Page 26 - foodservice Magazine August 2018
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MANAGEMENT
TONY ELDRED
FOOD SERVICE
It is interesting to consider how some front of house roles have changed over the last 20 years.
Traditionally, the priority focus of someone working as a waiter or a full-service bar person was to provide excellent and timely customer service. There is no argument that we certainly still need strong customer service skills to be demonstrated by these staff, but deteriorating economics have pushed another set of skills to the forefront.
Think of a restaurant or cafe this way, you are running a food production facility with a sales office attached to the front of it. The production team has to produce efficiently and consistently, while the sales team have to maximise the customer average spend of people who choose to occupy the tables and chairs. It got to the point where what we call ‘passive’ service, that is simply waiting for a customer to ask for something and then give it to them, is no longer sufficient to maintain
the financial health of a food and beverage-based business.
Among our more progressive clients we have seen a steady move towards the creation of strong sales cultures among the front
of house staff, to the point where
best practice businesses are spending significant amounts
of time and money teaching front of house staff sales and merchandising techniques.
This kind of training and focus turns out not to be a cost to
the business, but quite a sound investment. Increasing customer average spend brings more revenue into the business without a proportional increase in labour costs, so much of the extra money goes straight to the bottom line. To put it simply, increasing customer average spend is the most effective and rapid way
to increase the profitability of
a hospitality business.
The traditional titles we
apply to front of house people are probably working against this. Consider the term ‘waiter’. The very name suggests somebody who waits, there being nothing to suggest proactive behaviour in the traditional job title. The problem here is if you advertise for a waiter, you are going to get a large proportion of people who want
an income but think that selling
is tacky and beneath them. This
is a basic attitudinal problem. Unfortunately, we have found that if a person has a negative attitude towards selling, it is extremely difficult to bring them to the
point where they demonstrate sales skills while they are not under direct supervision.
To illustrate the potential
of creating a strong sales culture, the difference between a passive waiter and one who is comfortable with the sales role and who is trained to suggest
to sell and upsell is commonly around 25 per cent extra revenue from the same customer base.
In other words, a passive waiter might take a dollar a customer, where the active waiter will
take a $1.25 off the same person. Herein lies a major opportunity for the restoration of healthy margins from many hospitality businesses.
It’s possibly time to consider using different titles for some of the traditional roles. For example, if you were to advertise a front of house service role under the title ‘food and beverage sales person’, you would probably get less applicants, but the ones who did apply would generally have a positive attitude towards the sales role. People who had strong aversion to selling skills would not apply for a job with the word sales in the job title.
Providing your recruitment system is geared to weeding out the people with a negative attitude towards selling, your
Tony Eldred operates Eldred Hospitality Pty Ltd, ‘The Hospitality Specialists’.
Contact him on (03) 9813 3311 or at eldtrain.com.au.
HOW TO INCREASE CUSTOMER SPENDING
WITH PRESSURE ON BUSINESSES TO TURN A PROFIT LIKE NEVER BEFORE, TONY ELDRED URGES RESTAURANTS AND CAFES TO DO AWAY WITH ‘PASSIVE’ SERVICE AND TO INTRODUCE A STRONG SALES CULTURE TO FRONT OF HOUSE.
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