Be Optimistic, and Flexible, in Hard Economic Times With Your Restaurant Business
These are tough times to be in business. The economic crisis generated by the credit and home mortgage crisis and the accompanying collapse in the financial markets will have repercussions throughout the world for likely a long time. People of all skill and education levels will lose their jobs and the current recession may grow into a depression.
As a small restaurant person you shouldn’t be faulted for being apprehensive about the future of your business. You may already be facing a decline in revenues as customers cut back on their spending, squirreling away their money for more pressing priorities or for harder economic times down the road. However, small restaurants such as yours may have some advantages that can help them weather the storm more deftly than larger businesses. In this piece I’d like to show you that there are ways to make the best of a bad situation!
What advantages, you might be asking, do small restaurants have over large ones during an economic downturn? I’ll explain with a metaphor. Think of a large company as a huge cruise ship—a very complex vessel needing elaborate systems to run. As everyone knows, an ocean liner cannot turn on a dime, and would be in danger if it didn’t have the necessary navigational systems to see obstacles coming in enough time to adjust its course. Your small restaurant is more like a little boat, more easily able to dart and maneuver through the “icebergs.”
That is, your business likely has much more flexibility to navigate the shifting dynamics of the economy, even if its resources are very limited. You can negotiate for lower merchant account fees on the fly, without having to go through a board of directors. You can jump online and learn some local search marketing to help drive online traffic to your offline restaurant.
As a small business owner, you have less overhead, smaller amounts of product, and a smaller, less regimented staff. If you remain responsive to changes in your market’s purchasing habits, you can far more easily change or replace menu items, make adjustments to your supply chain, and other elements of your business than large companies, for which big changes may necessitate scrapping a scraping advertising that doesn’t convert, laying off staff (and thus losing people with well-developed skill-sets), and creating complicated restructuring plans, which which can be expensive and time-consuming.
As a small restaurant owner, you are in closer contact with your customers. (and your restaurant staff) Communicating one-on-one with them is less cumbersome for you, and you should be regularly trying to reach them to get a sense of their needs and concerns. People are less likely to simply let you go if they have a personal connection with the person they’re doing business with. Faceless corporate giants just don’t have that personal connection that can make dealing with them more than just a cost/benefit based business transaction.
You are in a better position to modify customer relationships on a case by case basis that won’t undermine your bottom line but may very well make a huge impression on the customer. Consumers love attentive and customized service. And keep this in mind: when the economy is unstable, consumers are just as nervous and demoralized as business owners. By recognizing their needs in a personal way, you are giving them a small bit of reassurance in an economic environment where people rightly feel that much is out of their hands and beyond their control.
The key is to be proactive. Stay in touch with your customers. Ask them, by phone, by email, in person: how can I improve or make changes that will be of assistance to you? If you remain responsive to your customers’ various priorities, you can leverage your smaller resource base to your advantage. You might just find yourself not only surviving the economic crisis, but thriving!
