12 Creative Ways Restaurant & Pubs are Hacking COVID-19

By Carola Richter, Contributor

Natural calamities and pandemics are inevitable. When they strike, the blow can be very devastating to everybody, and especially to the business community. COVID-19 has been a nightmare right from its onset, causing most businesses to stagger and others to close down – restaurants included.

During the period of its full wrath, more than 16 million hospitality workers have experienced the greatest nightmare of their lifetimes. People have been scared to lose their jobs. Some are worried about rent and bills, and of course, entrepreneurs are worried about the survival of their businesses.

Restaurant, hospitality and travel sectors have had their share of the wrath, but as they say, where there is will there is a way. This is how restaurants and pubs have escaped the wrath of the pandemic and found ways to survive and sometimes thrive.

Outlined below are some useful tips they applied and which you will also find useful as a restaurant owner.

Your Restaurant Managerial Team

As a restaurant manager, owner, or leader, you need to understand that the business condition will change. It is okay to feel stressed and anxious about the future, but do not let that affect your running of the business (easier said than done, we know). Remember all your subordinate staff members are looking up to you for inspiration. Here’s what you should do to stay on course:

Trust your entrepreneurial instincts. The pandemic caught the whole world by surprise, and therefore that should not throw you off the balance. Instead of coiling at the corner of your office, reach out to other people. Use virtual hangouts to connect with other entrepreneurs running hospitality businesses like you and inquire from them how they are managing.

Set health/safety protocols. Designate various points for handwashing, temperature checking, and reporting symptoms. You may be required to appoint one employee to be in charge of these protocols to ensure it is not breached.

You may also be required to set aside a room where every employee or customer suspected to have the symptoms will be taken for further investigation. Also be sure to regularly sanitize your restaurant using CDC guidelines.

Communicate with your staff. Find the best way to request any employees to stay at home if they show any symptoms of contracting the virus. Encourage them to get tested, quarantine themselves for the two-week holiday, and find medical advice. In case an employee shows flu-like symptoms at work, send him or her home.

Also be sure to show your staff empathy as they are also going through this troubling period are also stressed and anxious.

Your Restaurant’s Operations

One of the three main objectives of starting a business is to make profits. With forced closures of services and a lot of social distancing requirements from the department of public health, realizing huge profits may be hard. Such strict measures may result in low consumer confidence. However, one should do all that it takes to keep guests ordering from your eatery.

Guarantee safety to your customers. Make use of all your communication channels -- including your website, email list and social media pages -- to inform your guests that you are aware of how serious the matter is. Instill confidence in them by assuring them that you have laid down proper procedures to ensure they are safe when they visit to dine in or order curbside pickup or delivery.. 

See to it that you have fulfilled all that you have promised them online. Add more tables and seats outside where it’s safer to dine, and make sure they are well spread. Insist on the need of washing hands and sanitizing and mask-wearing when they’re not actively eating or drinking. You should also consider having hand sanitizing stations at your front door and in strategic spots in your restaurant.

Give all guests the VIP treatment. Let all the guests who come visit you leave with an experience they have never found elsewhere. This will make them want to come back. Not only that, such experiences will make them spread the word and increase your online ratings and reviews.

Try to make the most of the guests who trickle. This is a great opportunity to make your guest feel like VIPs since most people are preferring to eat or drink at home. It is prudent to make the most from them whenever they show up. You can achieve that by upselling drinks and desserts.

Curbside delivery services. Most customers are gripped by fear that makes them want to remain indoors. They only come out for a important reason. However, given that they must eat whether they come out or remain indoors, an opportunity presents itself for you to grab. Start delivering food to their doorsteps, designated drop off points, or better off curbside delivery.

Alternatively, you may pop the food out to their cars should they drive to pick it. Create awareness all over your social media accounts that you are offering delivery services while taking serious precautions not to contaminate anything in the delivery process.

Sell gift vouchers. Another way to keep money coming in is to introduce gift vouchers for subsequent visits. Customers who successfully gain such vouchers will not only supply you with the cash you need at the moment, but they will spread the word and might become loyal customers.

Also look for opportunities to connect and cooperate with other local or related businesses to create combined offers. For example, team up local bookstores, florists, breweries, or dating or eSports sites, and create common deals/offers that can bring business to all parties.

Reducing Your Restaurant’s Costs

Making great sales and earning profits sounds good to the ears. On the other hand, one should also endeavor to reduce the cost of operation to ensure that the business will keep running smoothly even with the little cash flowing in. Many hospitality businesses have been able to achieve that through various ways, such as reducing the number of business hours to lower variable costs. Other ways of maintaining costs at the minimum include the following:

Reduce the list of menu items. The best way to go about this is to remove from the list items that have a small profit margin. Secondly, do away for some time with the highly perishable products. Other things you can consider subtracting from the list are the ready-made items that you buy from outside. However, if you can produce them on-site, you can retain them depending on their profit margin.

Revise credit terms. Maintaining a good business relationship with your supplier is very vital. During difficult times such as this, you should request your suppliers to review or extend credit terms.

There are other ways of reducing costs. Unfortunately, some of those ways do not apply to all businesses, such include claiming any benefits that are being offered by the state government.

Making Use of Idle Hours

Restaurant business, unlike other types of businesses, is largely hands-on. This means that despite the number of guests decreasing to zero or almost zero, you cannot operate it from home. This also means you and your staff will likely have more hours to yourself, which can be spent on doing things that have remained for long on your to-do list.

Among them is building and promoting your brand on social media. Come up with innovative ways of promoting your restaurant, while adding value to your social media followership.

Examples of such things include question and answer sessions to handle your customers’ queries and recording Facebook Live videos as you cook. Other ways of utilizing time may include the following:

Design innovating new recipes: Encourage your team to come up with new recipes that will be offered when things normalize. Besides, you may assign them the task of researching your competitors. They can also take this opportunity and take online courses related to their career.

Team building & staff training. How about launching management and staff training? This is ample time to train junior staff as they look forward to joining the management team. A good way to inspire them is by organizing forums and outdoor training sessions. Secondly, prepare online cooking tutorials for aspiring chefs.

The virus is here with us for some time, and eventually, people and businesses will roll back to whatever the new normal will be. The restaurants will reopen and people will go out. Most definitely, they would want to go on dinner dates or lunch dates with friends, family, or colleagues.

Online tutorials are one of the most effective ways of keeping your team busy, while also assisting to introduce future restaurant workers into their career.

Update records. Last but very important, spend some of this free time updating your systems. Check whether costs, employee records, tax records, stocks, and any other records are up to date.

Conclusion

The impact of the coronavirus has been felt across the globe. It has been a rough time for many businesses, and especially those in the hospitality sector. Yet, there are several positive outcomes one can count from the pandemic. So far, the pandemic has pushed management and the entire team of restaurant workers to come up with creative ways of survival.

These twelve creative ways will keep your restaurant and pubs afloat by continuing to offer services to your customers. Besides, they will also enhance dinner loyalty towards strengthening relationships when the pandemic is over.

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About the Author
Carola Richter is a professional esports journalist who reviews esports events and trends in the industry. Recently, she's decided to create the blog csgo-bets where she could share her passion with the readers interested in the topic.

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