1. Create a Facebook Page
This one seems obvious. Creating a Facebook page is simple: Just sign up and fill out the basic information about your business. Click here to sign your restaurant up for its own business page. You can also designate yourself as a local restaurant under the “Local” option. Many smaller restaurants have abandoned their own website in favor of their Facebook page. Some restaurants have both and link them together.

2. Use Updates to Convert Fans to Your Marketing Goals
Posting simple status updates about your business — or really, anything you think is relevant — will be seen by users in their homepage news feeds. This is a great way to keep your “fans” updated with your goings on as well as to stay top of mind when your fans are thinking about dining out.

3. Interact with Your Fans as Much as Possible
When a customer approaches you in real life to tell you what they think of your business, you’ll listen. So why not on Facebook? You might hear some useful criticism, or some timely compliments. Also, when you respond, you’re more likely to get them to respond — this additional activity further increases the chance your fans’ friends will see and learn about you.

4. Create and promote events online and offline
Let people know about a special Mother’s Day brunch or a regular Friday Happy Hour by sending invitations and ask people to RSVP on Facebook. This can be a great way to increase viral marketing as information about Facebook Events travels through news feeds from your network of friends and family outwards to create a greater social media footprint.

5. Use Multimedia to Show Off your Food and Dining Experiences
Photos and videos say a lot about food, if not the overall style of your establishment. Make sure to let your fans see what you offer by posting your latest or most prized dishes. Also, photos and videos of events and happy hours can be great PR.

6. Integrate Your Page with Other Marketing Efforts
Are you also running some sort of contest or special on another site? Make sure your Facebook fans know about it. Integrate all your marketing channels. The more touch points you have with your customers and potential customers the better chance of success you have.

7. Use Existing Applications to Promote Your Story
Polls, quizzes and other types of applications are readily available within the admin section for page owners, and they just take a few clicks to install. Start off modestly, try a few, and see what works.

8. Make your Page engaging with applications
Show your restaurant’s great ratings by displaying the Zagat application or add a reservations widget through Open Table on your main page; display a video of the chefs making the house’s special; allow users to click through an interactive menu. The possibilities are endless.

9. Create an App Just for Facebook Fans
A little more advanced and this is for restaurants with larger marketing budgets, but it’s worth exploring whether or not an app would make sense for your users.

If you are a restaurateur thinking about ways to increase sales, increasing marketing, making capital expenditures, or otherwise investing in your business and looking for a restaurant loan, try Advance Restaurant Finance, LLC (ARF). ARF has been making short term business loans to restaurants for almost a decade. Despite the economy, ARF never stopped making business loans to restaurants, and ARF makes restaurant loans up to $1,000,000 per location. If you are looking for a restaurant loan, ARF is one of the first calls you should make.

ARF is a lender you can trust, and our team of experienced hospitality specialists provides a funding solution with no surprises, a quick and simple funding process, and professional and personal service.

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What is Your True Credit Score
When making a lending decision, lenders only use credit scores provided by a limited number of organizations. The most widely used score is your 3 digit FICO score calculated (and owned) by a company called Fair, Isaacs (the 5 categories that make up your FICO score are discussed later in this blog). The 3 national credit reporting agencies – Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax – in addition to providing your credit report will also provide a 3 digit credit score that each calculates using its own proprietary formula.

Virtually every lender in the US only uses your FICO score or one or more of the scores provided by the 3 national credit reporting agencies when making a credit decision. Lenders may make a credit card or auto loan decision based on a single credit score, while others such as mortgage lenders often will look at multiple scores. Not surprisingly, each of these scores – since they are calculated using different formulas – will vary somewhat. Also not surprisingly, since lenders pay for the right to access these scores, none of the organizations that own these scores will give them away for free…even to you.

What about the Free Scores
The free scores you see advertised are simply estimates of your general credit worthiness and are different from the credit scores lenders actually use, although they may appear similar. Consumer reporting agencies and other companies sometimes use an estimated score to illustrate a consumer’s general level of credit risk. How can you tell whether a score is estimated? Ask the company if the score is used by most lenders. If it’s not, it’s likely to be an estimated score.

Why do Fair, Issacs and the 3 national credit reporting companies charge you for their credit scores while other companies give you theirs for free? Basically, 2 reasons.

First, Fair, Issacs and the other companies charge for their credit scores because they can. Lenders find those scores useful in making credit decisions, so they will pay for them. On the other hand, lenders do not find the other estimated scores valuable and will not pay for them.

The other reason, of course, is because most, if not all of these other companies are actually trying to sell you credit monitoring services for anywhere from $8.95 to $14.95 per month. The “free credit score” is their hook to get you on their site and get your credit card information.

Don’t be fooled. If you want to see the credit score that lenders use to make credit decisions about you, go to one of the 4 companies that provide those scores and pay the $14.95 or so it costs to get it. For example, at www.myfico.com, you can get your FICO score for $14.95.

The 5 Parts of your FICO Score
These are the 5 general categories that make up your FICO score.

