Business
Builders

The New Economy Calls for Smart Marketing

Retrain Employees to Boost Your Bottom Line

Why throw away thousands of dollars each year training new employees? Instead, spend next to nothing retraining your current employees. Christina Raines, author of, “TWENTYSOMETHING:  Managing and Motivating Today’s New Work Force” sums up the problem simply: “There is a real shortage of front-line workers in the service industry; therefore, we have to keep the ones we have.  It’s really expensive to be recruiting, hiring and training new people constantly.  Your products and services are being delivered by your front line – and if they don’t care, they aren’t going to do a good job.  It’s the right thing to do and it’s the nice thing to do; but if you want to stay in business, it’s the only thing to do.”

What tools do you use to give your employees feedback?  Do you spend countless hours at your business monitoring the daily operations and making sure that everything is running smoothly?   You can minimize the time you spend monitoring employee performance by adding some tools to your management toolbox. 

Why Your Bar Needs a Signature Drink

The best operators have long recognized the tremendous profits that can be generated by putting all their marketing resources into promoting one unique product that they have developed. At the Hyatt Regency Kauai, it is the Poipu Passion; at the Cactus Club in Vancouver, it’s the Bellini; in downtown San Diego, the Bitter End has their Black Martini. And walk in to any large chain restaurant, from Applebee’s to TGIFriday’s, and you will see the staff pushing the restaurant’s own blended frozen Margarita or other specialty.

The savvy operators of these establishments understand that there are three great reasons to develop a signature drink. First, these drinks are very profitable. Most of the examples cited above have a theoretical pour cost of under 10%. That means that every time one is sold, the operator sees his beverage cost go down and his profits go way up. Second, the staff is trained to sell the signature drink. In fact, it sells so well that it is a large part of their sales mix. Generally, a well-accepted signature drink should make up 5% - 10% of a bar’s alcohol sales. The combination of a high volume item that also carries an exceptional profit margin can only have one result: exploding profits.

HR Expertise Keeps a Restaurant Business Protected and Productive

Compliance with federal, state, and local labor laws is the responsibility of a business owner, whether they have one employee, 25, or 100. With the typical high employee turnover rate in the restaurant industry, labor law compliance issues become even more important.

So, what is compliance? Simply stated, it is business behavior that follows government laws. The federal government alone administers and enforces more than 180 laws directing workplace activities for approximately 10 million employers nationwide.¹  Add state and local laws into the mix, and every restaurant is required to comply with laws that cover many familiar day-to-day activities, including:

• hours and wages,

• hiring and firing practices,

• equal opportunity,

• on-the-job health and safety, and

• workers’ compensation.