Football’s Blitz on Online Ordering and Praising the Lard

Mobile-First Web Design for Restaurant Menus

I have been a patron of Eppes Essen, a legendary Jewish deli in Livington, N.J. since I was seven years old. So when the delicatessen owner came to us looking for a modern responsive website, one that matched the famed establishment’s reputation and top-notch quality food, my team couldn’t wait to start. And, as a New-Jersey web design company, we were even more excited to work with a local business.

We knew from our own experience how big Eppes Essen’s menu is—each time it takes us a solid 15 minutes to thumb through all the options—so we knew it would be a challenge to communicate all aspects online in a quick, efficient and easily digestible manner. 

In addition to the sheer size of the menu, we accounted for all item variations: Some items required measurements in ounces and pounds, which affected pricing, while others required one or more call-out areas highlighting specials. This could be done through hard coding, using Photoshop, or slapping up the menu as a PDF file, but this lacks strategy and the ability to easily update menu items and pricing. The more challenging, but dynamic approach was to design the backend interface to work harmoniously with these variations so they could be added and removed as needed.  

Starving for Web Design Solutions

In addition to making the website easy to update for the backend user, we also made it super simple for the public, Eppes’ clients, to find exactly what they have a hankering for in no time. We designed three options for the user to navigate the menu—for both casual perusing and deliberate on-the-hunt-for-your-craving search: traditional scrolling, using the search bar, and selecting from the flyout menu on the left-hand side. 

With such an expansive menu, we helped eliminate confusion and expedite browsing by creating a powerful search bar.

When users select items from the flyout menu, they can jump rapidly from section to section.

 Custom Imagery and Videography

Finally, we’re avid believers in custom video and imagery for websites.  It has the ability to captivate your audience. When you open with a big, gorgeous, well-produced video, it pulls the user in with emotional content and increases click-throughs to your products, or in Eppes’ case, its food. Because humans are highly visual, video also helps us retain what we see. It resonates with the audience and we’re able to retain what we saw much better and longer than if we read it.

Custom photography also plays a big hand in digital marketing and web design. Custom images help to represent your brand accurately. Have you ever went on a website, let’s say for ziplining in the Catskills, and you book it based on how beautiful it looks in photos? Then you get there and realize the photos haven’t been updated in 10 years, the forest canopies are no longer lush and green and the equipment is ancient? Or, you Google around for ziplining in upstate New York and you come across a website that has images of the activity, but the mountains in the background are clearly from the West Coast? In both scenarios, you feel mislead. You lose trust and respect for the company.

Current, high-quality custom photography showcasing what you offer is authentic and instills trust in your brand. That’s what we did for Eppes Essen. We recently expanded our capabilities to include in-house photography and videography to go hand-in-hand with our digital marketing strategy. We conducted a full-day food photography and video shoot of all its best-sellers, and then populated its new site with the images.

Designing Eppes Essen’s website with a clean, simple menu navigation and creating content for the restaurant site was certainly a passion project for all of us. We hope guests feel the site is an appetizing reflection of the restaurant experience.

Lform Design, located at 42 Park St. in Montclair, N.J.,  can be reached at (973) 239-9002. Full disclosure: Lform is also the design team responsible for Modern Restaurant Management. 

Mobile-First Web Design for Restaurant Menus posted first on happyhourspecialsyum.blogspot.com

Straws for a Cause, POS Blueprint and ‘Bullish’ Design

The Call Was Coming From Inside The POS: A Starter’s Guide to Data-Driven Restaurant Loss Prevention

Whether you are the sole operator or you manage thousands of stores, the stresses you face in the restaurant industry won’t disappear with the click of a button, but there are some easy ways to calm down the craziness by leveraging your POS data and dipping your toes into loss prevention.

Because loss prevention is still a (somewhat) new practice across the restaurant world, many owners and operators still focus on it as an offshoot of their internal safety or risk management practices. And while a focus on safety & risk is essential to your business, it’s also worth knowing that loss prevention isn’t about people slipping on a kitchen floor nor is it just about employees stealing. Restaurant loss prevention is about protecting your already thin margins by enacting policies that “keep an eye on things”…but in a way that doesn’t feel like Big Brother is watching.

When I talk with restaurant operators who are starting to dabble in loss prevention, I always recommend starting with your data first – let the numbers tell the story. Below are three initiatives I recommend you tackle first when rolling out or refining a loss prevention strategy.

Monitor for Employee Fraud or Theft

Rather than manually reviewing check data and video to identify fraud at your restaurant, you can use existing transcational data to define an “unacceptable” level of activity for each internal fraudster trying to grift your business (ex. 3 item transfers in a shift per employee). Once you define your tolerance for theft, you now have a benchmark when reviewing your nightly/weekly transaction reports. The best outcome with benchmarking is finding employees who may seem to be engaging in suspicious activity, but in reality, the issue can be resolved through additional training. Contrary to popular belief, the best loss prevention plans actually work to avoid employee turnover.

Refine Cash Handling Procedures

Well-defined cash handling procedures reduces the risk of cash loss via employee theft or error. If you lack a well-documented plan, it makes it nearly impossible to track and identify cash handling issues. Poor cash handling procedures is usually a sign of poor overall operations, and knowing how your cash is being tracked is a vital component to being a restaurant operator.

Start with these three tactics to get a cash handling plan in place.