1. Your payment history is about 35% of your FICO score – if you pay your bills on time, this improves your score and, if not, it hurts your score.

2. How much you owe is about 30% of your FICO score – FICO scores are calculated in part based on the amounts you owe on all your accounts, the number of accounts with balances, and how much of your available credit you are using. The more you owe compared to your credit limit, the lower your score will be.

3. Length of your credit history is about 15% of your score – generally a longer credit history increases your score, but a short history can get a high score if it shows good credit management.

4. New credit is about 10% of your score – If you have recently applied for or opened new credit accounts, your credit score will weigh this fact against the rest of your credit history. If you need a loan, do your rate shopping within a focused period of time, such as 30 days, to avoid lowering your FICO score.

5. Other factors are about 10% of your score – Several minor factors also can influence your score. For example, having a mix of credit types on your credit report is normal for people with longer credit histories and can add slightly to their scores.

Want a Free Copy of your Credit File?
Go to www.annualcreditreport.com. This site, set up by the government, allows you to request a free credit report, once every 12 months from each of the 3 national consumer credit reporting companies: Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. But remember, you can get your credit file for free, but not your credit “score.” That will still cost you.

If you are a restaurateur who wants to increase sales, enhance marketing, make capital expenditures, or otherwise invest in your business and are looking for a restaurant loan, try Advance Restaurant Finance, LLC (ARF). ARF has been making short term business loans to restaurants for almost a decade. Despite the economy, ARF never stopped making business loans to restaurants, and ARF makes restaurant loans up to $1,000,000 per location. If you are looking for a restaurant loan, ARF is one the first call you should make. ARF is a lender you can trust, and our team of experienced hospitality specialists provides straightforward funding solutions with a streamlined funding process, professionally and personally.

Even though we’ve probably all heard the urban legend that 90% of all restaurants fail in the 1st year, Dr. Parsa came across a foolproof source for learning exactly how long restaurants remained in business: the health department. “Every restaurant has to be inspected by the health department before it opens, and the license has to be renewed every single year. The only time they don’t renew you is when you’re closed. I thought, ‘Wow, there we go — when a restaurant opens I know it because of the license, and when it closes I know because it’s not renewed.’ The research was done credibly, scientifically. That’s the point.”

Data was collected over four years from among 1,400 restaurants. The result: Fewer than a third of restaurants — just 29.6 percent — went under.  You can read Dr. Parsa’s study here.

Not satisfied with that, however, Dr. Parsa decided to study the reasons restaurants failed. Not surprisingly, the reasons are several and varied. According to Parsa, the factors that can lead restaurants to ruin are several — some are more obvious than others — and include the following:

Location
The No. 1 reason that restaurants fail, Parsa found, has to do with population density and location. The highest failure rate in restaurants comes about, “believe it or not, in downtown markets,” he says. “As you and I know, the highest number of restaurants per capita is in downtown locations. High real estate costs and hard to get labor make operating downtown difficult, but the single most important factor is simply that most downtown businesses operate Monday through Friday for breakfast and lunch. “Very little for dinner,” he says. “Very little for the weekend.”

Rainy Days
Parsa’s second most common reason is one you won’t find in many books. He says most entrepreneurs and restaurateurs have enough capital to open the restaurant, but not enough capital to survive for three to six months of the “slow days, the rainy days. So insufficient capital is the reason.”

Why so ill prepared? Parsa says that entrepreneurs think, “Once I open the restaurant the money will start coming in.” That’s a mistake, he says. “They need capital to survive for three to six months without a paycheck.” How much they need depends on the concept.

Size
A third factor, Parsa says, is that size matters. “We found that the highest rate of restaurant failure happens in the smallest restaurants, the mom and pops.” Why? Because such small operations tend to carry with them relatively low entry and exit barriers. In other words, it is easier for anyone to get into the business and easier to get out when fortunes wane.

“Say I’ve got $70,000,” Parsa says. “I bought myself a grill, I can make my scrambled eggs — I’m a chef. Simple as that. Because of the low upfront investments, everybody tries to get in because it’s easy. Nobody thinks about opening a book store or a movie theater because they have high fixed costs.”

Quality of Life
The fourth most common reason restaurants fail, Parsa says, has to do with quality of life. He questioned 50 operators. “Many, many times restaurant owners quit because they can’t take it anymore. They burn out,” he says. Dollars, of course, play a role even here.

High variable costs mean high maintenance or, more specifically, “high management,” he says. “That means somebody has to closely watch what’s happening. Because of that they have to be in the business every day, seven days a week. They can be married to their wife or husband or their business, but not both. That’s reality.”

Retirement
Yet another factor is ill health — that of the owner or a family member — leading to retirement. “Because of this they find they can’t stretch the time between the family and the business, so they leave,” Parsa says.

Retirement and the failure to adequately plan for it is another potential torpedo. “Restaurant owners don’t live forever,” Parsa says. “At some point they have to retire. “Too many, though, have no transitional plans. “Most restaurant owners never, ever have transition plans. They think they’re going to live forever. “Most restaurateurs never have a plan to get out. There is no exit strategy.”

