Business has been good, your best selling dishes are selling like hot cakes (pun intended), and you’re happy with the way things are rolling. Now when it’s off peak time – be it the monsoon, or when people are away on vacation, they aren’t crowding your restaurant as much; or when you aren’t booked out on a Friday or Saturday night, is when you pull out a few good tricks that are hidden somewhere up your sleeve. This also holds true for empty tables during lunch hour at many restaurants. Let’s talk about a few key areas you could tap.
Don’t drop the mic!
Let’s say it’s a multi-cuisine family restaurant, but that shouldn’t stop you from introducing new elements in your restaurant. Something new in the restaurant will bring in curious diners. Options are plenty – from karaoke to stand-up comedy, from live music to poetry slam, there’s a wide range of small-scale events people love to attend. Keep it light and simple so it doesn’t seem forced, yet there’s some buzz about the restaurant. The more you’re talked about, the more diners it’s going to draw. Remember, these events might bring the diners in, but you need to ensure they stay for the food.
Zomato For (Your) Business
Introduce offers to boost your sales. Like Happy Hours, free dessert when you order a seafood platter, or a complimentary drink when you upload a photo of your food on Zomato – you get the idea. Even introducing happy hours might get more and more tables getting full. Make these announcements on your social media channels so you have some activity going on there as well, keeping it interactive and informative. Having said that, your database should have a healthy fill of your customers’ email ids. Shoot emails to them periodically with ongoing offers so they can avail them in time (but exercise control, lest you come across as spammy).
Burbee’s in Noida for instance, is using Zomato Order to promote the restaurant’s home delivery business. “It’s rainy season and people hardly want to step out. They want to have pakoras and such so they order from us.” He also says it’s important to keep these discounts lucrative and to turn something like monsoon for instance, to your advantage.
Let’s Roll That Dice!
One of the reasons diners come back to restaurants and cafes is engagement. There are cafes who have their corners stacked with books. There are others who have merchandise for sale. Some of them have board games to keep their diners entertained.
Nishant Sinha from Coffee Cup in Hyderabad says a cafe is something in home and office. The kind of place you’d visit regularly. And when you have regulars you want to keep them coming back for more. Coffee Cup has a fun range of board games like Snakes & Ladders, Ludo, Jenga, and the likes. They also have 500 – 600 books including fiction, non-fiction and comics they keep for sale. “When customers come into the cafe and place their order, they don’t wait around for their food to get to the table. Instead, they get themselves a board game and get playing”.
With these added elements, your business is bound to increase, even if marginal. It could also work as a USP – something for people to talk about and something for people to come back for.
Sweet Deal!
Look at what’s around you – sports arenas, colleges, corporate offices, etc. Work out a partnership with them giving them the best your restaurant has to offer. And once the ball gets rolling, they are sure to turn into loyal patrons. A few examples – providing lunch combos delivered to corporate offices at a discounted price, offering discount cards or giving a beverage free for every meal to college students, giving restaurant vouchers worth a certain amount to winners in sports arenas, and the like.
Revisiting the menu
Lastly, revisit your menu. Keep the ‘hot cakes’ aside and focus on what’s not selling as much, and what’s not selling at all. You have a couple of choices here – either get the non-selling ones off the menu, even temporarily, or bring in a new specials menu for that time. It’s also the best time to introduce local seasonal produce in your menu. Sit with your chef and see how you can work around this. Keeping non-selling dishes on the menu will only increase costs. Might as well do away with it and give diners something new and refreshing.
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The slump in business should be looked at as an opportunity to understand it better. Every restaurant goes through a lull – it could be monsoon, peak summers, peak winters, schools reopening, and many other factors that contribute to it. Find the gaps, be imaginative, and fill them with ideas that could really work like magic for you. Keep your eyes open for what’s picking up in the industry, and apply what might work for your establishment.
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