By Tony Conway

I'm no Harvard Business School grad, but in just ten years I have built a small special-events business from my own kitchen into a multimillion-dollar enterprise. The gradient has been steep, at times challenging, but I have certainly learned a thing or two about effective business practices along the way—from slicing avocados to managing a team of over 200 employees. Here are seven business strategies that have helped my company grow.

Refer to your mission statement. If an impending decision is leaving you stumped, refer to your mission statement. A mission statement embodies the spirit of your company, so referring to it can bring immediate clarity to otherwise difficult choices. Our mission states that we "promise to provide world-class cuisine, gracious service, and exquisite decor." If I refer to that statement when I'm at a crossroads, it acts as a compass, always setting me on the right path.

By Paul Suplee

Resources

acfchefs.org The official site of the American Culinary Federation. Certification guidelines can guide a kitchen manager to ideas on class topics.
chefspencil.com A consortium of chefs and their ideas, with recipes and articles dealing with many contemporary and classic dishes. Free sign-up.
ciaprochef.com The Culinary Institute of America's continuing education site, which offers classes and professional education. After you have completed courses, it is a natural leap to share this information with your staff.
gigachef.com An excellent professional chef networking site, with recipes, information on the business, training ideas, and an "Ask the Chef" function.

Deciding to train your staff formally in a structured, hands-on fashion can seem a daunting task for many chefs. Often we internalize, and sometimes even vocalize, such questions as, "Where would I find the time in my already overbooked schedule?" In-house training can contribute huge value to an operation and its leaders, since it can empower staff and often lighten the workload of the manager. But for many chefs this extra duty appears on the front end as an expenditure of precious time and money.

Building Leadership and Drive

The idea of an in-house culinary instructor brings forth some of the greatest traits in ourselves as leaders of kitchens. As Brad Barnes, CMC, CCA, AAC, and president of gigachef.com, states, "From the perspective of great leadership, you must position yourself as an expert and become the 'go-to' for training your employees." While chefs can claim the in-house culinary instructor title for themselves, the honors also can be bestowed upon sous chefs and qualified line employees. Not only will this help them grow and learn (we learn more as we teach), but it will give the staff a diverse educational platform.

By Richard Young

Restaurants face two new and unavoidable challenges: rising utility costs and the "greening" of foodservice. Fortunately, from an operations standpoint, these two issues are related, and tackling the energy and water bills rewards you with environmental brownie points. Its a win-win that's worth taking advantage of. Knowing where to start is the difficulty for most operators. The place to begin is with the simplest, most cost-effective actions - the no-brainers, the basics that are required of any restaurant that wants to call itself "green." Here are some examples.

Analyze your utility bills. A stuck valve on a water softener in the back room can hemorrhage 3,000 gallons of agua a day and go unnoticed for months, but it will be revealed by a bump in the water bill.

By Terri Melincoff

I was listening to an interview on the news the other day in which the owner of a Chrysler dealership was being interviewed. He said that he needed to sell 80 cars and service 1,200 per month just to break even. As reported in the New York Times, Daniel Boulud estimates the breakeven at DBGB Café and Bar at $4.5 million annually, adding, "It needs to fill each of its 140 dining seats twice on high-traffic nights (Thursday, Friday, and Saturday) and 1.25 times on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Anything in excess of those numbers—say 2.25 seatings on a Saturday night—is money in the bank." Knowing your break-even sales volume is an indispensable business tool—especially during an economic downturn.

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QSRmagazine.com – Building on the restaurant industry's continuing efforts to help victims of the earthquake in Haiti, the National Restaurant Association and National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation (NRAEF) announced that they have joined with Share Our Strength to organize Restaurants for Relief-Haiti to galvanize the restaurant industry's fundraising initiative. The program is an extension of the original Restaurants for Relief in 2005 that raised nearly $1 million from the nation's restaurants to aid recovery efforts in the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. "Restaurants are always among the first to respond to emergency situations, and we have seen how incredibly generous the restaurant industry is in times of crisis," says Dawn Sweeney, president and CEO of the National Restaurant Association and National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation. "Share Our Strength is one of our industry's most effective charitable organizations, and we are pleased to join their efforts. If you are already involved in relief efforts, you can still participate in Restaurants for Relief-Haiti to further help the hundreds of thousands of people affected by the earthquake. We encourage all the nation's nearly one million restaurants to join this effort." Original Source>>

QSRmagazine.com – Driven by improvements in both business performance and expectations for future business conditions, the National Restaurant Association's comprehensive index of restaurant activity rose to its highest level in 22 months in December. The Association's Restaurant Performance Index (RPI), a monthly composite index that tracks the health of and outlook for the U.S. restaurant industry, stood at 98.7 in December, up 0.9 percent from November and its strongest level in nearly two years. "The RPI's strong gain in December was the result of broad-based improvements among several index components," says Hudson Riehle, senior vice president of the Research and Knowledge Group for the National Restaurant Association. "Although restaurant operators continued to report a net decline in same-store sales and customer traffic, both registered their strongest performances since the summer of 2008." "Along with a solid improvement among the current situation indicators, restaurant operators are increasingly optimistic about industry growth in the months ahead," Riehle adds. "More than a third of restaurant operators expect to their sales to improve in six months, the highest level in more than two years." Original Source>>

NYTimes.com – Though it may seem counterintuitive at a time when many hotels around the country are having trouble filling their rooms, nearly 100 hotels are scheduled to open in major American cities this year. New York will have the most new hotels, 46, according to Smith Travel Research, a hotel research company in Hendersonville, Tenn., followed by Houston, with 30. New hotels are opening as well in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami and Washington. That does not include new hotels opening in the suburbs of these cities. So how can so many hotels be opening even though the economy and travel remain so slow? The answer, according to Mark Lomanno, president of Smith Travel Research, is that "hotel building cycles rarely mesh just right with economic cycles." Planning a new hotel can take two to four years, and construction an additional one to four years. Most of the hotels getting ready to open were on the drawing boards several years ago, when the economy was healthy, demand for rooms was strong and room rates were rising quickly.