Taj Mahal Syndrome
Another factor that contributes to restaurants going belly up is what Parsa, who was born in India, terms the Taj Mahal Syndrome. The famous landmark, he says, was built “not for a living person, but for a dead person. Nobody lived in that building.”

Restaurants are the same way, he says. “People want to build but that’s it; they don’t know what to do with it once it’s built. Restaurant owners most of the time have a dream of opening a restaurant, like the Taj Mahal, but they don’t know how to do the next level, managing it and building it beyond. They thought that once they opened things would happen automatically. They don’t. They never realized it’s more about what happens after a restaurant is built. It’s what I call entrepreneurial incompetence. They are competent enough to come up with the idea, but totally incompetent when it comes to taking it to the next level. That’s why they fail.”

The Right Dream
The key for anyone considering opening a restaurant, Parsa says, is to realize that his dream should not be opening a restaurant, but having and operating one.

“Opening is the first step only,” he says. “Do you have enough money to survive? Do you have the managerial skills to run it? Do you have plans for somebody to (care for) your family? Can you take time off and be involved in your kids’ lives? Do you have a life plan so that the restaurant is a part of your life, not your life itself? Most restaurant owners don’t think in these terms. But if you’re reading this article before you open your restaurant, really think it through — location, the concept, the finances.”

A restaurateur must remember, he says soberly, that “a restaurant is a living, breathing, real thing. Not a toy to play with.”

If you are a restaurateur thinking about ways to increase sales, increasing marketing, making capital expenditures, or otherwise investing in your business and looking for a restaurant loan, try Advance Restaurant Finance, LLC (ARF). ARF has been making short term business loans to restaurants for almost a decade. Despite the economy, ARF never stopped making business loans to restaurants, and ARF makes restaurant loans up to $1,000,000 per location. If you are looking for a restaurant loan, ARF is one of the first calls you should make. ARF is made up of hospitality experts with financial products tailored to fit your needs delivered by your own personal banking team with no surprises and with over 10 years in business, you know we will be here when you need us.

2. Successful Independents Build a Customer Database and Use it for Marketing
Restaurants today – even ones with outstanding food and service – must actively market their restaurants to be successful. Many highly successful operators market using a customer database. Then they use this database to promote many different types of events and offers to their guests.

3. Successful Independents Send out a Customer Newsletter Every Month
This marketing activity is related to the use of a customer database discussed above. Many operators claim that the most effective way consistently to increase their guest counts, sales and profit has been through a monthly, mailed customer newsletter. Sending out a physical newsletter each month appears to increase the odds that a restaurant stays “top of mind” and gets remembered and therefore chosen more often. Customer newsletters not only keep a restaurant’s name in front of its customers, but it can help create personal connections with them, too.

4. Successful Independents Know Their Numbers
Almost without exception, the most successful independent operators today not only deliver a quality dining experiences for their customers, but also keep a constant watch on the financial performance of their restaurant. In other words, “If you don’t know your numbers, you don’t know your business.” Stated another way, one operator said “If I waited until the end of the month to know how my restaurant was doing it would be too late.”

5. Successful Independents are Good Bosses
While operating a restaurant is about dealing with food, finances, marketing and a host of other factors, fundamentally, the business – like many – is about people. In restaurants, the frontline staff has 99 percent of the customer contacts and performs 99 percent of the functions that cause a guest to either have a great dining experience or a lousy one. Sharp operators recognize this fact and many go out of their way to create a positive working environment in which everyone is respected and employees feel good not just about their jobs but about the people they work for, too.

6. Successful Independents Grow Profits Before Growing Units
One of the most seductive occupational hazards of owning one successful restaurant is to assume that the easiest way to double your income is to simply open a second one. While this isn’t always the case, premature or ill-conceived growth has led to the downfall of many successful single-unit independent restaurants that began to struggle or even fail after opening a second restaurant. When you consider the time, resources and financial exposure that comes with opening a second restaurant, many operators should first ask themselves if they are already doing all they can to maximize the sales and profitability in their existing operation.

7. Successful Independents Keep a Running Inventory on Key Products
There are endless ways to lose money in the restaurant business and one of the most vulnerable areas for squandering big dollars is in dealing with food. Potential profits are lost due to spoilage, theft, over-portioning, waste, unrecorded sales and a host of other reasons. Most highly successful restaurants recognize this and are very deliberate and diligent in making the most of their food cost dollars, and one of the best ways to do this is by maintaining a perpetual, running inventory of certain, key products.

8. Successful Independents Engage in a Prime Vendor Relationship
Research has shown that prime vendor programs, the practice of buying a large portion of food and certain supplies from one broad line supplier, is much more common in more highly profitable restaurants than it is in marginally successful ones. While one-stop shopping, as it’s sometimes referred to, is no panacea, in most cases consolidating the majority of purchases with one supplier tends to offer the opportunity to lower ‘overall’ food prices and costs, among other things.

