Restaurant Seasonality: How to Make the Most of the Highs and Lows

The restaurant business is one of the few industries that are heavily impacted by seasonality, probably even more so than the hospitality industry. People’s willingness to go out, the number of hours spent at work, dinner parties and family meals cooked together at home, as well as the weather, all impact the number of patrons an eating establishment can expect to have at any given time. High season could be described as the time at which the demand is at its greatest and the bookings come in easily. Sometimes you may even have to turn customers away because of a lack of available tables. This season is generally considered to be the warmest months of the year. However, some notable exceptions are made for university towns, where a large proportion of the population is made up of students who often leave for major holidays and summer vacation. Slow season is not the same for everyone and can vary from place to place. It is the time when you may have few bookings and maybe some passing trade, but your tables are rarely full. This can happen during an extended period, such as a particular month or season, but it can also occur a few days each week when the restaurant is just not making enough money to warrant keeping it open. During the slow season, diners may be enticed by the lure of free drinks, free appetizers or discounted meals and two-for-one promotions, as well as special promotional happy hours or events for the wider community. Make your customers aware of any exclusive promotions you may run by marketing and posting about them on all your social media accounts.

SLOW SEASON

For many restaurant businesses, the colder winter months are the slowest because of a number of factors affecting their customers: The cold weather makes them less likely to want to go out, the looming Christmas holidays mean budgeting for gifts and parties, visits to relatives may involve long drives and evenings spent indoors cooking with the family. People generally tend to be less apt to get dressed up to go out for a meal after getting home from a long day at work when it is dark, cold and possibly wet outside. The location of your restaurant and whether it is close to other stores or amenities will also play an important part in how easy it is to entice customers in during quieter times. If your restaurant is close to a sporting venue, theatre district or shopping mall, it will have larger footfall and more opportunities to convert passersby into patronage with some clever offerings and promotions. Here are some tips for addressing a lack of consistent patronage — and therefore consistent revenue for your business — in the slow season:

Change Your Hours of Operation

Reduce your hours of operation or adopt flexible hours: staying open more during daylight hours to attract lunchtime customers and shoppers helps with saving on both the staffing costs and overhead of keeping your establishment open in the evening, if that is when you are struggling to get people in the restaurant. Be consistent with your new reduced schedule: Update your hours on your website, social media pages and Google listings. Make sure you mention them on any promotional material you may have printed for offers and promotions so your customers always know when they can expect you to be open. Customers who are disappointed by getting to your restaurant and finding it closed without notice will consider it a wasted trip, and they might be unwilling to give you another chance.

Hire Seasonal Staff

Unfortunately, as staffing costs make up a big portion of a restaurant’s budget, it may sometimes be necessary to let go of some workers to reduce labor costs. If you employ seasonal staff on fixed-term contracts, this should not be an issue as the contract should be coming to their natural close toward the end of the peak season

Update Your Menu

Making changes to your menu could be a way both to get diners in and to reduce spending on ingredients. It may also allow you to run your restaurant with less staff, a so-called skeleton crew, as you may not need the full kitchen and wait staff to implement a reduced menu. Adding a couple of items on the menu that will appeal to younger diners will make the restaurant appear more family-friendly and may increase business from a family with children looking for a rest stop or break from a hectic family day out.

Reduce Inventory Levels

The slow season can be a good opportunity to reduce your inventory levels. Avoid buying expensive ingredients with short shelf-lives, as the use-by dates will make them likely to spoil before they get used. Make sure your menu includes dishes with ingredients that are in season, as they are often cheaper and easier to source locally. And don’t forget to reduce your stock of liquor, as the start of the year is traditionally the time for New Year’s resolutions when many people decide to stop drinking and take part in campaigns such as Dry January to recover from the over-indulgences of the holidays. Talk to your vendors and suppliers to find out whether they can offer any discounts or specially priced drinks that could be added to your menu as a special offer. In fact, the offer of a free drink upon purchase of a set meal or a certain number of courses could be a clever marketing tool to invite more people to use your restaurant when they could have otherwise gone to one of your competitors. If a reduced-price drink is not available, ask your vendors to freeze your deliveries for a month or two. This will keep your stock levels from getting too high but will also lower your expenditures during the slowest months.

Create A Cozy Atmosphere

A warm and cozy atmosphere with spaces where customers can sit and relax with friends can entice more foot traffic. People may not be going out to eat as often, so they will want to make the most of the time they spend in restaurants. Make sure yours is consistently clean and inviting and make the most of your outdoor spaces with comfy seats and a propane patio heater to give your customers the choice of being outdoors in winter.

