Well there are several:

• The social skill to relate to customers from the very get-go!
• The ability to say a few words when she passes a table that are having to wait for their food (If she chats even a little with them, they feel attended to and forget that they are actually sitting there waiting)
• She must remember to write down every  single drink and every food item that she has taken an order for. This must be written on the bill for the appropriate table. (Remember what doesn’t get written down, doesn’t get paid for)
• The most important skill is to control the flow of orders to both the bar and to the kitchen. When you are really busy in your bar/ restaurant  in Spain, a good waitress will discourage people from ordering cocktails and encourage them to order a simple bottle of wine or a jug of Sangria (only if it has been pre-prepared)

Buy encouraging people to order items that you can deliver quickly, you not only get more sales, but you keep the customer happy.

Controlling the flow of incoming food orders

By chatting just a little to customers, you can get them to sit and be happy just having a drink and not worrying about having their order taken quickly.

Most customers try to order food and drink at the same time and this causes several problems.

• The waitress has to concern herself with processing both food and drink orders at the same time and even looking after a few tables she soon starts to feel under stress, has no time to chat and starts to make mistakes
• When she separates food and drinks and takes the drinks order first, it’s a lot easier for her and the kitchen buys time to clear existing orders, before she goes back to the table to take the food order 15-30 min latter.
• Using this system customers start to enjoy having a drink and often will order a second round. More profit for you bar/restaurant in Spain..

In mid August when you have 300% of normal trade, you waitress may have to stop taking food orders for a period of say 30 min to give the kitchen a chance to clear existing orders. In such a case she must tell the clients honestly that there will be a wait and NOT take their order until the kitchen has freed-up.

Finally

At busy times she should not take orders for long lead items, such as frozen Lasagna. Even if you have it, she must be instructed to say that it’s off the menu

Remember

that a customer times his/her food order from the moment your waitress writes it down, so writing the order down as late as she can get away with, will lead to less unhappy customers.

If she serves them a drink or two before taking their food order, they will already be a little merry and in a better humour.

One of the secrets of running a successful Bar, Restaurant on the Costa del Sol is:

Train your staff to operate to a system.

Especially when it comes to taking down customers orders!

There is nothing worse for slowing down the flow rate from the customers table through the kitchen and finally back to the table, than a set of staff who have no common system for working/processing orders.

I worked for Ford Motor C0. when I was young. I was one of 14,000 staff. when I first arrived I couldn’t understand how the output of 14,000 office staff could be co-ordinated. Here’s how it’s achieved in a nut shell:

They have a massive office solely dedicated to writing systems/procedures. These people who ensure that 14,000 staff can operate together in a highly efficient way are called “Systems Analysts”.

To run a bar/restaurant successfully which employs staff, you must become your own Systems Analysts.

Here’s how we take and process orders to a strict system:

Any item on our menu is described in detail, so all staff must be taught the same system of short hand and must use it at all times when taking down orders

The short hand must be simple. The simpler the better!

e.g. Our short hand looks like this:

Cheeseburger with onions, chips and a side salad and a gin & tonic for table 4, would be written as follows:

4.

1* ch/b+ons+chips

1*sal green.

Everybody who works in my pizzeria uses this system.

The advantages are:

• Can be written quickly
• Can be read quickly. This is very important for the chef as he may have as many as 30 orders hanging on pins in front of him, at any one time. He can read them quickly and hold them in his memory easier.
• Don’t have to decipher several different ways that staff choose of writing down the same thing.
• No mistakes in what arrives at the customer’s table.
• Speeeds up the work flow

Having good staff in your bar/restaurant in Spain will bring in extra trade

and lead to increased profits, so it’s very important to learn the correct criteria when choosing staff.

Bear in mind that most clients will like or dislike a waiter/waitress based on the first impression

that the member of staff gives them. If they like your staff, they will return to eat and drink in your bar restaurant regularly and if they don’t like your staff, you will probably lose their custom.

When you interview a person to be a waiter in your bar/restaurant, I would recommend that you take a minute at the beginning of the interview to sense the first impression that they give to you, because if you are put-off them in any way, your clients will react in the same way.

Here are some negative points that I personally would use to move an applicant down my short list as an employee.

• Slouching or lazy posture
• Scruffy appearance
• Heavy smoker or drinker
• Unduly shy
• Mumbles when speaking
• Not much personality
• Only speaks his/her mother tongue and is unwilling to study a second language

I have listed some of the criteria that would render an applicant unsuitable for bar/restaurant work. There are other criteria, but basically, if you don’t take a liking to the applicant after 5 min the rule of thumb is simply;

keep looking

Positive criteria, in no particular order. I look for all these qualities in each of my staff members;

• Trustworthy (Ask for references)
• Shows alertness
• Basically attractive Physically
• Basically attractive personality
• Smart appearance
• Good upright posture
• Clearly has the ability to converse freely (articulate and not shy)
• Speaks a second language at least basically and is prepared to study that language
• Punctual
• Not adverse to working extra hours
• Shows some ambition to learn new skills, like pizza making etc

The right person for you bar/restaurant, who is going to help grow your business will have all the above qualities and that person potentially you will be able to train up with new skills and develop into a valuable long term employee.

Last post I talked about controlling staff

Today I want to talk about how to select, contract and train staff to best serve your profit goals.

A small business like Graham’s Pizzeria needs a couple to run it and between one and two extra staff.

The extra staff do the simple tasks like shifting rubbish and washing up, but they also do one of the most vital jobs in any bar/restaurant i.e:

they are at the coal face, interfacing with the client, and as all income flows from the client, you need your staff to be:

• Attractive
• Well dressed
• Polite at all times
• Have a strong personality and be able to chat with clients who are waiting.
• Have at least some English and Spanish
• Write down orders clearly to the system which you have established.
• Be capable of remembering where each order goes on a given table
  
• To regulate the work flow going into the kitchen

Young well groomed women will bring in more trade, but in businesses with more than two staff a young well turned out waiter will also draw in trade.