9. Successful Independents Make Hospitality the Goal, Not Just Good Service
Customer service deals primarily with the mechanical aspects of getting customers what they want. Instead of just delivering good customer service, your goal should be to provide “hospitality.” As one successful operator put it, “You can get serviced from a vending machine, but only caring people can deliver hospitality.”

10. Successful Independents Don’t Compete on Price
The best run restaurants typically don’t compete on price, they compete on quality and value. While most operator are sensitive to their customers’ desire for a good deal and value, the most successful realize that price is rarely the No. 1 criteria people use to choose a restaurant. After customers leave your restaurant, they rarely remember exactly what they spent, but they do remember whether they liked it.

Excerpted from Jim Laube, The 10 Common Practices of Highly Successful Independent Restaurants

If you are a restaurateur thinking about ways to increase sales, increasing marketing, making capital expenditures, or otherwise investing in your business and looking for a restaurant loan, try Advance Restaurant Finance, LLC (ARF). ARF has been making short term business loans to restaurants for almost a decade. Despite the economy, ARF never stopped making business loans to restaurants, and ARF makes restaurant loans up to $1,000,000 per location. If you are looking for a restaurant loan, ARF is one of the first calls you should make. ARF is made up of hospitality experts with financial products tailored to fit your needs delivered by your own personal banking team with no surprises and with over 10 years in business, you know we will be here when you need us.

A successful example of developing the late night trade comes from Sunset Grill in Nashville, Tennessee. The owner, Randy Rayhurn, implemented a late night menu that has come to exceed lunch as a source of revenue.  Best of all, he has accomplished this without expending a penny in advertising!

His late night menu consists of some lower food cost entrees off his regular menu and any items he wants to run out.  These entrees are offered at half price from 10:00pm until 1:30am during the week and from midnight until 1:30pm on Saturday night.  Desserts, coffees and beverages remain at full price.

His late night sales mix is equally divided between food and beverages.  Because of its structure, the late night menu only runs about four points higher in overall food cost than his regular menu.  A large percentage of Randy’s late night market has become restaurant people looking for a bite to eat in different surroundings when they get off work!

Tip No. 7: Change Your Menu To Spark Customer Traffic
New menu products offer the greatest potential for restaurant traffic increases.  But changing the menu must be handled properly if operators are to realize the full potential for expanding sales and profit.

For example, the dining public in Florida is older, better-educated, more nutrition-conscious and more drawn to convenience than in the past.  These shifts create promising areas for light or nutritious foods, regional taste experiences, foods not easily prepared at home and take-out/delivered foods.  Each can offer an advantage to the operator willing to exploit it.

Here are seven steps that will enable you to multiply the success of new menu items almost exponentially.

1. Consumer Research
2. Product identification
3. Product development
4. Consumer testing
5. Test marketing
6. Analysis
7. Communication/launch

These steps will keep you on the new product path to business expansion.

Tip No. 8: “WOW” Your Sales: The Zork Interview
Have you ever heard of a ZORK? Probably not. A ZORK costs $250,000 and looks a lot like a ball-point pen. It is your job to sell it to a group of executives from the largest companies in the world.  Does that sound like a tough sell?  Perhaps, but if you apply for a job on the service staff at Old San Francisco, be prepared to convince my managers that the ZORK is an invaluable asset, worth every penny.

The reason?  If you can generate enough enthusiasm to sell a ZORK for $250,000, we are confident you will easily make the sale on a $20 bottle of wine or a five- dollar order of Bananas Foster.

The items on your menu are like the imaginary ZORK.  Guests only know what you tell them, so your ability to build sales depends on your servers’ abilities to sell what, to customers, are intangibles.  Demand that our staff “Wow” guests with their description of that bottle of wine or the Bananas Foster flambe.

The ZORK interview reinforces one simple truth: if you love people and are not afraid of an audience, you will be great, whether you are selling Cherries Jubilee… or a ZORK!

Tip No. 9: Wine Sales for Dummies
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to sell more wine in your restaurant!  Good thing, since most of us don’t have too many of those on the service staff, anyway!  But there are not any trade secrets, either. To sell more wine, you just need to do four basic things:

1.  Make sure everyone is comfortable with (and skillful at) opening a bottle.  Buy a $10 bottle corker and a gross of inexpensive, new corks.  Recork your old bottles and require every server to open at least 100 bottles before you turn them loose on your guests.

2.  Assure that your wait staff knows how to pronounce every wine on the list.  Run through the wine list at pre-shift meetings, with each server pronouncing the next wine on the list.  How about a “Trivial Pursuit” challenge for servers where they match food items with the wines on your list?  They should also be able to match wines with appetizers and desserts.  ”Which wines would you suggest with Rack of Lamb?”  ”What entrees go best with Robert Mondavi Fume Blanc?”

