Operations
How Restaurants Can Use Slow Season to Upgrade Operations
Beat the holiday hangover by setting your restaurant up for success.
For smart restaurants, the period after the holidays are over — the “slow season” of the restaurant calendar — is the perfect time to set up for long-term success. Rather than succumb to the holiday hangover, restaurants should use the months of January and February to reassess their operations, make necessary improvements and adjustments, and even launch new revenue channels.
President John F. Kennedy said it best: “The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.” For restaurants, this means tuning up operations in January and February. It’s a great way to go from seeing the dead of winter as a slowdown to an opportunity to set up for even more business. Here are a few things you can do during this time of the year.
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Update your digital properties
The principle for making slow season productive is simple: Aim to accomplish as much as possible that you don’t have time for during the rest of the year.
Start by making sure your digital stack is being put to good use. If your restaurant is covered wall-to-wall in holiday rainbow lights, now’s when you’re taking them down! Similarly, if your website pops up notifications promoting now-outdated holiday specials, now’s the time to remove them! Comb through your menu and your online ordering flow, ensuring everything is up to date. Online ordering and catering are powerful revenue drivers during the slow months, with sporting events and big winter holidays providing important gatherings observed by corporate clients and private diners alike.
If there’s a website refresh you’ve had in mind for a long time, get that project started. Now’s also the time to launch any new branding you’ve developed, and to do an audit of which ordering channels you do and don’t need.
This is also a good time to take a look at your social media presence. If you like what you see — if your accounts vibrantly reflect your restaurant’s brand — consider capturing photos and videos you can publish later on in the year. If your social media presence is in need of a larger overhaul, reach out to a strategist or start developing your own plan now. It might be the best chance you get to do high-level brand thinking.
Read more: Social media keys to success for restaurants
Market your winter events
In our experience, most restaurants regard digital marketing as a type of work they ought to do — maybe even need to do — but don’t have time to begin. Slow season, then, is the perfect time to start: launch promotions, draft marketing copy, set up email cadences.
A great way to start these practices is to use them to promote slow season events. The Super Bowl, Valentine’s Day, birthdays, baby showers — all of these can be made into successful seasonal moments with restaurant marketing.
Read more: 10 Restaurant Marketing Tactics to Try in 2024
For example: if you’re a restaurant that has been meaning to set up an email marketing campaign, use the slow few weeks after New Year’s to conceptualize a promotion for Valentine’s Day. Then draft an email or two promoting this event and schedule them to be sent out to the customers in your database.
If your catering business is taking a breather after the holidays, put together a package for the Super Bowl, which takes place the first week of February. Add pop-ups to your website and posts to your social media page to promote it.
Read more: Why women’s sports is a great slow-season attraction for bars
Most importantly, slow season is a time to try new things. If you think you’ll be full for Valentine’s Day without promotions, see if you can put together a package for mid-February’s Presidents Day, when many families have off from work and school.
Using slow season events to dial in your marketing practices and promotions will set you up to maximize your business for the lucrative spring events: Mother’s Day, graduation season, baby & wedding showers, and more.
Read more: 38 Restaurant Event Ideas to Drive Revenue
Evaluate your staff, hiring, and retention
Perhaps the most important thing you can take a moment to evaluate is the people you have working for you. The holidays are wildly busy for restaurant workers, and you may have even added seasonal staff that you are now without. In the trough time of the calendar, pause and evaluate who you have left — and who else you’ll need, and how you plan on hiring them.
Here’s an example of an ambitious slow-season people management project: draft an anonymous employee survey that asks your people to share how they feel and gauge how happy they are in their work. No matter how close you think you are with your people, it always helps to hear from them directly.
Try to understand what employee benefits they want; you can even take this a step further by gaming out the operational impact of multiple different tiers of employee benefits. (For example, if you wanted to offer two weeks of paid vacation, how would that work? How much would health insurance cost? Would other kinds of perks be actually used or not?) You don’t have to commit to anything, but later on in the year, you’ll be glad you gave it some thought now.
Performance reviews are a natural project for this time of year. Assess your employees on how they’ve done and invite them into conversations that are honest about what they want and how you can help them get there. Purpose-driven reflections like these are what other industries use to engage their employees, and increasingly, this type of practice is making its way into restaurants.
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These are just some of the projects a restaurant can do to use the time between busy periods productively. You could also use the slowed pace of business to do things like strategize expansion, reevaluate or renegotiate your lease, and myriad other things you’ll very rarely have time to think about later on.
Most of all, use the slow season to get your restaurant ready to do even more business later in the year. Nothing’s “over” just because the holiday season has ended; you’ll still need your catering system for business in the spring & summer, you’ll still use the people you’ve recently hired, you might make a promotion you tried permanent.
Keep your eyes down the road, think about what’s working and what needs a change, and don’t waste this period of reflection. It will not last very long.
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