Bringing It All Together
Posted by estiator at 11 April, at 09 : 28 AM Print
MANAGING FOR SUCCESS By CONSTANTINE N. KOLITSAS Business Coach
During the first six months of pandemic, most restaurant businesses were in survival mode, trying to figure out temporary strategies to keep the doors open and customers engaged. After that half year mark, it was becoming obvious that many of those temporary fixes would transition to permanent features, creating a new or significantly evolved business model. We spent most of 2021 innovating; working on channels that included takeout, delivery, third-party delivery, “remote kitchens” for affiliated partners (breweries, for example), ghost kitchens, cocktails to-go, and more. In some cases, we were simply beefing up peripheral parts of our business that already existed; in others we were adding completely new channels to our operations. The goal was to offset the loss of in-store traffic with outreach models that would bring our food to where the guest felt safe (or otherwise preferred) to eat.
Three months into 2022, it’s clear that this year will be about making those disparate channels work in harmony, and enhancing the guest’s overall experience and impression of your restaurant.
If you looked at my pizza takeout business pre-pandemic, you would have seen a couple of people manning telephones, inputting orders into a POS system that also received online orders coming from our website and our app. All orders were fed into the kitchen by ticket, and our 6-man team of delivery drivers would be running in and out of the place with boxes of pizza for the better part of three hours on a busy Friday or Saturday night. Things were humming. Across the wall, our upscale Greek concept was pretty much independent from the pizza place (which had its own distinct brand). We didn’t want the create the impression of two different operations, even though both operated out of the same kitchen space.
It’s clear that this year will be about making disparate channels work in harmony, and enhancing the guest’s overall experience and impression of your restaurant.
On March 17, 2020, all of that changed, as the state of Connecticut closed its dining rooms. We were a new business, having opened just seven months prior, and while Pizza Station was fine with takeout- and delivery-only (that was its model all along), we never got to the point where we were building out the takeout for Greca. As such, I feared that Greca would go away. The four or five takeout orders we would receive per week were certainly not going to sustain it. And so, I broke down the invisible wall between the two businesses (although the physical wall stayed up) and integrated the Greca menu into the Pizza Station POS, and reprinted my takeout menus to include the Greca offerings. The results were immediate and overwhelming. By May we were outpacing our sales projections, and the dining room had still not reopened.
Flash forward a year to May 2021 and the Greca dining room had gotten back to about 80% of its business levels, with takeout and delivery still humming at Pizza Station, where both menus were contributing equally.
Flash forward again to March 2022 and there are things that you wouldn’t have seen even a few months earlier… After being strongly against giving my profits over to the third-party delivery companies, I finally relented when I was offered the opportunity to deviate pricing from my menu prices. I was able to negotiate with two of the largest names in delivery to a minimal commission, which I pass along directly to the consumer by way of higher prices. For example, a $21 moussaka delivered by my driver will cost a DoorDash customer $23.10. I still get my full price, and I don’t have to deliver it myself. I was hesitant at first to charge higher prices, as I didn’t want to change the value proposition for guests or their impression of our value. But after careful consideration, I came to the conclusion that the customers who utilize these platforms expect to pay a premium and, therefore, it does not negatively reflect on the restaurant.
Today, I’ve got orders coming in to three different tablets (two from delivery services and one from a local brewery that my drivers service); I’m in the midst of changing POS systems (which will enhance my online ordering capabilities); and I plan to add online ordering features to my social media platforms, and look into other third-party ordering apps. I’m in negotiations to install a kiosk at a large company down the road that will integrate into my POS, and I’m ramping up cocktails to-go.
My challenge now is to bring all of these disparate channels together into a seamlessly connected, integrated workflow and customer-facing presence. I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to do it, but I’m working on it. I’ll let you know how it turns out…
Constantine Kolitsas is the president of CNK Consulting, a restaurant consultant and coaching business. He can be reached at 203-947-6234 or at ckolitsas@gmail.com