3.  Be sure your service staff has tasted the wines you offer.  Since wine is most often consumed with food, have them taste wine with menu items.  For example, try a Pinot Noir and a Chardonnay with the salmon special and note how different the food tastes with each wine.  Educate your staff so that they can educate your guests.  The easiest way to encourage suggestions is just to have servers recommend their two favorite whites or their two favorite reds – but first they must find out what their favorites are?

4.  Finally, let your guests know that you sell wine!  Put the wine list on the dinner menu – or at least your 20 most popular wines. Suggest a wine under each food item (entrees, appetizers, desserts).  Pre-set tables with wine glasses and perhaps a full bottle of wine.

If you will make these four simple efforts on a daily, consistent basis, you should grow wine sales by 20-25%. What have you got to lose?

Tip No. 10: Pick A Signature Item and Grow For It!
This is the story of how a simple Chinese Chicken Salad accompanied by freshly baked zucchini bread built a restaurant, a banquet business and became the famous Dianne Salad of Pasadena.  The tale starts in 1978 at the Greenstreet Restaurant in Pasadena, California when Dianne, a friend of the owners, developed a knockout dressing for Chinese Chicken Salad.  When they introduced the salad, everyone at the restaurant fell in love with it and shared their excitement with other guests.

The popularity of this item grew with the ladies at lunch and the businessmen watching their waistlines.  The owners christened their new star the Dianne Salad and added freshly baked zucchini bread to the dining experience.

The press got wind of the salad from Greenstreet’s fans and the subsequent stories increased the salad’s following and reputation.  As a result of the exposure generated by the Dianne Salad, Greenstreet was voted the best lunch restaurant in a popularity poll.

In 1992, the restaurant added a pick-up window so that Dianne Salad addicts could quickly satisfy their habits.  As the convenience grew so did the large orders and soon the Dianne became a party favorite.

So what does all this mean? The Dianne Salad, directly or indirectly, was responsible for approximately 30% of the restaurant’s total sales!  The next goal is to take the Dianne Salad, the secret dressing and the zuccihini bread into retail production.

This shows what can be done with a signature salad.  What is your restaurant famous for? What are you going to do with it?

Excerpted from 50 Proven Ways to Build Restaurant Sales & Profits from Hospitality Masters Press

If you are a restaurateur thinking about ways to increase sales, increasing marketing, making capital expenditures, or otherwise investing in your business and looking for a restaurant loan, try Advance Restaurant Finance, LLC (ARF). ARF has been making short term business loans to restaurants for almost a decade. Despite the economy, ARF never stopped making business loans to restaurants, and ARF makes restaurant loans up to $1,000,000 per location. If you are looking for a restaurant loan, ARF is one of the first calls you should make.

Research shows that nearly 80% of restaurant sales – whether a one-store independent or a member of a major chain – come from within the three-mile radius that represents your neighborhood. Are you directing 80% of your marketing efforts toward that critical area? Or even 50%?

The mass marketing myth that the more people you reach, the more business you will attract just does not work for neighborhood businesses like restaurants. The battle for the heart, mind (and pocketbook) of the local patron must be won block-by-block, store- by-store and purchase-by-purchase through what we call neighborhood marketing.

Tip No. 2: Get Flexible, Get Cozy, Get Wealthy!
Guests are no longer willing to sit in dining rooms that are less than half full and deadly quiet. (Ever notice how everyone ends up in the kitchen at parties?) Please your guests with guaranteed cozy dining and your sales will grow as a result.

You cannot control the number of guests who arrive, but you can control how full the room looks and how cozy the guests feel. It takes a willingness to re- organize your seating, the wisdom to change service policies, and the ability to reconfigure the dining areas to match your volume of business. It will not happen with huge open dining rooms, rigid seating policies or by using the dreaded “This Section Closed” sign.

Tip No. 3 Expectations and Guest Satisfaction
Hospitality is a business based on expectations. The more a consumer spends, the greater expectations he or she will have. Meet those expectations and you will succeed; exceed them and you will prosper.

Let’s say you eat out and your meal costs $5.00. What are your expectations? You expect a “no-frills” experience – ready quickly, the food hot or cold enough, probably wrapped in paper and handed over a counter to be eaten with disposable utensils in an environment dominated by plastic.

If these expectations are met, a sort of unspoken contract has been fulfilled between the customer and the restaurant. The value received corresponds with the price charged. The expectations have been met. The guest is satisfied.

Now consider a $20.00 meal. Your expectations will be both different and greater. This time you will probably expect a china plate, a tablecloth, glassware, metal flatware and personal table service. Make sure you are meeting (or exceeding) the customer’s expectations.

Tip No. 4: Pre-Shift Sales Briefing
In full service operations, one opportunity to build volume lies in increasing sales through improved selling skills at the table.  There are virtually hundreds of tactics to assist the waiter or waitress in selling more. But to really make a difference, today’s operator must focus on selling strategies that unfold within the restaurant’s four walls, from the time that a guest crosses the threshold until leaving the building. A realistic goal is to improve communication between management, the kitchen team, and the server/salespeople who are actually talking to the patrons.

