Restaurant Ideas

We’ll start from the assumption that you already have a restaurant business serving food in a dine-in way. If so, you should expand into the online space with one little piece at a time. The point is: start easy, start small.

Start by expanding your serving output with some pick-up business. Basically, you do all that you’ve been doing before but you also set-up a fast order counter and packaging food step.

Trying some casual pick-up service first would provide an effective way of calibrating a full-blown take-away business without investing and risking too much from the start. There are many things such as menu items, pricing packaging and cooking flows to optimize before putting more chips on this idea.

But when you see promising results for your takeout business, don’t wait! Set-up a website asap and allow people to pre-order online. Avoid letting them queueing up because this may backfire on your business. Queuing people are frustrated, some are even noisy and they will be starring in the plates of the other people that came to dine-in. Customer satisfaction may decrease an all-fronts.

It all boils down to letting people know that you are now doing this. In fact you are even happier to engage in an online interaction. Really. Build confidence within your clients that if they try ordering online from you, someone would really like to take care of them. A simple headline like “All online orders are manually confirmed by us! Find out in real-time when your food is ready!” can do wonders for your initial adoption rate.

How is your pick-up business lately? If you’ve done all the right things for your pick-up business but you simply don’t see any other way to significantly increase further…Well then, maybe it is time to consider doing some delivery business too.

Now it’s time to make good use of your eligible phone list of clients. If you have been taking phone orders for delivery during the last years, chances are this marketing-ready list is big. If not…than maybe it is better to jump directly to some Facebook paid posts.

If you already do pick-up and delivery business, you do quite a good chunk of your business online, but you feel that you’re entering on a plateau in terms of sales growth, than it’s probably the right time to move the game to the next level.