- Inexperienced Restaurant Owners
Some restaurant owners have either zilch or little experience in working in the F&B service industry before and thus do not know what to expect or how to handle their operations smoothly. The lack of planning and knowledge in the Food Industry background makes it hard for them to make right decisions pertaining to their restaurant.
Before starting up a restaurant, it is important to attend both F&B and Restaurant Management courses to enhance your knowledge as you have to know everything regarding the F&B service and how to lead and manage your service team well. You may also want to try working in a restaurant to have hands-on experience so that you can practise the theory that you have learnt while carrying out your duties. You will be more familiarized and exposed to the restaurant operations. You can have the restaurant’s owner as your mentor to guide you around. From there, you will also be able to understand the common F&B terminology used in restaurants so that you will be able to communicate with your staff effectively and easily when you have successfully opened your own restaurant.
- Wrong Choice of Location
Choice of location plays a huge factor in determining the restaurant’s success. In order to ensure constant foot traffic to your restaurant, you must consider the different factors while deciding the location of your restaurant. Most restaurants fail due to poor location. It may not be able to attract the right type of crowd to ensure constant foot traffic or that restaurant’s owner can barely cover the unrealistically high rental of their restaurant in a prime location. Therefore, it is important to research for an ideal location and do a predictable calculation of your future restaurant’s profit in both good and bad scenarios to ensure that your restaurant is sustainable and profitable in the long run.
You can research about your competitors’ restaurants and look at the typical locations that they choose. Try to figure out what is the reason behind their decision and what is common between all the areas. (Eg: Near the mall, Walkable distance from MRT, At popular food street/spots, Beside Tertiary Schools to target large groups of Tertiary Students to dine) Imagine having your restaurant situated in those areas, ask yourself if it can be profitable.
- Poor Standard of Food Quality / Inconsistent Food Portion
It is important to constantly keep food quality in check to ensure that the food is prepared consistently according to your restaurant’s recipe and Standard Operating Procedures (SOP). Poor Food Quality would deter the customer’s decision of wanting to return to your restaurant in the future, thus you would fail at retaining your new customers. Keeping food portions consistent is an important factor to sustain your customers as no one wants to spend their money on a meagre portion of dish. Feedbacks through reviews or word-of-mouth from customers may also affect the choice of others wanting to dine in your restaurant as well.
- Weak Marketing
It is important to ensure that your restaurant has strong marketing campaigns and stay ahead of the competition. You need to let customers know about your restaurant in order to succeed. You can market your restaurant through online or offline advertising channels such as Facebook and Instagram advertising or through brochures and flyers. Marketing helps to promote your restaurant to many different groups of people who may be interested in the type of cuisine that your restaurant serves.
- Weak Customer Service
Having good customer service is important everywhere, especially in restaurants. Tone and gesture are particularly important when it comes to communicating with customers. Staff should not portray a lazy attitude to serve or fulfill customers’ demands which makes the customers feel that they are just here for work and cannot be bothered with the customers.
If there are mistakes made by your staff that customers are unhappy with, you should fix the mistakes immediately. If a dish is prepared inaccurately as to customer’s requests, you should inform the chef to redo a new one on the spot. If a drink accidentally toppled on customers’ clothes by the staff, you can offer discounts on their meal or a return voucher on top of your apology. This is to appease the customers and they are more likely to return again as they felt your sincerity.
