Restaurant Owner Tips

Successful restaurant manager meetings are key to productive communication. Sit-down manager meetings focus on moving the business forward and are a must to facilitate communication and move your business forward.

Watch this video to learn 7 tips that will help you have more successful restaurant manager meetings.

Communication in restaurants is key to getting anything done, from cleaning to profitability. The big communication challenge in restaurant management is making sure you get your message across in a manner that everyone understands and can execute what you want done how you want it done.Now, managers and owners have very different challenges when it comes to communicating these wants.

Owners tend to fail to communicate what they want done and how they want it done. As a result they express their frustration often when their managers seem to not get their job done. Then owners start to believe the only way to get anything done is to do it themselves, resulting in highly paid babysitters as managers — people to watch the restaurant, not manage.

Managers have a completely different frustration. It’s their crazy-making owners who fly into the business creating a new list of things they want done, never explaining how they want it done and creating this list that can never be accomplished as fast as the owner would like. When the manager can’t execute on the owner’s expectations, the manager is told what they are doing wrong every day.

These challenges are completely avoidable, and I have the solution.

The best way to avoid these challenges is to have routine manger meetings.

I know what you’re saying to yourself: “David, I meet with my managers almost daily, and we still have this problem.”

When you say that to me, I’m going to tell you very quickly, the “meetings” you’re having with your managers, those are not a manager meeting. And worse, those “meetings” lead to more problems.

Communication in restaurants is key to getting anything done, from cleaning to profitability. The big communication challenge in restaurant management is making sure you get your message across in a manner that everyone understands and can execute what you want done how you want it done.

Owners tend to fail to communicate what they want done and how they want it done. As a result they express their frustration often when their managers seem to not get their job done. Then owners start to believe the only way to get anything done is to do it themselves, resulting in highly paid babysitters as managers — people to watch the restaurant, not manage.

Managers have a completely different frustration. It’s their crazy-making owners who fly into the business creating a new list of things they want done, never explaining how they want it done and creating this list that can never be accomplished as fast as the owner would like. When the manager can’t execute on the owner’s expectations, the manager is told what they are doing wrong every day.

The solution is to have manager meetings.

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A manager meeting is scheduled on a weekly basis. It’s not a five-minute tirade over what didn’t get done at closing the night before. It’s a weekly, scheduled time, set aside to review goals, expectations and challenges and then brainstorm solutions.

Here are the 7 Steps to a Successful Manager Meeting
1. Plan properly and ahead of time
2. Make attendance mandatory, switching days for the meetings so the same person isn’t called in on a day off over and over
3. Collect info for the meeting and create an agenda in advance
4. Stay on track – follow the agenda and don’t let new topics take you off course
5. Facilitate and communicate – the owner or general manager should only be talking about 20% of the time and clear expectations must be laid out
6. Assign specific actions so progress can be reported at the next meeting
7. Take notes – assign someone to take notes and then distribute the notes to everyone

These blog posts cover this information more in detail:

• The Solution to Miscommunication in Restaurants
• How to Get Your Message Across to You Restaurant Management Team

To learn more ways to build a management team that is accountable, read our special report, Breaking Away from the Insanity: How to easily take control of your restaurant and make more money. Download it here.  Also, visit our YouTube channel for tips and webinars.