improves decision making is challenging in many respects. But, the Same Store Sales (SSS) metric can be useful, especially when applied to a long period of time, and across thousands of restaurants. SSS is caluclated as a percentage change from last year to this year, and only uses locations that are open for both years.

Read More

Topics: Restaurant Profit, Restaurant Marketing, Restaurant Operations, Restaurant Finance, Restaurant Performance, Performance

Restaurant Growth is Optional. Change is Inevitable. Choose Wisely.

Posted by Chuck

Time For Change?

Spreadsheets are one of the most popular tools used to organize data and manage restaurants. Why? Because when you’re starting out spreadsheets are manageable, cost effective and contain useful tools for manipulating data.

Over the past several years however, I’ve seen some pretty incredible spreadsheet usage leaving me dumbstruck by the amount of copying, pasting, calculating and linking of pages that, in turn, create massive multi-page workbooks not to mention the hours of work that goes into their care and feeding. And as a report consumer, if you can locate the information you need in one of these behemoths, it’s likely the information is out of date before you even received it.

Read More

Topics: Restaurant Performance

3 Tips To Improve Restaurant Surveys

Posted by Mirus Marketing

You'd think employees of restaurants know why it is important to collect customer feedback, right? Not to say that your employees don't care about customers in general, but I wonder if they understand that the data customers give management can be leveraged into profits and improve job satisfaction! Let's take a look at how this could be.

Read More

Topics: Restaurant Marketing, Restaurant Performance

Search

Subscribe to Blog

Recent Posts

Top Restaurant Blog
Hot Companies In Houston