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Picking the Right Consultant

Your restaurant opened up to a great reception. All your guests come in, enjoy there meals and leave happy. For the first few months everyone wanted to try the new restaurant in town. Now despite great reviews your sales are leveling off, your labor costs are beginning to add up and you and your management staff are working 60 or 70 hours a week and still not finding the time to improve the structure and planning of your restaurant.

Even with great food, a welcoming environment and a good locations, the important factors any restaurateur understands, there still a lot more to keeping a consistently high quality restaurant running. This is where consultants can make all the difference for your business. With your hands already full running the restaurant, a second pair of eyes, and an experienced pair at that, can do a lot to help.

However, how do you know you’re getting your moneys worth out of your consultancy company, an that you can trust them with making major decisions for your business?

There are a few factors to look for when deciding on the perfect consultant, or consultancy group for your business whether it is a restaurant, bakery or other type of culinary establishment.

The first part of the process is deciding on the type of consultant you will need. In nearly every area of restaurant management and operation you can find a specialized consultant.

Decide whether you may need consultancy for location selection, recipe and menu development,  operations and profits assessments, marketing, staff training, accounting or growth strategies just to name a few. Understanding what you would like to improve also helps you set real goals to work towards with your consultants, allowing you to measure the success of the work done.

To find a consultant it can be helpful to use a search engine to find out what you can about the individual consultant, or the companies background. See if they have worked with companies like yours before, what their repertoire with previous clients seem to be and look into whether these restaurants are now doing well.

After this basic background research conduct a thorough interview to understand the consultants competence in dealing with your specific problem. They will be working with your company to the same extent as one of your own employees, so the hiring process should be similar. Also, understand that you can always see a few different consultants to find the one that will work best for you.

December 14, 2016 Articles