The hospitality industry presents one of the more complex enterprises to run on a daily basis. Running an efficient operation is often a fine, but chaotic, balancing act, where it takes time to manage your team correctly, streamline processes and get the business running optimally.
Ultimately, any business is looking to boost their bottom line through increased revenue and better budgeting, and a huge part of that in the hospitality world comes down to day-to-day productivity.
If you’re involved in the sector, here’s how you can get the most from your business every single day.
Priorities & Preparation
In an industry where it’s virtually impossible to get everything 100% done, understanding your priorities and setting achievable goals is essential to setting the right direction for the day and keeping yourself and your team motivated.
Recognise that not everything on your schedule is urgent, prioritise the most important tasks and think about the best times of day to carry them out. Once you have an ‘essential’, ‘necessary’ and ‘if there’s time’ type scale, you can create a cohesive plan around it.
Key areas for hospitality will surround late evening and early morning food preparation, planning staff numbers to accommodate for peak times and appropriate cleaning schedules around service hours.
Keep Up with the Accounts
When it comes to managing your day-to-day operation, it’s easy to fall behind on the bookkeeping. As it’s not an immediate need during a busy working day, you might think you’d be better served attending to other areas, but forgetting your accounts can lead to auditing errors that are costly and time consuming to resolve come the end of the quarter.
Depending on the size of your business, it may be worth investing in quality, hospitality appropriate accounting software that can help you run daily financial reports, record all your payments and make sure all your reports match.
Not only will this provide a huge administrative boost, but well packaged financial data can allow you to make trend-based adjustments to help boost profits in the business.
Good Maintenance
At the core of a good hospitality business lies quality, well-maintained equipment that keeps the production line of the company ticking over. Often, businesses may identify maintenance costs as a good area to cut corners on, however this will soon catch up to you in the form of unhappy customers.
From failing ovens producing substandard food to chipped paintwork, unclean toilets and fading décor, not keeping the cogs of your operation well oiled will result in expensive repairs, drops in productivity and a decidedly unimpressed customer base.
Running a solid hospitality operation lies in the art of juggling at lot of important elements at once. It’s sometimes an unenviable task but, with the right planning and ideas, you can get your business moving forward at its most efficient and profitable.
