Video Blog: What to have in Your Restaurant & Catering Operating System

Video Blog

This video is part of a series of videos where I, Jonathan Munsell, answer questions and offer hard hitting comments that you can use to improve your restaurant immediately!

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What to have in Your Restaurant & Catering Operating System

Hey it’s me, Jonathan Munsell, the founder and creator of Restaurant Success Systems.  I want to talk about systems as a whole and all the little, itty, bitty things that go into a system for a restaurant.

The Restaurant & Catering Assessment is one of the tools that we use.  This actually is available to you online if you go to http://restaurantsuccessmonthly.com/restaurant-start-up-members-only and you can see that it’s up a big checklist that’s got about 50 different items on it; everything from your people to your systems in general and how you handle quality, marketing, service, safety and sanitation, your financials, and your management.

When I started out in this business I didn’t start out with this.  I wasn’t fortunate enough to be able to go to a website and download it.  It’s actually free here: http://restaurantsuccessmonthly.com/restaurant-start-up-members-only and you can download it and you can even fill it out and send it to me and I’ll happily talk to you and talk through what you need to focus on maybe first because that’s an important thing is that you make sure you focus on the first things first and the things that are going to help you get ahead.

But with this, you can create your own systems.  Even without this, if I had to give you a piece of advice to build your own systems in your restaurant, the thing you want to do is start with maybe the most frustrating thing or maybe the most important thing.

I’ll give you an example:  Maybe you’re having trouble getting the deposit to the bank.  All you need to do is take the time – and you can do this from everything from answering the telephones to how food is prepared; just sit down and write out line by line exactly how you want it to go.

We go to the safe and we open up the safe and we take out the money; we write that we took the money out.  They money goes to the bank.  Once the bank gives us back our receipt, we bring the receipt back and we staple it with our paperwork.

Just write all that stuff down and do that for everything in your restaurant.  Start with the things that are the most frustrating or the most challenging or the things that you’re having difficulty with and then work your way backward to the things that are very simple.

You’ll find if you do this and even if you did just one system a day, at the end of the year you’d have 365 of them.  So keep in mind that whenever you’re writing a system to make it very simple.  So it’s the KISS principle:  Keep It Super-Simple and just write down exactly what you want to happen.

Then the thing you can do is you can share this with the people in your organization and you can ask them, “How are you handling this?  Here’s the deposit procedures; is this exactly what happens?”  Let them respond and give you some feedback and then you’re getting buy-in on how this stuff is created.

Let your people know that you’re going to start the process and do it and just get all this stuff documented because you’re going to find at the end of the day that if you can keep getting these things off of you and if you can keep getting other people to understand what you’re doing, your restaurant is going to run a lot better and it’s going to run smoother and you’re going to have better days and you’re not going to feel like you’re fighting it out.

Then you can start really delegating things and then there’s no reason that they don’t do them the way that you expect.  You have a piece of paper; what part of that didn’t they understand?  So start documenting the systems in your restaurant even if they’re very specific to your restaurant.  Other than that, grab this Restaurant Success Assessment and go through it and figure out exactly what you do need to put into place.

That’s my tip for you today.  If you enjoyed this and you’d like to receive 20 more of the top questions that people ask me about the restaurant business, and you can also get a copy of my free report, How to Make any Restaurant into a Super-Powerful Cash Machine, which has ten secrets not included in any of the videos about the characteristics of a successful restaurant owner, go to www.restaurantgoldmine.com.

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