How Do I Keep My Staff Busy During Down-Times?

14 Jan, 2014 |

How do I keep my employees busy during the downtime? This is a question that every business owner asks themselves, but it’s often not addressed. Every owner focuses on ensuring that the staff schedule is completed and posted, maintaining inventory levels, bookkeeping and marketing their business.

It is inevitable that any business will have busy and slow periods during the day. When it’s busy, it’s all hands on deck making sure your customers get the best service possible, but what should your staff be doing during slow times? To answer this question you have to start with your employee schedule. First, review your sales against your schedule to ensure that you don’t have too many or too few employees scheduled for each shift. Using an online restaurant scheduling software (like the one from What Time Do I Work), you can easily track your past schedules and compare against your sales reports to accurately determine the right number of employees to schedule for each shift.

Once you have created a conflict-free employee schedule with an adequate number of employees to cover the rushes, you can then focus on ways to keep everyone on each shift busy during the downtime. You have probably heard the statement “If you have the time to lean you have the time to clean.”

Every business should have a list of simple, yet important tasks that can be done throughout each day. Create a checklist of daily/weekly/monthly tasks that need to be done where the employees can reference during the slow periods. You may want to include tasks such as wiping counters/tables, checking stock levels to ensure you are prepared for the next rush, sweeping or vacuuming, cleaning windows, dusting, etc. Depending on your industry there could be many more little tasks that need to be done throughout the day, but having a list handy for all employees will help to keep employees active.

Not only does What Time Do I Work employee scheduling software help you to generate reports on the staffing levels needed for each shift, and create conflict free schedules the first time, but you can also assign different tasks throughout the day. Include housekeeping jobs in your list of tasks to keep your employees busy and accountable. Try it today and get your first 30 days free.

How do you Promote your Bar to Women

09 Jan, 2014 |

You know that women are the key to the success of your bar, but how do you promote your bar to draw in women? There are 3 main parts of your bar that you must look to create a female friendly bar; environment, menu and promotions. With the right combination you will have a full bar and register in no time.

Let’s start with the bar itself, when you look around your bar what do you see? Women are looking for a clean, comfortable and inviting area to get together with friends and have a good time. Make sure that your floors and tables are cleaned often and bathrooms are fully stocked and cleaned often throughout the night. A couple of small touches that should not be forgotten are hooks for purses, counters for holding drinks, hand lotion and lots of mirrors with lighting that makes anyone look great.

Having an area set aside for dancing is a huge plus as it promotes interactions between patrons. Jon Taffer of Spike TV’s “Bar Rescue” includes a “Butt Funnel” in a lot of his bar makeovers. If you haven’t heard about this, it creates a passage to the dance floor but requires you to turn and slide through, increasing the opportunities for men and women to interact.

When you have men and women interacting in large numbers you need to ensure that everyone is having a good time. This includes not only security outside the bar, but also inside the bar. Have someone inside the bar, monitoring all your patrons to ensure that they are not being harassed or made uncomfortable by other patrons. This is a major plus for women to feel safe and comfortable at your bar.

Next take a look at your menu, this is a key place to attract women and increase profits. Women like hors d’oeuvres that they can eat without getting messy; they also appreciate low calorie items. Women are more likely to purchase wines and cocktails that have a higher profit margin than traditional beer. However, recent studies are showing that women who drink beer are more likely to pick a craft beer; this trend is also increasing in men. Offering a selection of staples and some local craft beers are a must. We are also seeing a trend in juicing, offering mixed drinks that include juices can be featured drinks to draw in new crowds.

Now that you have the perfect atmosphere and a female oriented menu, how do you market your bar to women? You can’t use the same tactics that you would use to bring men through the doors (sports and scantily clad women). The easiest way to market your bar to women is through different promotions such as Ladies Nights, Karaoke Nights, Singles Nights, Special packages for Bachelorette Parties and contests just to name a few. Women want to have fun and men want to be where the women are.

To ensure that your staff is fully involved in creating a bar that is welcoming to women, as well as supporting any promotions that you are using, try What Time Do I Work Online Staff Scheduling Software. A unique feature of the What Time Do I Work software is that it allows managers to schedule shifts as well as different tasks that need to be completed during each shift. Try scheduling one employee each hour to go and check the cleanliness of the bathrooms and making sure that they are fully stocked. By including these little tasks automatically in your normal scheduling, you can rest assured that your bar is running at its full potential.

Why Women are Key to the Success of your Bar?

07 Jan, 2014 |

As you look around your bar, do you see?

An establishment decorated in “early man cave”
Signage that suggests “for men only”
An après-hunting paradise
Warm, inviting décor, comfortable seating, with tables arranged for conversations

If you answered anything but “d,” you’re bar probably suffers from a lack of female clientele. And if that’s the case, you’re losing a large number of potential patrons—not to mention lots of revenue.

There are many reasons why you should focus on attracting female clientele to your bar. Men go to bars for many reasons; however the most common reason is that they are at the bars looking for attractive, single women. When men and women get together at a bar, the atmosphere is entirely different than at a men-only establishment. When together, men and women tend to stay longer, order more drinks, and eat more appetizers. Men have also been known to leave bigger tips when women are present. This makes having women around better for you and your wait staff—and undoubtedly more interesting and exciting for your male patrons.

If you just look at your sales receipt at the end of any night, you will find that your profit margins are higher when there are more women in your bar. Women buy more expensive, sophisticated food and mixed drinks. As a bar owner you know that the profit margin on your cocktails are much higher than on your beer sales. To increase you sales, ensure that you have a list of appetizers that women can eat and still look sexy, along with a good selection of specialized female friendly cocktails.

So what can you do to attract more women to your bar? You can start by:

Asking your female friends and relatives about what they prefer in a bar/pub
Replacing worn, outdated barstools with new and comfortable ones
Moving seating to suggest intimacy
Making sure everything is cleaner than clean
Ensuring that restrooms are clean and tidy
Hiring musicians to play quiet music on certain nights of the week
Offering exotic drink specials

How else can women help the success of your bar, by having women on staff during your busiest hours! Men will linger and buy more drinks because they enjoy talking with female bartenders and servers. So how can you ensure that you have adequate shift coverage with women working all the busiest shifts? Try online employee scheduling software from What Time Do I Work. You can quickly create conflict free schedules, post them online and communicate scheduling updates with your entire staff with a quick click of the mouse.