Let’s face it. Online deliveries only serve as a supporting tool to keep restaurants afloat and are not proving to be financially sustainable – at least for most existing restaurant models.
The Covid-19 pandemic serves as a reminder that having strategic crisis management plans in place can help immensely in staying ahead of the crowd.
What is crisis management? They are tools in hand to help you weather through scenarios that you did not see coming and flipped your business model upside down. Such scenarios can wipe out your business overnight.
Hence, it is important for every restaurant to have an actionable crisis management plan from now on.
Here’s a helpful guide on what to do and include.
Crisis management planning
First things first, your crisis management plan and goals might need the below in mind:
- A list of possible scenarios with solutions and benchmarks in place: low cash reserve (how much cash reserve is needed to sustain the business for the next three to six months?), sales (breakeven, profitable, how long can you maintain at the lowest sales numbers?), natural disaster, theft (what to do when staff left with your cash?), and of course, pandemics.
- Sustaining the public perception of your brand image. Work with your PR and Marketing team to ensure a positive outcome from the crisis.
- Listening to your stakeholders, trusted employees, partners to have a well-rounded view of the crisis.
- Normalising operations, reducing damage control and reaching breakeven within a timeframe.
Ultimately, your brand values should serve as a foundation for you to make the right decisions to steer the ship around.
Crisis management team
This team can be a combination of one representative from every unit – Operations, FOH, BOH, HR, Finance, PR and Marketing. Everyone should work together in the planning stage.
This way, communication will remain unified and everyone would be confident in responding to crises. The representatives should be appointed from the get-go and not when a crisis hits.
Be proactive and vigilant
You snooze, you lose. Be in the know on the ground whether competitors are taking advantage of the crisis you are facing. Being proactive is probably one of the best crisis management techniques you and your team need to be equipped with.
If you have a sense that a crisis might be brewing, communicate with your crisis management team. Preparation, shorter response time and recovery time go a long way.
After every crisis management, vigilantly document every threat, measured taken and outcome after every crisis. Review them with your team and train your staff well to better manage future crises.
Build relationships through the supply chain
Always have options or plans B, C or D. Restaurant models are not sustainable due to unanticipated disruptions. With razor-thin margins and reserve, restaurants are on the brink of closure and unable to weather crises if unprepared.
If there is a positive side to the Covid-19 pandemic, it would be the F&B communities coming together to help each other out.
There is an African proverb that goes like this, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
Strengthen your brand’s supply chain by building relationships with purveyors, farmers, producers, industry peers and your neighbours. Host roundtable discussions with various vendors to exchange ideas and insights.
Communicate, communicate, and…communicate!
The effects of poor communication can threaten business and brand reputation. Just like in a relationship, honest communication goes a long way. The following can be some key pointers to start with:
- Your PR and marketing teams need to have clear pointers of keywords and brand tonality when handling social media queries, stakeholders and media.
- Have one key personnel (or yourself) overseeing every message – both print and digital – before it goes out to the public.
- Communicate what is happening to your staff, especially your front-of-house (FOH). Give your team key pointers if customers request an answer, or refer to your management team.
- Be in the know of what others might be talking about the crisis. Start with tracking mentions of your brand. Consider tracking via Google alert, monitoring social media platforms and news outlets.
- Own up to your words and apologise when necessary.
We have seen how restaurants struggled to survive due to the unanticipated crisis that is Covid-19.
We planned at lengths ahead to open our brands with a bang, but what about sustainability?
When we plan for worst case scenarios, we can detect risks early before they impact (too) negatively on core operations and avoid the painful process of recovering.
This article first appeared on Set the Tables.
Set the Tables is positioned to inspire and educate those already in the industry as much as the aspiring reader who dreams of a future in the food business, and maybe even the merely curious tantalised by the vast and irresistible universe of food and drink.