How Black Restaurant Owners Can Save Money

Running a profitable restaurant is no easy business. Making sure that you stay out of the red goes beyond just making sure your tables are full. You need to carefully analyze where your money is going.

Hopefully, you are already keeping track of all your expenses. If not, stop whatever you are doing, and fix that immediately. Once you have your bookkeeping in order, try the following three tips to cut costs.

Stop Wasting Food

Unless the food is getting paid for, it was a waste of time and money to make. And since you must pay your employees for their time, you just got burned twice for throwing out food.

The most important principal for avoiding wasted food is FIFO. FIFO is an acronym for First In, First Out. In a restaurant this means that you need to use your older ingredients before your newer ones. Train your cooks to do this and help them out by storing new ingredients behind the old ones.

You can also avoid throwing out expired food by using computer inventory programs. These programs can track your ordering trends and help prevent you from ordering too much food.

Renegotiate Utilities

Variable-rate plans have drawbacks that you’ll want to avoid to cut costs. If your lease allows, you should try renegotiating the cost of your utilities with your landlord.

If you own the building, you can contact the power company and see if a deal can be made. If this doesn’t work, look for ways that you can cut back on your energy use.

You can save energy by replacing your lights with energy efficient bulbs and turning them off when you leave for the night. Replacing old appliances with new appliances may have a large upfront cost, but they’ll save you money on your energy bill.

Some appliances will continue to suck energy even when they are turned off. You can prevent this by unplugging them each night.

Focus on Your Staff

Staff turnover can be extremely costly. It takes time to train new staff to be efficient members of your team. Every time a staff member leaves, you have to start the process all over again.

If you have a high turnover rate, it will be very difficult to maintain a good staff that provides quality customer service. You can help improve with these two tips. First, more rigorous hiring processes.

You want to make sure that you don’t hire any bad eggs. Second, implement employee recognition programs. If you recognize hard working employees, they’ll be more likely to stick around.

Owning a restaurant is hard work, but it is rewarding work. You can make your life much easier if you take the time to get organized financially and materialistically.

As you do, the atmosphere in your restaurant will improve and customers will keep coming back for more.