How cafe owners made spare time for themselves – and more money …
Wendy’s Story
Our business is Cafe Istanbul. It’s a Turkish restaurant in Wellington City, New Zealand. It’s a family-owned business that we’ve run for 11 years now. I look after the front of house, manage the staff and see to sales.
Over the last 6-months to a year, we’ve noticed a big growth in the upper end of Cuba St, where we are situated. There’s a lot more people, a lot more foot traffic, and many bars and cafes are being developed in the street.
There are also a lot of inner city apartments in our area now.
While many of our customers are students, we also cater for those between the ages of 25 and 45; we have quite a few 40th birthday parties here. We also get 21sts and even 60th and 70th birthday parties, so our customer base is quite vast.
Our cafe is very well known. Everyone in the area knows who we are and where we are. Those who haven’t been to us before will always ring up to find out. We have a lot of regular customers.
We obviously want to pitch to the people with the most money, so we’re thinking of aiming at city dwellers, the apartment people, in the next marketing campaign.
These tend to be aged 25 to 35 or 40, have a good disposable income and probably no children or dependants. They have that extra money to spend on going out.
We’re definitely considering opening up for lunch. We have done that once before and there just wasn’t enough foot traffic. But we’ve noticed in recent times that on a Thursday, Friday and Saturday (and even Sunday) there are a lot of people about and they’re all looking for somewhere to have lunch.
We faced several challenges before we met ActionCOACH, particularly regarding staffing in the kitchen (we used to import chefs from Turkey), team building with our front of house team and getting the right people.
Other challenges included putting systems in place that, perhaps, we hadn’t thought of before.
Finding the right staff had always been a big problem … we’d advertise and basically end up just having to take the first available person rather than the right person.
ActionCOACH has given me some really good information and guidelines on how to choose the right person rather than be hasty and choose the wrong person, because when running a restaurant, you need people; people on the floor and not just people who are available to work.
In the past, we were basically happy with what we made from the business. Even though we could probably have made a lot more, we didn’t try.
With putting different systems in place, like managing our booking times and getting more ‘bums on seats’, we’ve been able to increase the number of people we serve, and of course, the number of dollars we take.
So there’s definitely been a really good increase since we’ve started working with ActionCOACH.
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