GUESTS: Keep a Sturdy Stool Handy in Your Restaurant’s Bathrooms [Hack #108]
This is a great hack for the family-oriented restaurants out there. Keep a sturdy stool in your restaurant’s bathrooms so it’s easier for children to get onto the toilette and as well as reach the sink to wash their hands. As an added bonus, your squat-preferring guests will also appreciate the leg up you give them.
DID YOU KNOWS…
Using March Madness to Boost Impressions
Here’s a great post from our friend Rob Cressy over at Bacon Sports. He wrote about how he increased his organic impressions on Facebook by 120% during last year’s March Madness by using Facebook polls. Cool insight and definitely worth looking into as the tournament rolls on.
Unsafe Water
Several countries, particularly in Africa, still have a way to go to provide their citizens with safe water access. 844 million people around the world still lack even basic access, according to the United Nations, who declared March 22 World Water Day. This is despite the fact that unsafe water, causing diseases like cholera, typhoid and hepatitis A, is a bigger cause of human death annually than disasters and conflict combined.
Digi Poli Ads
President Trump’s 2020 campaign for reelection spent over $3.5 million on digital advertising alone in the first three months of 2019, according to data from Bulley Pulpit Interactive. Combining the digital advertising spending of the 15 Democratic candidates currently in the race does not come close to what Trump's reelection campaign has already poured into Facebook and Google.
PUT DOWN THAT CELLPHONE…MAYBE
Why it matters to you: How you can benefit from your staff using their phones at work.
Here’s a metric for you: 57% of Millennial employees want to manage their schedule via their cell phone. Honestly, to those of us that have run a shift in the last 10 years, that number sounds low. With the access to cloud computing, now is the time to leverage the newest “bring your own device” platforms for scheduling and training. You don’t have a single employee that doesn’t have a phone sufficient enough to manage their schedule requests and switching shifts. We also know how important the schedule is to Millennial employees. Likewise, training resources can be made available for employees to access them during training and for ongoing development.
Allowing your team to access their phones for legitimate use while working at your restaurant can open you up to abuse by employees. That’s why if you want to begin scheduling online so your team can access their schedules and make requests digitally, you have to have a very clear policy in place. Start by brining your team together and letting them know you want to make their lives easier and support them. Then describe your policy in no uncertain terms. Next and final step is to be unerringly consistent in applying your policy. Quickly staff will respect your leadership. Then you can finally get some value to the fact that they are without their phones anyway.
[Source: Restaurant Business Online]
IDIOSYNCRATIC GROWTH
Why it matters to you: Are the headwinds in our industry getting windier.
All you hear about the economy on the news is that there is 4% unemployment and the stock market has achieved record highs. But that seems to mask a more serious headwind that is likely about get windier. There are just too many full-service restaurants in operation. The regular traffic declines with spending increases are an idiosyncratic outcome of a wavering economy. People have more to spend, but there are just too many places to do it. Not to be morbid, but some are saying the correction will be 100,000 industry wide. Those numbers are not likely, but there have been plenty of bankruptcies over the past couple of years.
Restaurants fail for a variety of reasons. Some because they couldn’t evolve as tastes and traffic patterns evolved. There is no better demonstration of that than Bertucci’s in New England. When asked, people would say the food was great and they still loved it; they just hadn’t gone in ages. Bertucci’s had been forgotten. That can be fixed by refreshing your image, which unfortunately takes money. Also, bankruptcy isn’t the end of every chain that declares. As with Bertucci’s, they were bought because their turnout systems are fast and match the tastes of Millennials. The new owner wants to refresh it and invite them back. We’ll be watching for a feel-good story on this journey.
[Source: FSR Magazine]
