Operating a multi-location restaurant? You know first-hand the benefits that come with running more than one restaurant venue. It can increase profits, boost brand visibility, and generally be good for business. 💸💸💸
But alongside the benefits, there are challenges of operating multiple venues — challenges that can strain even the most seasoned managers. Inconsistent processes, communication hurdles, and maintaining food and service quality are just a few examples.
Let’s walk through some of these challenges (and a few others) in more detail, as well as how to overcome these hurdles.
1. Maintaining consistency across multi-location restaurants
Ensuring that all locations uphold the same quality and service standards is crucial for upholding your brand reputation. And why is your brand reputation important?
Because it builds trust with customers. They know what to expect in terms of service, decor, atmosphere, and food quality. Meeting these expectations creates a sense of reliability, which encourages repeat business.
Not to mention, 58% of adults say that brand reputation is a major factor when making purchasing decisions.
But implementing the same processes (while allowing for local nuances) can be challenging. You’re not handling everything under one roof, so it’s tricky to ensure that each location follows the same processes and provides the same quality of food.
If you operate a central production unit (CPU), it’s easier to ensure consistency across locations. The same staff prepares all the food from your central kitchen, meaning that each location serves the same food items.
However, you still can’t control certain aspects of the customer experience, like the speed and consistency of service at each location.
How Nory can help
Nory’s AI-powered performance management features can track and compare quality metrics across all your locations. For example, keep tabs on things like labour productivity, customer service, and sales.
If things aren’t going to plan at one of your locations, you can step in to ensure consistency and service standards. 💪
2. Ensuring clear communication across multi-location restaurants
Having a clear and timely flow of information is essential to multi-site operations. Here’s why:
- To enable efficient communication between on-site teams. The better communication on-site teams have, the more efficient they can operate on a daily basis. Think about operational processes as an example. If you make a change to an operational process, you need to communicate this to your team on the ground. If you don’t communicate it effectively, staff may not implement the new process. This can cause inconsistency which can impact operations, profitability, and the customer experience.
- To ensure your central kitchen can communicate with individual locations. Clear communication allows the central kitchen to provide timely deliveries, implement menu changes, and address special requests from individual locations. It also enables efficient cost control by reducing the amount spent on unnecessary ingredients, ensuring that inventory orders meet customer demand for each location.
But coordinating teams and communications across different locations isn’t always easy. As well as operating in different locations, there are a lot of roadblocks to overcome — like staff working various shifts and potentially in conflicting time zones. It’s tricky to ensure communication is effective and efficient.
How Nory can help
With the right technology in place, teams can easily communicate internally, as well as keep in touch with the central kitchen.
Take a look at Nory as an example. Our restaurant operating system centralises all the key operational information in one location. Teams can keep up to date with the latest information — like inventory orders, stock levels, and labour schedules — on the same platform.
Plus, they can send messages and share updates in the system. This means everyone’s on the same page, no matter where they’re working.
3. Monitoring performance across multi-location restaurants
Tracking and comparing performance metrics across multiple sites is vital for multi-location success. It helps you:
- Identify underperforming locations. Tracking performance at an on-site level helps you pinpoint which locations need improvements. Without this granular insight, you’ll struggle to find which locations are most profitable, and which are causing your profits to take a hit.
- Implementing improvement strategies. When you can pinpoint which locations are underperforming, you can also drill down to find out the reasons behind it. Then, you can put strategies in place to increase revenue and boost profits. For example, if one location isn’t as profitable because there aren’t enough customers coming through the door during the day, you can update your opening hours to save costs and boost profits.
So what’s the problem with tracking metrics when operating multi-site locations?
It’s hard to keep tabs on performance across different venues. You’re trying to track sales and revenue from different restaurants, with different goals and metrics. It’s tricky to manage.
Fortunately, using the right technology can help.
How Nory can help
With our real-time analytics dashboard, Nory provides instant performance insights for all of your locations. You can quickly identify issues and facilitate data-driven decisions at an on-site level, ensuring all your locations are as efficient and profitable as possible.
Nory success story 🥳 See how Masa achieves 96% sales forecasting accuracy in both of its locations and gained invaluable insights into its financial landscape to enable more informed decision-making.
“Constantly being able to see what your sales are, what your cost of labour is — and trusting that is really valuable.” – Shane Gleeson, owner and founder at Masa.
4. Managing inventory across multi-location restaurants
Inventory management is essential to the success of any restaurant. It ensures optimal spending on ingredients, which keeps costs low, increases gross profit margins, and reduces food waste in the process.
But managing inventory across different locations isn’t always easy.
Coordinating supplies and managing stock levels is one of the biggest challenges. Keeping track of stock levels to ensure that each restaurant location receives the right amount of food to meet customer demand. 🤯 It’s a lot.
And if you can’t track stock levels effectively? You risk:
- Overstocking locations, which can reduce profits, or;
- Not having enough food to serve customers, which can impact the customer experience.
How Nory can help
Nory’s inventory management system tracks and manages inventory across all your restaurant locations. Our AI features analyse historical sales and external elements (like the weather or local events) to accurately predict how much inventory you need in each location.
The results? You spend less time trying to manage inventory for each restaurant, and less money on ingredients that you’ll never use.
