- Choose a right location
Choosing the right location with good traffic will ensure more footfall in your restaurant. However, it is important to not choose a location where the rental is too expensive to maintain in the long run. Do your calculations and predict how much you are going to earn on the average, in both best and worst case scenarios, and determine if the rental is going to eat up a large portion of your profit. Also, do not choose a location where it is deserted most of the time and does not suit the cuisine that you are offering. For example, you would not want to choose a location near a neighbourhood school when you are offering French-style cuisines that are targeting the working adults in the CBD area.
- Choose a team of good chefs
It is important to choose a team of good chefs that master in the cuisine that you are offering in your restaurant. This is to ensure that the dishes prepared by the chefs will be able to satisfy your customers’ appetite. You definitely would not want to have poor quality food prepared by inexperienced chefs and faced complaints by many customers, leaving bad comments and reviews online, which will cause the reputation of your restaurant to suffer in the long run. The word of mouth may deter potential customers from patronising your restaurant in the long run. On the contrary, having good chefs who cook good food will bring a good name to your restaurant. It also increases the chance for your customers in becoming your regulars.
- Always keep aside sufficient funds
It is essential to keep aside sufficient funds for your restaurant. This is because you may not know how sustainable your restaurant is after a few months and there are always pointers for improving your restaurant. You may need some funds to do some changes for your restaurant such as upgrading the mobile ordering system and partnering with delivery companies, to suit your customers’ needs. It is also crucial to keep aside adequate savings for your restaurant to prepare for the unexpected and uncertainty that may bring (eg, COVID-19 pandemic).
- Choose a unique Restaurant name & logo
By choosing a unique restaurant name and logo, people will be able to recognise your restaurant easily everywhere. For example, if they happen to come across an advertisement about your restaurant online or on the streets, they will remember it easily from your logo and restaurant name. The uniqueness peaks their curiosity and they are more likely to patronise your restaurant. This increases the amount of your new customers and the quality of your food and service determines if they are going to be back in the future.
- Come up with a good menu and its design
The menu design talks a lot about how your restaurant is doing. When most customers look through the menu, they are going to look at the menu item associated with its picture and price. Factors include the menu item name, image, description, font, font size, and the outline of the menu design. It may sound easy but it plays a huge part in determining whether or not it will be able to entice your customers to order a particular dish. If your menu contains a dish that is priced expensively, you will surely want the customers to feel that it is of a high quality. To enhance the quality of the food in their mindset, you have to ensure that the various factors mentioned above have to be taken into consideration to be able to present the highest quality of the food as such.
- Ensure that your restaurant’s information is up to date online
Always ensure that your restaurant’s details are up-to-date online on the different platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google, so that your customers will be able to locate or contact your restaurant. Information includes operating hours, location, contact details and email addresses. You may also wish to add in the timing for the last order to prevent any mislead information and misunderstanding as some customers might assume closing time as the last ordering time.
