Food Service Disciplines for Success

Most club managers would agree that food service is the most challenging part of their operations, but recognizing that knowledge is power, this summary of disciplines will enhance any operation’s bottom line.

·??Benchmarking revenues, cover counts, and average check by day of week and meal period. ?This will help you schedule staff more efficiently, monitor sales trends, and allow you to track the success of new menus and efforts to suggest and describe menu items.

·??Benchmarking payroll cost, hours worked, and average hourly wage by pay period.? This essential discipline will allow you to stay within budget, monitor overtime, and control your most significant expense.

·??Formal forecasting by using historical cover benchmarks and knowledge of upcoming events, external factors, and optimum staffing levels, you can ensure expected service levels in the most cost-effective way.

·??Timely and accurate inventories and benchmarking of inventories.? This will ensure budgeted cost of goods sold and identify any adverse outliers or trends for investigation.? A further discipline that will yield significant benefits is to identify and inventory high value items weekly.

·??Sales mix analysis.? This discipline will help you understand your members’ dining preferences while protecting profit margins.

·??Basic dining policies.? Well-thought out and promoted dining policies will give all members an equal opportunity to enjoy the dining services while ensuring the highest service levels for all.

·??Consistent pre-shift meetings with a purpose and continual On the Go Training.? There is no better way to prepare and train your staff for service.

·??Product knowledge and suggesting and describing training for servers.? They can’t promote what they don’t know, and servers well-trained in these techniques will enhance your members’ dining experiences, while increasing your operation’s average check.

·??Suggesting and describing feedback.? If servers are provided with daily sales goals and feedback on their efforts to suggest and describe, they will be far more engaged, enthusiastic, and effective in increasing their average checks.? You just need to provide the numbers to them daily.

·??Real Time Accounting.? This powerful discipline of tracking revenues and expenses in real time will ensure your bottom line, make you more knowledgeable about your operation, and make preparing future budgets a breeze.

Food service managers should make these disciplines part of their daily and weekly routines.? Once these disciplines are instituted and mastered, many of them can be delegated to properly trained and motivated subordinates.? When consistently applied, these basic and commonsense disciplines will enhance both profitability and member service.? What more could you want for your operation?

For more useful ideas and information, check out the wide range of highly integrated and widely acclaimed Professional Development, Operational, and Training Resources at the PCPM Marketplace Store.