Restaurants and bars go through an incredible amount of wear and tear on a daily basis. Add in the fact that interior design tastes change and that the dining out experience evolves, and the reasons to refurbish and relaunch just continue to pile up. You want to offer a great experience, and part of offering such an experience means updating and refreshing your business establishment and even business model.
Restaurants, bars, pop-ups, breweries, and more all fall into this category. If you find that business has slowed or have noticed that your interior design and menu have slowly faded out of date, use this guide to help you refurbish and relaunch with a bang.
Audit Your Establishment and Prioritize
The first step is to first audit what you have, make a list of improvements that need to be made, and then list them in order of priority. This way, you can focus on the upgrades that will make the biggest impact on the customer experience. Don’t focus on décor when there are rips in your seats, for example. Don’t work on improving the floors when you need to first look at how you can give new life to the menu or services you offer.
Look at your list of issues and consider them from a customer point of view. This way, you can identify the pain points and work to turn them into positives instead.
Make Essential Updates
Essential updates inhibit or reduce the standard on the basis of your business. For example, if the food isn’t good, then changing the décor isn’t going to bring customers back. If your services don’t meet expectations, then you will just see more complaints and bad reviews. Work on the essentials, then the rest.
When it comes to identifying essentials, look at them in this order:
- Structural Essentials
- Services Essentials
Depending on how many essential updates you need to make, you may benefit from closing down your store during refurbishment. This way, you can get all the essentials out of the way and open back up with a huge launch party.
Give Your Team a Refresh and Retrain Them
You want to refresh the entire experience, which means that your team will need an upgrade as well. To start, refresh the uniform so that it is sharp, obvious to customers, and most of all functional. Getting special aprons made for bartenders can help improve their ability to serve your customers or even offer special table service.
A new look isn’t the only way you can give your team an update. A great way is to consider how your team can offer a better experience. For your bartenders, you may want to consider sponsoring them to learn how to make new drinks or improve their mixology skills.
You can make it fun as well. For example, you can challenge each of your bartenders or employees to come up with a signature drink. Have these drinks go through a voting process with your customers, and you have a great draw and marketing tactic all in one.
Define Each Project and Finish Fast
When it comes to any future updates, you want them too small, defined, and able to be finished fast. Doing small updates one at a time may seem like you are just dragging out the renovation, but it can help you budget better and keep your downtime to a minimum. You can likely replace old floors in the two days you are off, for example, but cannot give your restaurant a full facelift in that time.
Defining your project and keeping each upgrade small can make it easier to budget, upgrade without closing, and of course, can help you and your customers see significant changes over time.
Offer New, Exciting Features on a Regular Basis
If you operate a restaurant, exciting reasons to get customers to return again and again are seasonal menu changes, specials, and even daily deals depending on your business model and customer base. Hotels can offer special packages for holidays like Valentine’s Day or partner with other local businesses to offer special deals to go from simple hotel booking to vacation planning.
In short, you need to give customers and guests alike to spend more with you and to visit regularly in order to try new things or get a good deal that they cannot get anywhere else. This is how you grow repeat business and encourage word-of-mouth marketing.
Writers Bio: Bio: James Daniels is a freelance writer, business enthusiast, a bit of a tech buff, and an overall geek. He is also an avid reader, who can while away hours reading and knowing about the latest gadgets and tech, whilst offering views and opinions on these topics.
