By Veronica Wallace, Contributor
Restaurants are somewhat notorious for eating up a lot of their owner’s time.
But life is all about balance. Even when your restaurant is the source of your passion and pride, you still need to look after yourself outside of it.
Your restaurant can only operate as well as you are feeling. If you’re tired, stressed, or worn down from missing your loved ones, it will show in the quality of work you do. In the end, it can end up hurting you and your business.
That’s why balance is so important, especially in the service industry. Restaurants are often open outside of regular hours, like on holidays, when most people rest. Owners feel pressured to be open all the time, even when it’s at the expense of their family time.
How do you strike the right balance when you want your business to be successful?
Here’s our guide to balancing work and life when you’re running a restaurant:
Take Time Off
Many restaurant owners share the same fear: that if they take a week or two off, their customers will forget all about them. But this is a far cry from the truth.
There’s nothing wrong with taking time to yourself. Doing so can prevent you from experiencing burnout, an increasingly common phenomenon in the 21st century. Symptoms include feeling cynical, unfocused, and experiencing stomach issues or headaches.
Not only is your restaurant your full-time job, but you work untold hours each week in overtime—buying ingredients, paying employees, and preparing for tomorrow’s lunchtime rush.
You don’t necessarily need to take a fancy vacation; instead, spend a week or two at home with your family and focus on looking after yourself instead of your restaurant.
Even if you can’t take a week off, at least shoot for a long weekend. Spend it catching up on sleep, watching movies, or playing games with your family.
Training members of your team to take the reins on occasion while you’re always will not only give you much needed time off but also promote growth and loyalty among your staff. The success of your restaurant needs to be a team effort.
Keep Your Restaurant’s Finances in Check
When we’re talking about balance, we can’t forget to mention the balance of your bank account.
After spending hours at the restaurant each week, other parts of your business can fall to the wayside.
Are you spending too much on ingredients that go to waste? Can you afford to hire another employee that will free up some of your time? Questions like these are useful to revisit several times a year as your revenue fluctuates.
Financial planning tips can be a great help when you’re first opening a restaurant. Even for an experienced owner, it doesn’t hurt to brush up on the basics. After all, who doesn’t want to manage their money more efficiently?
You might find that by restructuring your budget, you can afford to work less and spend more time with your loved ones. Talk about a win-win situation!
Should You Hire a Family Member?
Here’s a great way to spend more time with your family: hire them to work at your restaurant!
While this arrangement works for some people, it can have disastrous results for others.
On one hand, it allows you to be with your family while you’re at work. If you’re unable to reduce your hours, this is a good solution to your lack of family time—however, it doesn’t exactly restore balance to your life.
But on the other hand, the dynamic of working with a family member is quite different than working with a standard employee. Think about what might happen if you hired your teenage son—he rarely listens when you tell him to clean his room, let alone bus the tables.
We’re not saying that hiring your family is a bad idea. It strictly depends on your situation. Only you can make that judgment call.
When you hire hardworking employees that you can rely on, you can trust that your restaurant will be in good hands whenever you aren’t there.
Many restaurant owners feel a sense of pride about how many hours they work each week. Even though it reflects a strong work ethic and a dedication to your business, it comes at the cost of missing out on family time.
What if you look back and realize that your kids have grown up, and you spent most of their childhood working? That’s time you can never get back.
You might work yourself to the bone to provide for your family. But at the same time, you still need to spend time with your family. It can be tough to manage both. By using the above tips, you can restore some balance to your life.
