Setting Objectives

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Irrespective of how big your business is, you need to think about setting objectives and outlining a clear vision to ensure that you have something to work towards. It is very difficult to keep track of how far you have come and where you want to go without writing something down for you and the teams to look at regularly.

Sharing this information is critical with everyone that works in the business and most successful businesses use their teams to help put these Visions and Objectives together.

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How do I do this?

This is NOT a lone project. You need to get your senior kitchen team together, with the senior front of house team and discuss and decide on some key fundamental parts of the business and the management of the kitchen, the restaurant or F&B outlets.

These need to be done together – even if you are going to create separate objectives for the kitchen and the service team (which we would suggest is the best way). Then discuss and work through the following areas and write them down:

Overall Vision

This is creating one or two sentences that captures what you want the restaurant to be. This is what you want people to know you for and when read, gives everyone a clear picture of what your are working towards. For example, if you were running a Italian restaurant you may write something like: “We want to be the best Italian restaurant in the region, serving the freshest, locally-sourced products and also importing the finest ingredients direct from Italy.”

Objective

This what you and your team agree is what you ultimately want to achieve for that year, for the three areas mentioned below, and what your commitment as a manager/owner is to your team.

1. Staff and Colleagues
2. Guests/customers
3. Business

Key strategies

You will need to develop a strategy each of the objectives you and your team have outlined. The strategy needs to look at how you are going to deliver this objective as a team, and anything else you need to help you to achieve your objectives. Doing this together is critical for buy-in to ensure it is achievable and that everyone understands what is required of them. Creating an action plan that looks at key responsibilities will help you to keep focussed. Make sure you set regular time aside to look at this.

Measures

This is how you are going to measure your success. You should set criteria against which you will measure yourself, depending on the objective. It could be for example:

• financial performance
• reputation – customer feedback rating
• local press – reviews and ratings
• introduction of new dishes/menus
• success of promotions
• etc

The important thing here is about regularly communicating this to the team throughout the year and letting them know how you as a team are tracking against these metrics.

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1. Staff and Colleagues

The singular, most important part to any business is the team (Staff and Colleagues) and the management. They are your highest ongoing cost and without them behind you as a manager/owner you are destined to not reach your full potential.No successful business has ever said they should be doing less of the following points:

• Communicating
• Training
• Developing
• Mentoring
• Providing great work places with the right tools to carry out their jobs easily and efficiently
• Encouraging staff ideas and interaction
• Customer interaction knowledge

Once you fully understand the importance of having happy well-informed and trained staff, the process of making your customers happy will be easier. Trying to make your customer happy without ensuring your staff are, is the wrong way around.

2. Guests/customers

Measuring and monitoring how happy your guests are is critical to your success and targets need to be set with clear measures to check to see if you have achieved this.

Key points

• What do they like about you and how do you protect and ensure you continue doing that and what would they like to see you doing more of.
• Find out who your customers are, where do they come from, why are they choosing you?
• What sort of customers do you want to get more of and where are they dining at the moment? How can you tempt them to dine with you? It is all very well wanting to be busier but if you are not sure who, when and how often you want these people in your business you will not be able to target them.

Be aware of online rating/scoring/review systems such as TripAdvisor to also benchmark customer satisfaction. And don’t forget to monitor Twitter and facebook to find out what your customers are saying about you. You can read more on this in one of the forthcoming installments of the Digital Marketing Guides coming soon to the Kitchen CUT blog.

3. Business

Many of the tools available on Kitchen CUT will help you to control the business better. Create a happy well-trained and informed workforce and carefully protect existing business, as well as growing new, targeted business and you will be busier.

If you don’t control costs or keep a well managed business you will not maximise your profit.

Kitchen Cut will help you do the following:

• Control food costs
• Reduce wastage
• Control/reduce payroll
• Improve staff retention
• Maximise efficiencies
• Price your menus correctly
• Reduce stock holding
• Control and reduce breakages and losses
• Deliver a more consistent product
• Develop repeat business
• Confidently cater for customers with allergies and dietary requirements
• Give you better customer knowledge

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