Planning for a successful restaurant in 2019

With the upcoming new year, many of you may be staring at your yearly exercise of goal setting and coming up with solutions to increase revenue and save cost. 

Many of you will head into the new year with plans and actions and ideas on how to build on your success of 2018 to take your restaurant business to newer heights. But to build on your business you need to plan and make it happen. 

While the world prepares to go out and party from now till the 31st December, it is a good time to plan and set priorities to improve your restaurant business

Planning for a successful restaurant in 2019 need not be a tough exercise and this guide will break it down into sub topics so that you focus on improving your business. 

Strategic goals

The first thing to do while planning for success in the new year is to look at your strategic goals and whether you are on track to achieve them. If you had made some long term goals, say a 5 year or 10 year goal, are your goals still relevant and the actions you did in 2018 helping you to move to that goal.

• Analyse you actions for the previous year, and find out if you managed to hit your goals
• If you could not, ask yourself what stopped you from achieving your goals
• What would 2019 be like. Or what changes would you like to make

Identify the competitive landscape

You will not operate your business in a silo. Every action you do is based on something the market or your competition does. Even if you did something unique, the market would have copied your actions and now you would have competition.  

Do a SWOT analysis. Understand your market and see if things have changed. A year is a long time for things to change in the local market. Online Delivery companies are changing the fortunes of many restaurants. How did the past year affect you

• Make a list of macro changes in your industry
• Identify how the change affected you and your competition
• Look at best practices in the market and what successful restaurant are doing 

Plan for Success

Understanding the big picture helps you to plan the details. 

Once you understand the big picture, you can go ahead and identify actions that will help you to make your restaurant successful in the new year

• What are your annual goals or targets?
• How will you get there? Food festivals, lunch promotions, etc.
• What training will the team need to help them get to their goals?
• How often will you measure the actions, monthly or quarterly

Take action

Once you know the action plans and you have drawn up your strategy and action plan on a yearly calendar, make sure your team knows about it. 

Without their help, you will not be able to succeed, make sure you keep telling them what you are planning to do and what success will look like. 

Ideas without execution is useless. 

Anonymous

Empower your associates to deliver your vision and have a truly successful new year