Editorial Team
5 min read
Of the nearly 750,000 restaurant locations in the U.S., just over 150,000 restaurants have only one location. For many restaurateurs, opening a second, third, or fourth location—or even growing a restaurant franchise—is the dream.
Taking that first step to open a second location is daunting, and it doesn’t get any easier as you expand your footprint. The more restaurants you open successfully, the more moving parts you’ll have to keep an eye on each day. Fortunately, there are tools and strategies you can put in place to make managing multiple locations more efficient. Here are some tips to help you figure out how to run multiple restaurants simultaneously.
Read: 6 things to consider before opening a second location for your business
Standardize your processes
Consistency is key when it comes to serving customers across multiple restaurant locations. Ideally, the experience of eating at your establishment feels the same no matter where someone is dining. The simplest way to achieve that consistency? Standardize everything.
Establish Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that your team can implement at every eatery. Your SOPs should cover everything from food preparation to employee training to customer service protocols. Even for the most routine tasks, a checklist can help ensure your team stays on the same page and sweats even the most minor details.
Delegate to trusted managers
The only way to run restaurants with multiple locations is to delegate to a restaurant leadership team. It’s impossible to be in multiple locations at once. As your footprint grows, you’ll need a team of managers you can trust to oversee the day-to-day workflow.
It takes a village to run a restaurant—from front-of-house leadership roles like the general manager, bar manager, and shift lead to the back-of-house team like a kitchen manager, a sous chef, or, for larger kitchens, an executive (or head) chef. Identify the team you need and hold yourself accountable for trusting this team to do what you’ve hired them to do.
Centralize reporting
Clover’s reporting and sales feature allows you to compile multi-location data—including online and across restaurants with multiple locations. In one clear view, you can keep track of total overall and hourly revenue, top-selling dishes, open orders, and more.
Jasmine Dietrich of Dietrich Espresso uses Clover’s reporting features to stay on top of her 15 locations. She said, “I love being able to log onto my phone or look online and find out exactly how many items were sold, what the sales were for the day, who sold what, and what the average is for each barista. All of those things are very, very important in tracking who’s doing better in sales and what items are selling well in each stand. It’s really helped us improve our business because of all the reports we can run, which has been great.”
Make communication easy
Even if you can’t be everywhere all at once, you can be available to restaurant managers and staff when they need you. Set up lines of communication that managers can use to talk to one another to troubleshoot, as well as reach you if something comes up. Talk to your team to see what communication channels they prefer: instant messaging, video conferencing, or another online tool.
Use technology to stay organized
Systematizing your operations also involves using the right technology to stay organized. Find a restaurant POS that tracks inventory across multiple locations, can handle online orders for each restaurant, and makes it easy to sync data.
Clover’s POS system can stay on top of inventory across restaurants with multiple locations. Clover’s partner apps SKU IQ and WooCommerce create real-time stock numbers that can help you see what inventory is available and reorder ingredients in time.
Clover also integrates seamlessly with MarginEdge Lite, a complete restaurant management system that greatly simplifies restaurant inventory management, so you can take inventory quicker and get more actionable information. With Clover, MarginEdge Lite automatically processes all your invoices with line item detail at the snap of a picture.
Read: Make restaurant inventory management easier with this 5-minute hack
Automate where possible
There are dozens of apps in the Clover App Market that you can add to your Clover POS system to help automate or streamline time-consuming tasks, such as employee scheduling, inventory management, and taking reservations. Adding automation into multi location management reduces errors and helps everyone work more efficiently.
Clover Kitchen Display System, for instance, displays orders as they come in and helps staff stay on top of a dinner rush. And, if you’re taking online orders, Clover Online Ordering can help you manage those orders directly in your POS system.
The Time Clock app by Homebase is a popular option for streamlining employee scheduling. It also automatically reminds employees about their shifts, tracks their hours, and integrates directly with payroll.
For the front-of-house team, apps like SeatOn or Waitlist Me manage reservations and wait lists, helping your host and servers give customers accurate wait times. Clover Dining can help manage your floor plan, assign sections or tables to specific servers, and split checks easily.
Don’t abandon your original location
It’s easy to get absorbed into the process of opening a new location and getting that restaurant off the ground. After all, you’ve dedicated significant time and resources to the success of this expansion. But, once that eatery is off the ground, balance your attention between the new location and those that came before it. Schedule regular visits to each of your restaurant locations to make sure each team feels valued and part of the larger vision for your brand.
Ready to hit the ground running? Contact a Clover Business Consultant today to learn more about how Clover can help you manage multiple restaurant locations.
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