You’ve been running your own restaurant for about a year now, and while you’re clearing expenses, it’s just barely. You want to earn enough money that your restaurant can grow and expand, whether that’s revamping décor, hiring more staff, updating your menu, or adding new locations. What can you do to increase your restaurant’s earnings potential?
Here’s how to make more money in a restaurant:
- Offer coupons and discounts
- Host seminars or live entertainment
- Sell restaurant merch
- Start doing takeout
- Upsell, upsell, upsell
- Focus more on marketing
- Cut extraneous staff positions
- Review contracts for areas of overspending
- Make a more economical menu
In this article, we’ll provide lots of actionable tips and tactics for increasing your restaurant’s bottom line in a meaningful way. Whether you use all these ideas or just a few, your restaurant will have the cashflow it needs to keep growing.
Let’s get started!
9 Ways to Start Earning More Money at Your Restaurant
Offer Coupons and Discounts
Yes, the idea of selling your food for less money when you’re trying to increase your earnings might sound counterintuitive. Stop and think about it for a moment, though. People love to save money, which makes passing up a discount coupon hard to do.
If some of the potential customers in your city or town had previously thought that your restaurant was too expensive, knowing that they can eat there for less will likely incentivize them to visit even if they regularly wouldn’t.
Once they enter your establishment and are greeted by the wonderful ambiance and they get to sample the delicious food, you could change their opinion. They might not mind coming into your restaurant every now and again even if you are costlier because your food is so good.
Don’t only promote your discount code through email and social media. Only your existing audience will see it. To make those potential customers who are not currently within your orbit privy to your deal, we recommend getting coupons printed and sent via direct mail.
Add exclusivity to the deal by only running the discount for a limited period, such as one to two weeks. This prevents your restaurant from losing too much money by discounting your food while ensuring that you should get new faces at your restaurant.
Host Seminars or Live Entertainment
Another way to get more people to your restaurant is to make the establishment about more than just eating. For instance, maybe one day per week, you host a seminar or class. You can teach cooking basics for young adults who are striking out on their own for the first time and want to cook nice meals.
You could also teach specialty courses such as cake-baking or decorating, French pastries, or certain cooking techniques. You can announce the seminar or course through your email newsletter, in your blog on your website, and on social media.
Again, since those whose interest you want to attract might not be signed up to your newsletter or following you on social media, you have to spread the word through other means. If your restaurant can afford it, a billboard will certainly advertise your class loud and clear.
You can even staple fliers around the town (provided you’re allowed to, and you have the required permitting) to get people interested.
You’d charge X amount of money per head. The cost would cover a certain number of classes. If your seminar or classes attract even moderate interest, this can be a great way to funnel extra money into your restaurant.
However, you do have to spend the money on ingredients, which can take away from your earnings potential. That’s why another popular idea that many restaurants use is to host live music.
Unlike the cooking class, in which you have to shut down your kitchen while the class is ongoing, when you have live musical entertainment, operations in your restaurant can continue on as normal.
What’s also better is that live music can become a weekly part of your restaurant’s schedule, unlike a class or seminar, which will be shorter-term. You’ll spend less money to host live music, too. You only need the space for live entertainment. You should pay the musical acts if you can.
People will come to your restaurant for entertainment, especially if they have nothing else to do on a Friday or Saturday night and there’s a live band playing. Your restaurant could become a weekend hotspot!
Sell Restaurant Merch
Has your restaurant made a name for itself since opening its doors? Are local customers avid fans of yours? Then why not make merchandise and sell it at your restaurant?
You can print your name and logo on t-shirts and hoodies and get it engraved in glassware. Outside of selling this merch in your restaurant, you can also put it on your website’s store.
Make sure you start a promotional campaign to spread awareness of your new merch. Send emails to your current customers and post about it on social media. You can also drum up interest by giving away a free t-shirt or mug at your restaurant as part of a contest.
Perhaps everyone who visits your restaurant for 20 days automatically gets their name entered to win. Then you’d draw the name of the winner in a raffle. This is a great way to get more people at the restaurant while also promoting your new merch.
While doing promotions for your merch, tell people to post photos of themselves wearing it using a hashtag of your choosing. This is free promotion that could get people curious about your restaurant, especially if the hashtag takes off.
One of the best types of merch you can sell is a gift card to your restaurant! Gift cards make wonderful presents for birthdays, anniversaries, promotions, and any other occasion.
Start Doing Takeout
Is your restaurant dine-in only? You’re making good money now, but imagine how much higher your earnings could be if you added takeout to your list of services.
In late 2019, Restaurant Dive published the results of a survey from Vixxo that discovered how Americans would rather visit a restaurant to eat there versus getting delivery or takeout. The difference was 62 percent for dining in and 34 percent for takeout.
Now, we have to mention that this data was published before the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, so opinions most certainly changed. Restaurants weren’t allowed to provide dine-in services for a while, so many of them started offering takeout.
Even today, with consumers again afforded the luxury of being able to go out to eat, more of your customers than before might prefer to have your food delivered to them (or to come to pick it up). You should accommodate them with takeout options.
As you go this route, be conscious of the services you use. Maybe your restaurant already has a few vehicles, so you do the deliveries yourself. This allows you to rake in the most profit from delivery sales.
