How can a restaurant keep sales up in January?

So, how can a restaurant keep sales up in January?

Recent reports indicate that most restaurants and bars across the UK performed well over the festive period.

Living Ventures, one of the UK’s largest restaurant groups, are reporting their sales up 34% during the Christmas period, compared to 2013! That’s not bad.

However – in January, like everyone else, they experience a huge drop in business!

How to stay busy in January?

After last week’s email, we had a dozen or so calls from restaurants who have done pretty well, but now want to keep up that momentum.

The Magic Formula!

No surprises – there isn’t one.

Our entire team work very, very hard to get results for our restaurants.

If you aren’t seeing growth figures like those above, and looking for reasons, the answer is simple – you aren’t doing the right things.

Some of the venues that ring us, are looking for reassurance that everyone else is struggling,like they are. We tell them it doesn’t need to be like that and because that isn’t what they want to hear, they never call back.

You see, some people aren’t looking for reasons to succeed, they are looking for someone else to validate their failure! We can’t, because it isn’t true – others are succeeding – BIG TIME!

What am I up Against?

Restaurant marketing is getting more complex all the time. It takes a lot of research and resources for even us to keep up.

Many restaurants chains are currently offering MASSIVE January deals – GET A LOAD OF THESE AS AN EXAMPLE. More than 50 restaurants in Manchester alone are giving customers up to 50% off their food and drink, to encourage them to spend in January!

Who cares if it it makes a loss or not – they are stealing your customers with these offers.
Making your job even harder.

It gets much worse if you are up against these restaurants!

These guys are well organised with large marketing teams. They are using these deals to capture data, build their marketing arsenal and get ready to punish you for the rest of 2015. That is why they are running at a heavy loss for now!

Our plans have been well in place since last year for growing our own business – and more importantly, helping our clients to grow their business, because that’s a key measure of what determines our own success.

Are you going to be complacent and just assume that growth will just happen. Are you just going to do nothing, or are you going to take action and get moving?

On a final note, I know we add this to most of our emails, but please don’t call us to say you want to grow your business, then change your mind when you realise that it takes time and money.

It sounds crazy but we constantly get calls from restaurants who think a full blown outsourced marketing department can be delivered for £100 a month. It genuinely can’t.

We would need to be working on 200 restaurants, round the clock, just to pay the wages of our team and let’s face it if we were working on 200 restaurants, we wouldn’t doing very much for each one!

To give this context, try recruiting an entire team for your kitchen for £100 a month!

If you haven’t been put off by my brutal honesty, based on 20 years of experience, call me directly or a member of my team on 01772 978 199. We can help.