The better prepared servers are to explain, promote and merchandise food items – whether the core menu or specials – the more they will sell. Tips will be incrementally higher, add-on sales will build, and extra profit will be banked.

The approach is to create an environment conducive to selling, replete with information and data about what is being served. This can best be accomplished by developing an effective pre-shift sales briefing. Most operators have a short meeting with the wait staff before each meal to relay the specials and describe the fresh or in-Season menu items, so this should be no big deal.

Tip No. 5: Build Sales through Environmental Enhancement
Did you ever think that the position of your entrance, cash register or range could impact your sales? Surprising as it may sound, the layout of your operation may position you for profound success or endless struggle. How does it work?

What we call environmental enhancement derives from the ancient Chinese art of object placement. Over 3,000 years ago, the Chinese discovered how your working environment acts as a mirror of yourself and your life’s circumstances. Challenges such as financial debt, poor morale and difficult staff relations can often be traced directly to the surrounding energy imbalances.

By tracing the flow of energy through the space, an environmental enhancement expert can locate the areas of your environment which correspond to such important issues as finances, relationships, health and career.

When the energy in these physical areas of the environment are obstructed or missing, the environmental enhancement consultant may recommend changes in the position of objects in the room, the correct application of color and much more to eliminate the problem.

Excerpted from 50 Proven Ways to Build Restaurant Sales & Profits from Hospitality Masters Press.

If you are a restaurateur thinking about ways to increase sales, increasing marketing, making capital expenditures, or otherwise investing in your business and looking for a restaurant loan, try Advance Restaurant Finance, LLC (ARF). ARF has been making short term business loans to restaurants for almost a decade. Despite the economy, ARF never stopped making business loans to restaurants, and ARF makes restaurant loans up to $1,000,000 per location. If you are looking for a restaurant loan, ARF is one of the first calls you should make.

Also, most of us agree that the most effective restaurant marketing is local marketing, so the community marketing concept makes perfect since for restaurants. So how do the 80/20 rule and the 4% factor fit in?

The 80/20 rule is the long held belief that 20% of a business’s customers drive 80% or more of its sales. The 4% factor comes into play when you divide that 20% into smaller segments of 20% each – or 4% of your entire customer base. Once identified, you market to your 4% groups with compelling offers that have extremely high conversion rates due to the targeted nature of the offer. Highly targeted offers tend to yield higher conversion rates with lower costs.

How important would it be to you to find out that 4% of your fajita lovers drove 70% of margarita sales? How long would it take you to get a “fajita night” email offer out to those customers?

How do you find out about your customers to determine which are the 20% and tailor offers to segments within that group? Well, do you have a customer database, and if so, what is in it?

If you don’t have a customer database, you should probably stop reading now and work on setting one up. If you do, what is in it and what efforts are you making to enhance the data in it? A name, an email address, and birthdays are a good start. Don’t have email addresses? Start collecting them. As far as a communication tool, an email address is your holy grail. Some ideas on ways to collect them include:

• Fishbowl drops for happy hours
• Raffles and/or door prizes with entry forms including email addresses, favorite menu items, number of visits per month, etc.
• Simple “mailing” lists, and
• VIP Clubs

Once you have begun building out an effective customer database, you can begin to drill into it to identify your top 20% customers. Once you have identified those customers, you can begin to divide that group into smaller sub segments of customers with commonalities that you can address with very targeted offers.

The goal here is to tailor offers to these sub segments with sky high conversion rates. If you can achieve this you will lower your overall marketing costs, increase sales among your best customers, establish yourself as a brand of choice creating even more customer loyalty, and convert many of these customers into brand ambassadors that can lead to even more good customers.

When you compare the potential payoff of 80/20, 4% factor marketing against your typical direct mail or newspaper ad payoff, the benefits become clear. Isn’t it time to bring your marketing into the 21st Century and start harvesting the benefits?

If you are a restaurateur thinking about increasing marketing, making capital expenditures, or otherwise investing in your business and looking for a restaurant loan, try Advance Restaurant Finance, LLC (ARF). ARF has been making short term business loans to restaurants for almost a decade. Despite the economy, ARF never stopped making business loans to restaurants, and ARF makes restaurant loans up to $1,000,000 per location. If you are looking for a restaurant loan, ARF is one of the first calls you should make.

Unfortunately, few people tell us how to harness the power of social media.This series of blogs is intended to help you determine the parameters of a social media strategy for your restaurant and to make suggestions on how to implement one.

Let’s start at the beginning: finding out what is already being said about your restaurant and listening to any ongoing conversations. People may already be talking about your establishment in the social media space. These conversations can occur on Yelp, Twitter, blogs, and comments to blogs, among other places.