This 2020 article from Washington Post shows how much cash that delivery services such as Uber Eats, DoorDash, and GrubHub can take. The article mentions that a Chicago-area pizzeria earned $1,042.63 for more than 40 pizzas. However, the delivery service that dropped off all the pizzas took their cut, which was $666.09.
The restaurant itself earned $376.54. That’s more than half of the earnings that went to the delivery company.
We’d also recommend hosting online ordering on your own website so your customers don’t have to log on to GrubHub or DoorDash when they’re hungry and in the mood for your cuisine!
Upsell, Upsell, Upsell
Here’s a simple but effective tactic that you can use as soon as tomorrow provided you take a bit of time to teach your restaurant staff how it’s done. It’s known as upselling.
If you’re not sure what upselling is, it’s a marketing technique, and a rather simple one at that. When you upsell, you attempt to get the customer to increase the size of their order.
For example, let’s say you own a café. A customer comes in and orders a small coffee. The barista taking the order mentions that it’s only $2 more to upgrade to a large coffee and then asks if the customer would like to do it.
Upselling allows the customer to still get what they want, only they’re getting more of it. That means you’re earning more money for each purchase you make.
Since upselling is a form of marketing, it requires a delicate balance. Your waiters and waitresses can’t be too pushy. There are lots of reasons a customer might want to stick with their original order. Maybe they budgeted for their spending and can’t afford to spend more. They could be on a diet and they’re allocating calories.
You should mention the upsell offer once, ask about it, and then leave it alone. If a customer says no, don’t keep pestering them. You’re not going to change their mind like that, and if anything, you could cause them to not want to come back.
You need to frame the upsell deal as something that benefits the customer, not you. Always mention how the customer can save money or get a better deal by upselling, which can incentivize them to say yes.
Focus More on Marketing
Speaking of marketing, it’s something your restaurant must do. Some restaurant owners only bother with marketing when first opening their doors to maximize the influx of people. Then once they start experiencing the daily rigors of restaurant ownership, they forget all about marketing.
You can’t promote yourself once and expect that to sustain you for the life of your restaurant. You always have new people who are interested in your establishment or those who could become interested, and you need to market to them.
You might use a few of the tactics we’ve recommended in this article and then spend that extra money on a marketing agency. The agency can review the current marketing measures you have in place (or had in place if you haven’t marketed in a while) and then make suggestions based on your marketing goals.
Your budget will be considered as well, which will ensure that you don’t overspend on marketing.
You can improve such areas as social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, and more. Whether you want to boost your SEO, build your link authority, increase your email list, filter your leads more effectively, or figure out lead generation tactics that work, a marketing agency can help.
Please remember though that marketing results are not instant. You don’t want to cancel the services of your marketing agency after a week because your restaurant isn’t packed to the gills with people.
Be patient, as it can take weeks, sometimes months for a marketing campaign to pay off. With the help of a professional team, you can rest assured that the campaign will indeed pay off, it’s just a matter of when.
Cut Extraneous Staff Positions
You’ve likely heard the old saying that a dollar saved is a dollar earned, right? In that regard, if your restaurant curtails its spending, then you’re making more money. That’s what this tip and the next two tactics are all about: saving money.
If your restaurant is struggling to make ends meet, one of the first things you can do is review your current staff. Maybe you have one too many bartenders or things in the kitchen are getting a little tight.
Remember though before you fire your staff that people depend on your job for their livelihoods. Things happen and sometimes you need to make cuts, but you might want to come back to this option only if you’ve exhausted everything else on the list and your restaurant is still struggling.
Review Contracts for Areas of Overspending
When you first opened your restaurant, you didn’t know as much as you do now. You’ve learned a lot through experience, and it’s made you a better restaurant owner. If some of your contracts are coming up for renewal, now is a great time to sit down and crunch some numbers.
How much are you spending to maintain your vendor relationships? Are you pleased with the relationships? Do the vendors always deliver the correct quantity and on time?
Even if you like your vendors, if there are lower-priced ones that can offer a similar level of service, you might be better off with one of them. Do keep in mind though that lower-priced vendors often don’t quite provide the same level of excellence as you get when you’re working with more quality yet higher-priced vendors.
Our best suggestion is this. Ask for quotes from the competitors of your vendors. Tour some warehouses, sit down for some meetings, and weigh your options. If you feel like your vendor provides the best level of service that your budget can afford, then there’s no need to jump ship.
Your vendor relationships are incredibly important, after all. If you start experiencing delivery delays or misplaced orders, your restaurant cannot provide the level of service that your customers expect from you. This will only hurt your bottom line, not help it!
Make a More Economical Menu
Our final suggestion for increasing your restaurant’s earnings is this: review your menu. If you’re spending too much money on food, you have the option to change your vendor, as we discussed above. You can also readjust your menu so everything on there is moderately priced.
This will save you money, but you have to toe the line carefully here. If you disregard the quality and variety of the menu in the quest to save some money, your customers will see right through it. They’ll stop going to your restaurant and begin dining at the competition’s establishment instead.
There’s nothing wrong with scaling back or changing your menu to spend less money on food. Rather than dump the whole menu though, make gradual changes. This will prevent your customers from feeling alienated the next time they come into your restaurant and scope out your menu.
Conclusion
With some ingenuity and creativity, you can earn more money in a restaurant. The tips and tactics in this guide are some great ones to start with. Making these changes can lead to instant results in a lot of cases so your establishment will quickly have more cash to pocket. Good luck!
