Mirus Reporter

Change Happens...

Menu changes occur all the time in restaurants. Sometimes it is a price change; sometimes it is a limited time offer. There are lots of reasons for changing your menu. Think of a menu change as an avenue to stimulating your customers. By making the change, you are hoping to achieve a particular outcome; for example, selling more of a menu item or making more money selling the menu items you already sell.

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.

As a restaurant CMO the areas of social media, guest feedback and planning the next profitable promotion probably take up most of your time. But what about labor? Wait, Operations is supposed to take care of labor scheduling and staffing not marketing. Before you pass this very important function off to the next guy you may want to see how labor affects the marketing department's efforts.

The Foundation

For the purpose of this article, let's make the assumption that the multiple restaurants you oversee have, in some form or another, a POS system, an established holiday calendar, weather data, customer satisfaction surveys, kitchen timers, and a labor management system.

If you only have a few of these systems in place, that's okay. I just wanted to name the data source systems that could be leveraged for this reporting overview.

Successful restaurateurs need to have extensive KPIs and they must be able to quantify everything.  Data scrutiny and analysis is an ongoing process. Restaurant CEO's need to have their restaurant information distributed and analyzed by different personnel that will empower their businesses to increase revenue and improve customer service.  However, operators can be misled by information received solely from their POS systems (sales, reservations) or BOH systems (inventory, food costing, labor scheduling).  They need to be able to get a look at the bigger picture.

Labor is on the minds of many restaurant executive's these days and for good reason. The news of the Department of Labor's new overtime rules along with minimum wage increases has operators scrambling to keep labor costs down. Technology can play a big role in helping track labor and prevent overtime.

Slow Sales

With all the bad news in the restaurant industry lately about negative same store sales and traffic declines it may be hard as a restaurant operations executive to motivate your team and stay motivated yourself. Throughout history the one thing that has helped people persevere through tough times: Hope. One way operations executives can find hope in these hard times is knowing when profits are highest throughout the year and taking advantage of that knowledge.

Nowadays, the CFO in the restaurant industry performs multiple functions. In addition to finance, and regulating costs, the CFO is in charge of restaurant development and making tactical decisions ranging from marketing initiatives to growth plans. The modern day CFO has to have the ability to forecast market fluctuations, analyze restaurant benchmarks against peers, and have some knowledge of IT systems and IT investments, ensuring that there’s a return on these investments.

They must outline metrics so that restaurant data can be interpreted in real time to set business strategy and make intelligent decisions.

Restaurant Scorecards

Restaurant scorecards have long been used to monitor the success or struggles franchise locations may be going through at any given point in time. Similar to a grade school report card, operators can get a glimpse of unit sales, costs, execution, media spending, revenue bands, area demographics, and more.

Now days, there are systems that can take operating data and use that information to compare unit to unit or geographical area to area. It can be a quick and effective way to reward and offer assistance to franchisees.

So why is it important to scorecard each location to it's granular level? Below are 3 examples!

Restaurant operators are always searching for new and fresh ideas that will attract more customers. The goal is clear: enhance customer experience, make sure the marketing objectives are met, and that the campaign produces profitable returns.