Yelp
Since most restaurant marketing is local in nature, let’s start with Yelp. If you are not going onto Yelp regularly and searching for your brand name, start today. If you see a negative review, take that feedback to heart and then you have a couple of choices. First, you can reach out to that person, send them a message, invite them back and improve on their experience (have them ask to see the manager or yourself when they come in). You will need to set up a Yelp account to send messages to reviewers, but it is quick, easy, and free. Hopefully, you will get a follow up review that is much more positive.

Your other option is to get the review buried on page 8 or 9, so it’s less likely to be seen. For this you would need to encourage diners that have had great experiences to post a review to Yelp. Train your servers to identify parties that are clearly having a great experience and have the server ask them to post a Yelp review. Chances are, someone at the table regularly uses Yelp. Either way, reading the reviews on Yelp is a great place to start.

Google Alerts
Another way to monitor what is being said about you is to set up a Google Alert for your establishment. It’s easy to do. Go to google.com/alerts, enter your search term – which is most likely your restaurant or brand name – set the alerts to “comprehensive,” set the frequency, and enter your email address. When your search terms are mentioned on the internet (or a Google indexed page on the internet), you will receive an email alert with a link to the conversation. If you haven’t already done this, you should do this in the next few days.

Twitter
The first step is again to set up a Twitter account if you do not have one. Once you log into your Twitter account on the right navigation bar you will find a search box. Input the keywords relevant to your restaurant and hit the search button. At the bottom of the navigation bar you will see a link called “RSS feed for this query.” Click that link and on the ensuing page you will see the current tweets for your particular keyword. In the lower left of the box at the top you will see a link that says “Subscribe to this feed.” Click that link and follow the steps if you want to automate the process.

Backtype
Conversations about your restaurant can occur in many places including social media sites, social network sites, blogs and comments to blogs. That is why you probably want to use something like Backtype. Backtype is a free service that indexes literally millions of conversations from blogs, social networks, and social media sites. You can search Backtype from its website (without setting up an account) or you can create an account and set up email alerts when keywords relevant to your restaurant are mentioned in a conversation. As with all these tools, it is better to automate the process and have the information pushed to you rather than having to manually retrieve it.

Taking these first steps will allow you to see what has been said about your restaurant in the recent past and to begin monitoring what will be said in the future. This is a key first step in harnessing the power of social media on behalf of your restaurant.

If you are a restaurateur thinking about increasing marketing, making capital expenditures, or otherwise investing in your business and looking for a restaurant loan, try Advance Restaurant Finance, LLC (ARF). ARF has been making short term business loans to restaurants for almost a decade. Despite the economy, ARF never stopped making business loans to restaurants, and ARF makes restaurant loans up to $1,000,000 per location. If you are looking for a restaurant loan, ARF is one of the first calls you should make.

6. Inappropriate pacing of the meal
Diners don’t like to feel rushed, nor do they want to have to wait too long between courses. Even if the server nails the beginning and end of the meal (getting customers seated quickly, making sure they have a drink, getting them the check as soon as the customer’s ready for it), pacing the meal in between those two endpoints is much trickier.

The cure: Servers should watch their tables and try to estimate when diners will be finished with a course to know when to fire the next one. One server at an upscale restaurant says that four or five minutes before diners are finished with their appetizers, she’ll tell the kitchen to fire the main course. How does the server know? The server watches the tables closely. Paying close attention is key to providing good service in general.

7. Sweeping, wiping, clearing dishes
A number of readers objected to bus boys or servers who sweep the floor while guests are dining, who wipe the table with the same cloth used to wipe the chair, who generally disregard hygiene or noisily drop dirty dishes into bins within diners’ earshot.

The cure: Offending bus boys and servers, clean up your act.

8. Tip games
“Do you need change?” This is a question that irked a number ofdiners. The server who rounds up change from a cash tip in his own favor, or who brings the change in big bills in the effort to land a bigger tip also fared poorly.

The cure: Just bring the change, even if you’re not sure it’s necessary. If some smaller bills are needed for the diner to leave a 20 percent tip, then by all means, include some smaller bills.

9. Untimely dish removal
Diners don’t seem to appreciate it when a server begins removing plates before everyone at the table has finished the course. The person still eating feels rushed, and the person whose plate is cleared before everyone else feels like they ate too fast. On the other hand, some diners are bothered when the servers don’t pre-bus or remove some of the dirty, used plates, bowls, etc. from the table because they clutter the table and are unappetizing-looking. So what to do?

As it turns out, it depends on the type of restaurant and on the specific policy of the management. “Some restaurants allow servers to clear plates before everyone’s done,” explains Susskind, and it’s usually the casual spots. In more upscale establishments, he says, “The standard is you don’t clear till everyone’s done.”

The cure: At one fine dining establishment, a server came up with a smart solution. “Normally I don’t clear plates until everyone has finished,” she said, when one of the diners had finished his soup. “But perhaps you’d like me to take this now?” Problem solved, though it was a mouthful for a busy server.

10. The errant wine pour
A server pours the wine all around the table, overfilling the glasses, and comes up empty before getting to the last guest. “Another bottle?” he asks perkily. It may or may not be an honest mistake, but it’s a mistake nonetheless, and in any case it can leave the diner feeling had. Of course, you have to spring for that second bottle.

