Restaurant Tips During COVID19

Restaurant tips during COVID19 include limiting delivery. Yes, you read that correctly. The COVID19 pandemic has affected everyone, especially restaurant owners. Here are things that can help keep you afloat until the storm passes.

The idea that the pandemic is over, is wishful thinking, or willful blindness. We’ve always maintained when it hit NYC in March that this would affect our industry for at least a year. An now with a second wave of the coronavirus hitting (and spiking) in many states, a good storm strategy is necessary.

So why did we say reduce delivery? Simple. Delivery is an add-on to restaurant operations, not a replacement for it. With its cost as high as 37%, you simply can’t use it as a majority of income to support a restaurant. If a restaurant doesn’t have at least enough in-dining (or take out) orders to cover overhead, then expanding delivery will drain working capital faster.

A2z Restaurant Consulting Restaurant Tips include:

A2z Restaurant Consulting CEO Eddie Fahmy conceived a new product for the market. DineVite will help restaurants during COVID-19 and beyond. Not only to survive the pandemic but to streamline their consumer interaction for a fraction of the cost of today’s mainstay apps. Here are the 5 major problems we see on the horizon for a restaurant and the solution(s).

Restaurant challenges during the pending post-COVID-19 reopening exacerbate an already complicated landscape in New York City.

Before the coronavirus hit the USA (and then essentially shutting down restaurants across the United States), we identified several existing pain points that restaurant owners faced. The first two included, but were not limited to:

• Filling empty seats on slow nights
• Time — to learn new technology and effectively leverage digital media and promotions.

This left restaurateurs with a dilemma: resort to desperate “deal promotion” platforms, that required deep discounts and losing up to as much as 50% of the remaining sale. The platforms touted that they would bring the restaurant new customers. And while they do generate bookings, many of those customers are ‘deal-hoppers’ that won’t return. Moreover, these platforms effectively made themselves uninvested partners in your restaurant, leaving you running in the rat wheel without getting anywhere — the bottom line never increased: you had to do twice the business to remain in place. Further, it increased additional work for the restaurant owner since they had to account for all the coupons. Lastly, by broadcasting deep discounts on these platforms, restaurants cheapened their brands: once they become known as a discount location, it is difficult — if not impossible — to shed that label.

But the alternative wasn’t any better—accept the idea of relying on a few strong nights a week to cover your entire operating overhead. Neither is a good solution.

Restaurant Tips During COVID-19

With the new pending restrictions being placed on restaurants that want to be open during the COVID-19 pandemic, there are new challenges.

The shortlist is that, with restaurant capacity restricted due to COVID19,

• restaurants must rely on more delivery to sustain revenues. However, restaurants can’t survive long-term, with delivery apps taking up 37% per order. The alarm of delivery apps killing restaurants has been a conversation for years; as discussed in The New Yorker article entitled “How Delivery Apps May Put Your Favorite Restaurant Out of Business,
• increased table turnover will be more important than ever. With only 25-50% capacity allowed, every minute matters. Lastly,
• reservation management will be more important, as many diners will refrain from ‘just stopping in’ for fear that they may be shut out due to capacity.

There are many tools available that can solve one or more of these problems. The question is whether they can do so in a time- and cost-effective way.

Eddie Fahmy, CEO of A2Z Restaurant Consulting, has been in the restaurant industry his whole life, beginning as a busboy in his teens and emerging as a successful restaurateur turned consultant. Through his own experiences — and working with clients –, he gained insights into the pain points and challenges restaurants faced and developed DineVite as a solution.

MORE ABOUT DINEVITE

DineVIte was developed as an easy-to-use, cost-effective platform for customer acquisition. It helps restaurants fill empty seats, increase the bottom line, and streamline promotional opportunities. 

The platform empowers consumers to decide where to enjoy their next meal and to request an exclusive and private offer from the restaurant to acquire them in real-time. It does so without broadcasting it, which cheapens the brand.

Moreover, it gives the restaurateur the tools to provide the consumer with a digital and on-premise VIP experience.

To help restaurant owners in New York City weather the COVID-19 storm, Eddie and his partners will provide DineVite for FREE (for 3-6 months). Your restaurant might already be in the Dinevite.me database. So go to the site and begin—type in the search box to see if you’re listed. Then contact us to claim your page and get a video-screen share demo of how to use the dashboard.

DineVite is Free for consumers and provides features other apps don’t have. As a restaurant owner, you can claim your page, use it, test it, and review the dashboard stats to get consumer and conversion information. If it is making you money at the end of the trial period, keep it. If not, there is no contract, commitment, or cancellation fees, and you’ll remain in the directory for free regardless.

The concept was so intriguing that CEO Review named Eddie Entrepreneur of the Year 2023. The platform will launch in 2025, but you can sign up now. Check out the video tutorials with step-by-step instructions. 

We hope these restaurant tips during COVID-19 help. If you have—or are planning to open—a restaurant, contact A2Z Restaurant Consulting for assistance with everything from location evaluation to leases, vendor negotiations, staffing, technology, marketing, and more.