Running a restaurant is one of the most fulfilling business ventures you can take on. You’re surrounded by hardworking people, great food, and usually, satisfied customers. However, it’s also one of the hardest business ventures to handle, because achieving all of those great things comes with several major obstacles.
To make it worse, many restaurant operators ignore one thing that can truly make a difference and encourage their success: data.
Data, or more importantly, analyzing restaurant data effectively, can be the difference between running a century-old restaurant that is a pillar of the local community or joining the majority of restaurant owners who fail.
Let’s take a look at the exact reasons it’s so essential to your restaurant’s success.
Why is Restaurant Data Essential?
Profit Margin:
First and foremost, if you don’t understand the data your business is constantly generating, you’re probably digging into your profit margin by a massive measure. Unless you have a data-analyzing company that helps you in understanding all the information you have, you are probably extremely confused.
Data shows you how much food you wasting, what that food is and why, what your customers are actually buying, whether or not you’re overstaffing the restaurant, and so much more that directly impacts your profit margin.
This is one of the big reasons that even new restaurants with great food fail; they fail to understand the data behind the operation, and their expenses become too much to handle.
Customer Relations:
Restaurant data directly shows your customers’ reactions to your business practices. It shows the demographic they come from, how much they’re willing to spend, the types of food they like, and what type of services they appreciate the most.
When you ignore the data and do what feels best, you usually end up doing things that negatively impact customer relations. This can be something as simple as having an out-of-place practice or not offering delivery, or it can be a much bigger problem. You won’t know until you analyze the data.
Employee Relations:
In business, we often think of our relationships with our customers, because they’re the ones who pay for our operations. However, it’s just as important to have good relationships with our employees. They make it all possible.
If you don’t analyze the data, you might be understaffing and causing them undue stress, overstaffing them and making their jobs boring, or simply not giving them any reason to stay; such as not having room to grow or anything to look forward to that enriches their work experience and personal lives.
This type of issue can cause high turnaround rates, and it can spill over into your profit margin and customer relations. So, it’s important to identify it and correct it quickly.
How to Understand Your Restaurant’s Data
Now, you know how important restaurant data really is. How do you convert it from seemingly meaningless numbers to tangible information, though? Well, that’s best to do with a professional analyst team.
A professional team will look at the data being brought in from basically every facet of your company. From your receipts to your POS and website data. It will then turn that data into information you can understand and make meaningful changes with.
Contact us to help you grow your restaurant business!