The cure: This one’s easy. “You’ve got to do the math,” says Michael Flynn, a wine and beverage director at the Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek. A bottle has 25.4 ounces, “so you do some quick division. You have to make sure you’re pouring the same amount in everyone’s glass, no matter how small that portion may be.” And if it’s just three diners, and you’re on the second round of pours? If someone hasn’t been sipping, don’t top off their glass.

Turns out it’s just like most other points of service. “You have to keep an eye on them,” says Flynn. “It’s actually being involved in service, in serving people as they need it.”

If you are a restaurateur thinking about increasing marketing, making capital expenditures, or otherwise investing in your business and looking for a restaurant loan, try Advance Restaurant Finance, LLC (ARF). ARF has been making short term business loans to restaurants for almost a decade. Despite the economy, ARF never stopped making business loans to restaurants, and ARF makes restaurant loans up to $1,000,000 per location. If you are looking for a restaurant loan, ARF is one of the first calls you should make.

Thanks to Leslie Brenner of the Dallas Morning News for many of these server mistakes.

1. Servers with boundary issues
These come in many variations, but include:

• Servers interrupting the diners’ conversation, introducing themselves, chatting, constantly asking if the diners are OK
• Servers that touch diners, by for instance, casually putting their hand on a diner’s shoulder 
• Servers putting their hand or finger too close to the plate or food as the server describes the dish.

The Cure: According to Alex Susskind, professor of food and beverage management at Cornell, The server has to figure out what the guest wants [in terms of interaction with the server], and in any case, “Never interrupt a guest. There’s nothing you have to do as a server that’s more important than a guest’s experience.”

2. The missing waiter
The waiter that fails to materialize. The host or hostess shows you to your seat, and then – nothing. If you’re lucky, you already have a menu. But sometimes you’re left stranded for five or 10 minutes before being greeted. Diners search the room futilely for the AWOL waiter when they’re ready to order, when the steak’s overcooked, when wine glasses are empty and the bottle’s been set out of reach, when more bread is required.

The Cure: This is a management issue. The manager needs to make sure the restaurant is properly staffed, that each server isn’t responsible for too many tables, and the manager needs to be on the floor surveying the scene. If a table needs attention, the manager can make sure the server gets to it.

3. The waiter who doesn’t know how to handle mistakes or problems
The clumsy or inadequate handling of mistakes got under the skin of many diners: servers who don’t know when a problem requires the attention of a manager, servers who don’t apologize for mistakes they’ve made or who don’t ask whether there was a problem when you left most of the food on your plate. “Don’t make me ask for the manager after determining that the black speck in my wife’s wine is moving on its own and is a live insect,” commented one diner.

The Cure: It’s the server’s responsibility to make sure diners are enjoying the experience. Are they pushing the food around their plates? Find out what’s wrong, beyond just asking generically, “How is everything tonight?” And then make it right. Not cooked properly? Take it back to the kitchen. Did the guests suffer crazy-long waits for their food? Comp a dessert or two. Not sure how to handle it? Get the manager.

4. The unduly delayed check
Dinner has gone swimmingly, with great food and wonderful service. But now you can’t get your check. You’ve been there, right? More than a few diners have.

The Cure: “There are two things that management and staff have direct control over that will always help the guest’s experience,” says Susskind. “The beginning of the meal and the end of the meal. You can never get a guest seated too quickly, and you can never get a guest the check and get them closed out quick enough.” Just do it.

5. The hard-sell
Whether it’s a server overselling the side dishes to the point that you wind up with a table full of food you can’t eat, or suggesting a wine that’s twice the price of the one the restaurant has run out of, readers resent the hard-sell. “I never return to a restaurant when, after dinner, I feel like I have been victimized by a huckster,” wrote one diner. Still, part of a server’s job is to sell the restaurant’s dishes and wines. How to find a balance?

The Cure: Servers should suggest side dishes or wines they honestly think will enhance the guests’ meal. Don’t push the side order of roast potatoes if French fries come with the main course. If a diner asks about a $50 bottle of wine, and you have an even better one for $40, suggest that; the diner will appreciate it and may well leave a more generous tip. The corollary is knowing the menu and wine list. If you can describe the way something is cooked and make it sound as good as it probably is, or know the relative bargains on the wine list, that’s a much easier sell.

In our next blog post, we’ll detail annoying server mistakes 6 through 10.

If you are a restaurateur thinking about increasing marketing, making capital expenditures, or otherwise investing in your business and looking for a restaurant loan, try Advance Restaurant Finance, LLC (ARF). ARF has been making short term business loans to restaurants for almost a decade. Despite the economy, ARF never stopped making business loans to restaurants, and ARF makes restaurant loans up to $1,000,000 per location. If you are looking for a restaurant loan, ARF is one of the first calls you should make.

Thanks to Leslie Brenner of the Dallas Morning News for many of these server mistakes.