Review Your Marketing Strategies

Marketing can be a great tool to combat the slow season. Promotions on social media, coupons and loyalty programs may all help you find new customers or bring back old ones. Loyalty programs that offer your customers something for free after purchasing a set number of items or after a certain number of visits are a good way of ensuring repeat business from satisfied customers. And in addition to offering these yourself, you could team up with other local businesses to make sure they offer your coupons, discounts and loyalty cards to their customers as well. Your establishment could host events on quiet nights such as networking evenings for local businesses or charities, seasonal parties for local businesses, launch parties for publishing or music groups or exhibitions by local artists. In short, make your restaurant available as an event space and market it as such. As well as bringing some much-needed patronage to your premises, these ideas will provide free marketing and publicity, making sure your restaurant name keeps getting mentioned so that new and old customers alike will think of it as the place to go for a meal out or to celebrate a special occasion.

Conduct Maintenance of Your Equipment

Of course, the slow season is the perfect time for equipment maintenance and making sure all your appliances can handle the colder winter months. Appliances that won’t be used until the start of the new season need to be properly cleaned and maintained. This is a great opportunity to carry out commercial dishwasher maintenance or to overhaul some of your hard-working appliances such as your commercial mixer. Any other improvements and alterations you want to make to the physical location of your business should also happen in the slow season. If you suspect the appearance of your restaurant is not helping attract or retain customers, or you see the décor as outdated and want to spruce things up, quieter times are ideal to come up with new décor themes or color schemes. Of course, any decorating and refurbishing is likely to require all or part of the restaurant to be inaccessible for a time, so they are best planned and carried out when this is likely to have minimum impact on your clientele.

PEAK SEASON

Summer and the warmer months tend to be peak season for many restaurants and eateries. Many factors contribute to this phenomenon, but it is mainly caused by an increase in tourism and the nicer weather encouraging people to spend more time outdoors, visiting bars and restaurants on their way to or from their preferred form of entertainment.

Implement a Seasonal Menu

A great way to cater to the increased business during peak season is to implement a seasonal menu that includes dishes that can be made quickly and consumed both inside the restaurant and as take-out items. The perfect example would be ice cream from a soft serve ice cream machine: It can be enjoyed in the restaurant, in the outdoor seating area or while strolling the sidewalk for that quintessential summertime experience both adults and kids will love.

Perform Regular Maintenance

At this point of the year, it is of paramount importance that all your equipment is in perfect working order. It would be a disaster for anything to break during your busiest time, so perform all check-ups, cleaning routines and maintenance, and replace old or outdated equipment before it fails.

Train Your Staff

Ensure your staff is trained and knowledgeable of the food and services you offer. Make sure they are aware of what is expected of them during their interaction with your patrons and offer them support and tips on how best to handle the busy months. Make sure they all work efficiently and do their part to keep your restaurant a well-oiled machine. Also during peak season, you should be implementing a financial plan that will help you in the leaner, slower months. Setting aside a percentage of your peak-season profits now may be all you need to ensure you make it through to the next peak season.

THE IN-BETWEEN

While many new restaurant owners may dwell on the shortage of business during the slow season and despair about not being able to entice patrons to their establishment, seasoned restaurateurs know that quieter times offer the perfect opportunity to plan ahead.

Recruit New Staff

If you made staffing cuts at the beginning of your slow season, start looking for new staff in plenty of time to train them and have them ready to work at the beginning of the next peak season.

Plan for Busy Restaurant Days

Just as the cold months set in and you experience a lull in business, it is time to start planning for Valentine’s Day, which for many eateries is the busiest day of the year. Make sure your business is ready to meet the demands of patrons on that day: Check your stock and ingredient availability, make sure you have enough trained staff to attentively cater to customer’s needs, brainstorm ideas for special or themed items on the menu and generally get a good game plan together. Mother’s Day will be just around the corner, too, as will myriad other special days in the spring and summer calendar. Successful restaurants start planning their special promotions several months ahead. In fact, it is not unheard of for some to start planning their Christmas menu in the summer. If you know the seasonal demands on your business, you can use the quieter times to plan well ahead and make the busiest times easier and more productive.

Examine Historical Data and Practices

This is also a time to check your books to examine which strategies and ideas were successful and should be carried into the new peak season and which trials failed and are best left behind. Draw down data from your cash registers or point-of-sale systems and analyze what was successful in increasing sales and which dishes should be a must-have in next season’s menu. Last but not least, make sure to take some time off during your restaurant’s quietest times. While the worry about lack of customers and cash flow may tempt you to think, rethink and over-think your strategies, some much-needed downtime can recharge your batteries and give you renewed focus to tackle the challenges ahead. A break might even bring you some inspiration for new menu items or promotions to implement.