Nory success story 🥳 Find out how CUPP improved inventory management to reduce food waste by 60% (from 3-5% to 0.5-2%) across the business since working with Nory.
By monitoring inventory usage at both a CPU and site level, CUPP can easily spot how to make improvements. Whether that’s reducing the amount of ingredients sent to the CPU, or liaising with individual franchises to find out why waste levels are higher than predicted.
“Nory CPU has streamlined how our franchisees and stores order to us and how we get information back to them. If things are out of stock or if we need to update something, it’s quick and easy to do it.”
Paul Tanner, Managing Director at CUPP
5. Scheduling labour across multi-location restaurants
Scheduling staff efficiently across multiple venues is a bit of a minefield. You have to consider employee availability, skill sets, preferences, and so on. And when each location has different footfalls and peak times, it’s even harder to optimise labour schedules.
Adhering to different local labour laws is another hurdle for multi-site restaurants. For example, if you operate restaurants in the UK and Spain, you have different regulations to follow. Look at holiday allowances as an example:
- In the UK, full-time employees must receive at least 28 days of paid annual leave.
- In Spain, employees receive 30 days of paid annual leave.
How Nory can help
Use Nory to create demand-based schedules across all your restaurant locations.
Our AI-powered system can predict customer demand to ensure each venue has enough staff to provide customers with a seamless dining experience. Plus, it prevents overstaffing during quiet times which ensures your profit margins stay healthy.
Using a centralised system makes it easier to track local labour laws, ensuring you comply with regulations across all your restaurant venues. It also helps you deliver consistent training across all locations, ensuring all staff have access to necessary resources and support
Nory success story 🥳 See how Nory helped Rocksalt reduce labour costs by 14%. With access to real-time insights, Rocksalt can accurately demand across venues to maintain optimal staffing levels at each location.
As a result, they’ve been able to forecast sales within 3% accuracy and create optimal schedules that meet customer demand.
6. Creating a company culture across multi-location restaurants
Fostering a unified company culture across geographically dispersed teams isn’t as easy as it sounds.
Oh, wait — it doesn’t sound easy. 🥴
When teams aren’t in the same location, it’s difficult to maintain the consistency and cultural practices that create a company culture.
But having a solid company culture is really important for restaurant success. Studies show that it can increase employee engagement, improve the customer experience, and boost retention — which is especially important given the current labour shortages.
How Nory can help
Use a centralised platform like Nory to connect employees from each restaurant location. Share best practices, success stories, and foster a community that represents your company culture.
Research also shows that flexible work arrangements are seen by employees as an effort to create a positive work culture. With Nory, employees have this flexibility! They can easily swap shifts and make schedule requests based on their availability.
7. Scaling successfully
As your business grows, you need solid processes and systems in place that can grow with you. For a multi-location restaurant, this can be hard to establish.
Think about it. You’re already trying to manage operations across different locations. Throw some new ones into the mix? It’s a recipe for disaster.
Not to mention, you must ensure food and service quality isn’t compromised with growth. This can impact business success, making new locations less profitable.
How Nory can help
Nory’s scalable AI-powered operating system is designed for multi-location businesses. As your business grows and you open more locations, our system will be there to support your entire operation. Here’s how:
- Centralise food costs and inventory management, making it easy to set targets, track food usage, and identify how to increase profitability at all of your locations.
- Manage inventory at scale to optimise production schedules across different locations for maximum efficiency.
- Use AI-demand forecasting to predict future inventory needs and keep profits healthy, ensuring all locations can meet customer demand.
Nory success story 🥳 Find out how Griolladh grew 3x into a successful franchise with Nory. Our real-time visibility was instrumental as Griolladh grew, enabling them to effectively forecast sales, manage costs, and adapt strategies in real-time.
“Nory has been with us every step of the way. It’s been incredibly helpful to the business, and has played a pivotal role in the successful franchising of Griolladh.” – Jacob Long, Co-founder.
Work better across multi-location restaurants with Nory
Operating multi-location restaurants has a lot of benefits. It increases your income, helps you reach a wider customer base, and builds your brand reputation.
But it isn’t easy. There are hurdles you’ll undoubtedly face along the way. But as long as you’re prepared for these challenges, you can take them in your stride and keep your bottom line healthy.
And the best way to prepare for these challenges? Using a real-time, AI-powered operating system like Nory. 👋
FAQs about multi-location restaurants
What is it called when a restaurant has multiple locations?
When a restaurant has multiple locations, it is typically referred to as a “multi-location” or “multi-site” restaurant. These are often part of a franchise, where the same brand operates in different venues offering similar menus and experiences to customers.
How do you operate multiple restaurants?
One of the fundamental aspects of operating multiple restaurants involves standardising processes. With clear and effective processes, it’s easier to handle all restaurant operations.
Implementing effective communication channels is another valuable element, ensuring locations can communicate with each other and that the central kitchen has regular contact with each venue.
How does technology enhance multi-location restaurant operations?
There’s a lot of ways technology enhances multi-location restaurant operations:
- Centralising management tasks such as inventory control, labour scheduling, and performance tracking
- Enabling real-time data analysis
- Improving communication between locations
- Ensuring the consistent application of processes and standards across locations
