Should you close your restaurant during those slow hours and days,
or should you keep it open? We're going to answer that here right now.
Hey, everybody. My name is Ryan Gromfin. I'm an author,
speaker, chef, restaurateur, and I'm the founder of TheRestaurantBoss.com,
as well as RestaurantProfitAndPerformance.com
And today, we're going to answer that question that a lot of my clients ask me
and I get comments and questions online,
emails all the time asking - should I close my restaurant early?
Should I close it on slow days? Should I keep it open?
What vshould I do? The labor is killing me,
we're not doing any revenue on those days or hours
and that used to be a tough question to answer until I
figured it out,
and the only way that I could really answer this for you is to tell you a quick story.
About six months ago, I had the privilege to see a gentleman speak live,
his name was Paul Orfalea.
And Paul Orfalea is the founder of Kinko’s.
We know it today as maybe FedEx Kinko’s, or depending on where you are in the world. If you don't know,
Kinko’s is a huge photocopy and office supply store,
thousands of units across the world.
Anyways Paul founded that a long time ago back when he was in college
in Santa Barbara and to hear him speak live was incredible,
but there was one part that really stood out to me.
He told this story about how he wanted to transition his stores
to 24 hours a day,
but none of his executives would go along with it.
They didn't agree with him, they kept showing him the data and the statistics that
you know midnight to 6:00 a.m.,
they were doing no business at all, virtually no business at all compared to rest the day.
If anything, they were trying to get him to cut back on his hours
and he kept fighting this,
but he didn't really have the data to back it up, then one day he was traveling, he was in another city,
I don't remember where he said,
but he was meeting with some other local business owners and a restaurateur,
a gentleman who owned like six or eight diners in the area
started telling the story about how
when he purchased this group of diners,
they were 24 hours and then he opened up
a new unit and the sales were terrible.
And so this restauranteur started telling the story about how when he
purchased this group of diners,
they were originally 24 hours a day.
When he started looking through the books and the data on him and getting ready to open up another unit
of that same chain, he saw that between midnight and 6 a.m.,
they only did like maybe a hundred dollars in sales and so when he opened up
the new store,
he didn't do it 24 hours a day.
Sales were okay, he opened up another store, it wasn't 24 hours a day,
but he couldn't figure out why his new stores
were not doing as well as his old stores
that were 24 hours a day.
And so he thought you'd do this experiment where he took one of his new stores that
wasn't 24 hours and he opened it up for 24 hours and within a month or so,
sales doubled at that store.
But his midnight to 6 a.m. sales were still really low,
only about a hundred dollars but it worked.
It brought the whole store sales up.
So he did it on his other unit and it worked again.
He couldn't quite figure this out so he shared the story with
Paul and some of the other business people to get their take on it.
And Paul said, this light bulb went off in his head because
he realizes if it works for restaurants,
it’s going to work for us. So he went back, he told the executives in his company the story.
They agreed to let him do a test,
so he tested a couple of stores that were not 24 hours.
Opened them up 24 hours,
within a couple of months’ sales doubled.
Did it again, did it again, did it again and every time that that happened,
that same result of sales nearly doubling.
Even though, they're midnight to 6 a.m. sales were still really small.
And so after Paul gave this speech, I had a chance to pull on the side and ask my question - I said,
did you ever get any date or did you ever figure out why that is? And he said,
whenever they would talk to store patrons or do surveys,
the patrons loved the fact that they could count on Kinko’s
to always be open because don't forget, you're going to a Kinko’s
becauseyou're late on a project, you forgot to do something, a lot of times
it's a rush job,you know you have a project that's due.
And so they just love that every time they drove by,
they saw the lights on.
Even though, they didn't need it, they saw the lights on. Early in the morning,
late at night and it gave them the confidence that if they needed something,
Kinko’s would be there for them.
And so unfortunately, I've been on both sides of this argument myself in restaurants where
I had a restaurant, a high-end wine market Bistro that I was operating
and our hours were a little sporadic, we were closed on Mondays,
we would close sometimes for private events, we would close early some days.
We tested all this out and sales were just flat, they weren't going anywhere.
We finally drew a line in the sand and committed to staying open
and then what ended up happening was,
all of our other period sales started growing because people would be walking by the restaurant
in the mall,
they would come by and they would see that we were open.
When you start cutting hours back, when you start closing on days,
it scares people, it gives them the impression that you're struggling.
It also takes away some confidence from them that if they come by your restaurant,
you might not be open, so then they make the decision to go to
their tried and true, the restaurant that they know will be open.
So generally speaking, my suggestion to you is, do not cut back your hours,
do not closed on those slow days.
Keep it open, let the community know you're there.
Use the slow opportunities to take advantage of some work that needs to get done in your restaurant
but more importantly to take advantage of the slow days or the slow periods,
run some really cool specials.
Don't coupon, that's really important. I'm not a huge fan of couponing,
there's a few times that I do like couponing, but I'm more about specialty things.
Things that they can't get any other time.
So like if Monday's are really slow for you,
offer a product or do a theme night on that Monday
or on every Monday that they can't do any other night.
Ah, there's a restaurant here in my town, a really busy high-end expensive steak house
that was really slow on Mondays, they decided to take all of their meat trimmings
from the weekend or from the week before,
grind it up to an awesome homemade hamburger
that they only serve on Mondays. The only time you get the hamburger is on Monday.
Now Monday is their busiest day. If you don't get there by like 4 or 4:30,
they're going to sell out of the burger completely.
I have a client who owns a sushi restaurant and same thing.
Mondays were really slow for him, so we started this really cool like
Asian Sriracha fried chicken dinner that you could only get on Mondays,
now Monday's is one of his busiest days.
I hope this was helpful. I hope you loved it. If you did, if you liked what you saw on this video,
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Last thing is, below this video, if you're watching this on YouTube,
there'll be a link to click to come over to my website
or if you're on YouTube, you can leave a comment there, or if you're on my website,
wherever you're comfortable, but please, leave a comment or ask me a question below this video.
I promise to respond to you personally within 24 hours.
My name is Ryan Gromfin. I'm with The Restaurant Bossand Restaurant Profit and Performance
and I hope you have an absolutely wonderful day.