1. Place drop boxes close to the register, and perform periodic cash drops to limit the register fund to the cash that is only needed for a specific shift.
2. Assign a trusted on-duty manager to make cash deposits, but limit the number of individuals authorized to handle cash.
3. Separate cash management duties (i.e. collecting cash, recording receipts and reviewing checks) to create a system of accountability.

Once your restaurant’s cash handling plan is in place, this is when you can begin to use your POS data to develop reports that include voids, refunds, discounts, and any other metric that could be an indicator of how a cash shortage (or surplus) occurred.

Use In-Restaurant Video as Confirmation – Not Investigation

Video can be a powerful tool within a restaurant loss prevention strategy, but it should not be used as the primary method for identifying loss. Restaurant video analysis can be a crutch because you are starting at the source.

Rather than starting with video and searching for the problem, restaurant management should avoid false positives by letting your data tell you when a particular store, employee, or item is outside the norm. Once you have the numbers that back up your assumptions, drill down into the video details to make your entire investigation process more efficient.

Read more about the nine tips to an efficient restaurant loss prevention program

The Call Was Coming From Inside The POS: A Starter’s Guide to Data-Driven Restaurant Loss Prevention posted first on happyhourspecialsyum.blogspot.com

MRM News: The Appetite for Franchising in the Middle East

Five years after opening in New York City’s East Village, Mighty Quinn’s Barbeque is bringing their authentic barbeque fast casual to Dubai this October.

Founded by Pit Master and former rock band drummer Hugh Mangum, half-brother Micha Magid and Micha’s brother-in-law Christos Gourmos, they have opened seven additional restaurants in Manhattan, New Jersey, Westchester, Brooklyn and Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, and two international licensing deals in Taiwan and The Philippines.  

Mighty Quinn’s enters a new international market in Dubai with two new locations at the Dubai Mall and THE BEACH.  Additional new locations include Midtown Manhattan, Paramus, NJ in December, and Staten Island in March of 2018.

In this MRM News clip, co-owner Micha Magid discusses Middle East franchising. 

MRM News: The Appetite for Franchising in the Middle East posted first on happyhourspecialsyum.blogspot.com

Employee Retention: Four Ways to Keep Your Best Team Members

Turnover among hourly workers is high.  According to Forbes, the industry average of turnover for hourly workers is 107 percent.  That means, on average, every hourly job turns once a year – and then some. The Center for American Progress, a prominent think tank, found that replacing workers making under $30,000 per year costs 16 percent of their annual salary— that’s up to $4,800 for each worker who leaves.

But just as your business isn’t average in the products you make and the service you provide, it doesn’t have to be average with regard to employee retention. Here are our top strategies to improve employee retention:

Start During the Hiring Process

The hiring process is when you should be looking not just for candidates who can do the job well, but who will stick around for a long time.  Make sure you’re aware of exactly what a successful employee will do – what are the job duties they will be expected to perform, what are the behaviors that are required to be effective at completing the tasks, and what are the minimum requirements an applicant must have to even be taken into consideration for the role.

A heuristic that some use in the hiring process is to weed out candidates who have short stints on their resume.  It makes sense to avoid people who haven’t lasted long in their previous job if you’re looking for someone to last long in your job, right? However, if a candidate looks like a good fit overall, even though a few of their experiences were rather short, give them a second look.  Make sure you have a question or two during the interview to determine why they left those jobs so quickly. It’s entirely possible that they were laid off or had to take care of a sick family member. The interview is a great time to determine someone’s character and whether their background and attitude will mesh well with your team.

Get Scheduling Right

If an employee seems to always get scheduled when they’ve said they aren’t free, your scheduling process clearly needs an overhaul. Your employees are the heartbeat of your business, interacting with customers and making sales that keep the doors open. You need their hard work each day and that means matching up your business needs as closely as possible with the schedule they want.

Introducing technology into the mix takes the scheduling process from scribbled Post-Its on a cluttered calendar to something that everyone can read clearly. Scheduling software brings the scheduling process into the 21st century, allowing you to collect availability, automate shift alerts, and duplicate schedules from templates—all from a computer or mobile device. That way, your employees will know when they’re working and have a schedule that better meets their needs.

Honor Time-Off Requests

Everyone, you included, needs a break every now and then.  And employees have a lot of reasons to request time off: a vacation, a sick family member, childcare in the summertime. As a good manager, you want to grant your employees the time-off requests they’re asking for. But you also need to make sure you’re adequately staffed. If the pendulum swings too far in one direction and you don’t grant time-off requests to keep the business fully staffed, you might have a disgruntled employee. If the pendulum swings too far in the other direction and you grant time-off too liberally, you might have an understaffed business. 

This can all be avoided if you improve your time-off request process. Having a deadline in place, for example at least two weeks’ notice, will keep your business running smoothly. And have employees submit time off requests digitally so you don’t miss a request. There will always be last-minute calls due to illness or emergencies, but managing the planned days off will set you up for success.

Communicate

As with any interpersonal relationship in your life, communication comes first. Your employees want to know what’s going on with the business, as it relates to them. When you share more with your employees, they will be much more likely to stick around. Make sure they feel comfortable making suggestions for improving sales and efficiency, just as you give them pointers on how to improve their performance. Communication needs to flow in both directions.

These are just a few ways to improve employee retention, but they are a good start to make sure that you invest your time and resources in model employees.

Employee Retention: Four Ways to Keep Your Best Team Members posted first on happyhourspecialsyum.blogspot.com

Serving Others: Restaurants Respond to Hurricane Harvey