Restaurant managers must be adaptable, organized, and proactive, as they are responsible for everything from ensuring the quality of food and service to handling unexpected challenges. Good restaurant management helps restaurants run smoothly, improve profitability, and maintain a strong reputation in a competitive market.
What is Restaurant Management?
Restaurant management is the process of overseeing all aspects of a restaurant's operations to ensure its success. It involves coordinating various elements such as staffing, inventory control, customer service, financial management, and marketing to create a seamless dining experience. Effective restaurant management goes beyond just managing the day-to-day activities; it also includes strategic planning, goal setting, and maintaining a positive work environment that motivates staff and enhances the customer experience.
Key Responsibilities of a Restaurant Manager
Managing a restaurant requires that you pay attention to a number of constantly moving parts. While it can be overwhelming at times, once you know which specific areas to focus your energies on and, importantly, have a strong crew to back you up, things get easier.
Managing Staff and Building a Positive Team Culture
Beyond meeting financial milestones and keeping the business afloat, your staff and the culture that you build with them is the most important part of managing a restaurant. It’s the environment that you and your team will be in for at least eight hours a day, often five to six days a week — so make it a healthy one!
A healthy staff and culture aren’t easy to create, but they’re likely to make or break how your job feels on a day-to-day basis. When everyone is tight knit and supportive, the rush feels nonexistent and the work goes by quickly; when the team is at each other's throats, though, is when things start to go downhill.
Because of this, it’s crucial to hammer home with your staff what specifically you want from the culture in your restaurant. And, more importantly, it’s vital to discuss with your staff what kind of environment they want.
Overseeing Daily Operations
This is the meat of the operation. Oversight of day-to-day will be what likely takes up the majority of your time each week. Generally, this is where your assistant management will come into play, allowing you to take over the more long-term things like scheduling, inventory, and menu development. But not every restaurant has an assistant manager or sous chef — so what does this entail if you’re on your own?
The most important part of oversight is that you don’t get in the way. Be familiar enough with every process in your restaurant that you can step in and assist should the need arise, but don’t bog your team down with micromanagement. Allow them to do what you pay them for and trust that it’ll happen — after all, if you can’t do that, then why did you hire them in the first place?
In other words, managing a restaurant in the day-to-day involves trust, and a lot of it. Trust that your staff can do their jobs, trust that they’ll turn to you if help is needed, and trust that you’ll support your staff should things go awry.
Managing Inventory and Supplies
While inventory management may not be enjoyable (nor creative or particularly engaging), it’s crucial to keeping your business afloat. Restaurants go through a lot of stock in any given week, and because of this, it’s important to have guides in place to keep ordering simple.
One of the first things you should do when taking over a restaurant is to review your par level guides, ordering lists, and vendors.
Ensuring that you have up-to-date and well-made guides for ordering and inventory isn’t just important for you, either. By creating these guides now, you’re creating a failsafe should you ever be sick or out of the business when things come up — and in restaurants, something always comes up.
Ensuring Excellent Customer Service
This is where the coaching aspect of your job comes into play. Customer service is an odd tightrope to walk, in that your servers need to sell things, but they also need to keep the guests feeling comfortable. And even if your staff is the best in the business, you’ll still need to deal with hangry customers, impatient delivery drivers, and stressed staff. Any of those on their own are easy to handle, but when they combine during service, that’s when you get to see what your staff is made of.
By making a habit of regularly coaching your staff, you help build a guideline for them to handle any given situation. This is why we hammer on the importance of training beyond the initial “learn the basics” phase — take notes and bring them to your Front of House. Hold all-hands meetings, go over pain points and the things that they get right, and then do it all again in a month or two.
Essential Tips and Strategies for Effective Restaurant Management
Now that we know the most important parts of managing a restaurant, we can talk about restaurant management tips. The points below certainly aren’t all that you need to know to run a restaurant, but they’ll provide a clear jumping-off point to creating a healthy, well-run restaurant.
Develop Clear Communication Channels
As cliche as it is, the saying that communication is key isn’t wrong. In fact, it’s a cliche for a reason — without communication, you wouldn’t have a restaurant, plain and simple. Your front and back of house should be regularly communicating about ticket times, modifications, limitations, and just about everything else on the way. If they can’t do that, then it’s time to focus on training your staff!
In short, encourage open communication and, importantly, provide clear ways for everyone to have their thoughts heard.
Implement Smart Scheduling Practices
Scheduling is a major part of your role in restaurant management. Not only is it the reason that people show up, but it can also be the reason that people don’t show up. Schedules in kitchens are notorious for odd hours, last-minute modifications, and poor timing, all of which lead to frustrated employees.
The long and short of things is that when scheduling, it’s crucial to provide every employee regular, predictable hours on a pre-set schedule. Don’t wait until the day before the schedule begins to publish it; don’t make last-minute changes without consulting the people involved; don’t switch things up without speaking to those involved, the list goes on.
What matters is that you remember that this schedule impacts the lives of dozens of people and that it should be a large priority for you to take time to do it right.
Monitor Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Managing a restaurant means that you need to know how healthy it is. By making a habit of regularly monitoring KPIs, you’ll set yourself up for success. It will allow you to make adjustments to scheduling, ordering, daily operations, and customer service — which all happen to be the major pillars of restaurant management.
Train and Develop Your Team Continuously
Training doesn’t end after the first few weeks. You should be making a point to regularly (every 3-6 months at least) coach your staff through new techniques, new equipment, and anything else that you can. Not only will continuing to develop your staff make them better at their jobs, but it’s likely to keep them around longer, too!
Foster Strong Relationships with Vendors
It’s crucial to build good relationships with each of your vendors and reps. This means that when things go wrong, you can’t call up your rep and scream at them. Yes, mistakes are frustrating, but it’s not worth burning a bridge with the only people in town that can get you that specific thing that you need. In other words, treat your reps like people; feed them when you can, talk to them when able, and be kind.
Adapt to Industry Trends and Changes
This industry changes constantly. From trends to techniques, dishes, and equipment, there’s always something new to learn; it’s why many of us love it so much.
Be sure to remain involved in your local industry and be willing to change when things get hairy. This also ties into monitoring your KPIs — if you notice a bad trend in business, that means that it’s time to change things up. Whether that comes in the form of event nights, restaurant marketing, or new menu items, change isn’t always bad.
Lead by Example
The fastest way to earn the loyalty of your staff is to lead by example. Don’t just tell your staff to work faster, clean this, or do that thing better — show them how. Show them that it’s possible. Because if you can’t do it, why should you expect that they can?
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