I’ll deal with each point over the next few posts, but let’s get started:

Interviewing.

When interviewing ask yourself does this person fit my criteria and ask them questions relative to previous experience, going on to work you way down the above list. Sometimes the first person you interview is the perfect candidate and other times you have to interview several people to find a suitable candidate. Remember, be patient and wait until you find the right person who you feel is prepared to learn and will add to you business.

Well most big businesses would call in a Business Analyst to assess how efficient their business is running.

You can’t afford the luxury, but you have all the same problems to solve as does a big business, if you are going to attract a big enough share of the market, minimise your costs, maximise your profits in order to grow your business.

On My Blog I will Show You How to Analyse Your Business

Remember the market is out there, so firstly identify you target market.

Mine is people who live here in Spain or are on holiday and want:

• Hamburgers

• Pizzas

• Kefta Kebabs

That’s my target market, so now I must do everything within my power to build a business that attracts the largest sector of this market possible.

• Produce a great product

• Aim to attract the target market

This is where all good businesses start.

So you need to look at your small business in the same way that a big business looks at itself.

Today We’ll look at staff efficiency.

1) Give all staff a written job description (If the rubbish has to be taken out 3 times per day, that is somebody’s job and must be included on their job description). The job description is vital in controlling staff and getting the Max. out of them. Many arguments just don’t happen when staff have their job description in writing.

2) Watch your staff for a week and make notes on how each member does their job. (If you are husband and wife running a business, with a small staff, you still need job your own job descriptions description). At the end of a week review each staff members input into the business and how well they have honoured their job description. Give both Praise and Criticism and get staff members to express how they feel about their job and how the business might be improved.

3) Germaine to the food and drink business are happy smiling staff members, who are chatty and polite to customers. Teach you staff that they are playing a role and that hardly anything a customer says should be taken personally.

4) The most important thing of all is to teach your staff that it is the customer who pays everybody’s wages and one should never be rude to a customer.

What To do when Food Orders Start to Block-Up the Kitchen?

You can easily find yourself in this situation, especially during July and August.
It is very bad for your restaurant to accept too many orders at any one time. Too many orders flowing into the kitchen can only mean two things:

• Customers will have long waits for their food and you will loose valuable return trade. (Customers with small children hate to eat in places where the service is slow.)

• When a kitchen gets too busy mistakes get made, the food quality drops-off and incorrect orders arrive at the customer’s table. Result, the loss of valuable return trade.

How do you deal with this situation, once it has occurred?

If the situation has already occurred, it is too late to stop poor service becoming the result i.e. customers waiting too long and getting fed-up and even angry.

All you can do in this situation is a bit of last minute damage control:

• Instruct staff to tell all customers that there will be a wait involved in preparing their orders and in the case of customers who haven’t ordered also stress the unavoidable long wait.
  

• Instruct staff to stop taking orders for main courses for as long as it takes for the kitchen to unblock.
• Staff must slow everything down. Take more time on drinks orders, chat to customers.
• Only where customers refuse to wait to have their order taken, do everything you can to get them to have easy to prepare or pre-prepared starters.

The Proper Solution to Back-up of Orders in the Kitchen:

Correct Training

All staff should know to control the kitchens work flow

When you know that it’s really busy:

• Clean the table as guests arrive and strike up a bit of chat. Tell them you’ll be right back to take their drinks order (slowing things down.)
• Serve their drinks 5-10 min later and apologise (slowing things down.)
• Give them the menus 5 min after you have served drinks (slowing things down.)
• 5  min later take order for starters.
• As they finish their starters take the main orders and Tell Them There Will Be a Delay and apologise.

If you follow these simple procedures everything will flow smoothly, your customers will feel that they are important to you. They will realize that the wait is unavoidable and maybe they wont even notice that you have strung everything out. A lot of customers enjoy this more leisurely continental approach and the end result is that they’ll probably become Return Customers.

When running your bar restaurant in Spain you and your staff can take one of the following approaches to selling your product:

• Passive approach

• Proactive approach

The passive approach is used my most bar restaurants and is quite simply explained as follows:

Yourself or your staff approach a table, give the customer a menu and then come back and ask them what they would like to order. As they order you write it down and that’s basically your sale for that table.

The proactive approach is morev aggressive and does generally result in winning bigger orders from each table.

This is how it works:

• Approach the table and introduce and establish yourself with a greeting and a little banter. (Your customers immediately feel just a little more special, because you have made the effort to give them a little attention, which they will interpret as feeling accepted.)
• Hand a copy of the menu to each client.
• When you return to the table to take the order, always suggest extras like garlic bread, a side salad a starter if they haven’t ordered one. (A lot of people are watching their figure or their pocket and just need a little push from you to make them order an additional item.)
• Wine. If they order a cheap wine always try to get them to up grade a little. (I always say “If you don’t mind me suggesting it, the Tierra Blanca is a much nicer wine and it only cost 4 euros more”. About 50% of clients will follow your recommendation.)
• If they finish the stater quite quickly, as you collect the plates just try saying the following. “The pate is really good today. Would you like to try some” I sell a lot of pate and servings of garlic bread with Mozzarella topping this way.
• Clear empty beer and shorts glasses away frequently and ask if the customer would like another.
• At the end of a meal always ask if your clients would like a brandy etc.

If you and your staff are trained to think of taking orders in a bar restaurant on the Costa del Sol as selling your product, your turn over will be quite a lot more than if you are simply passive.