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The Recession Means That Your Need To Open Up Your Café Or Restaurant On A Sunday?

Written by: Lee Lister

Article Overview: You are working hard to beat the recession, but you are going to have to open up on a Sunday in order to make any profit and keep your staff employed. So how do you go about capitalising on this?

The Recession Means That Your Need To Open Up Your Café Or Restaurant On A Sunday?

You are working hard to beat the recession, but you are going to have to open up on a Sunday in order to make any profit and keep your staff employed. So how do you go about capitalising on this?

Here is a suggested plan of attack!

1) Check what the extra costs of opening on Sundays are and decide what you have to take to break even.

2) Ensure that this break even amount is reasonable and achievable. Do you think that you can motivate yourself and your staff to achieve this amount?

3) First thing to do is tell your existing customers so that they have an opportunity to visit more often.

4) Find out if there are other markets that have opened up on the new day. Church goers, Shoppers and families that can only be together on a Sunday seem to be an obvious market.

5) Investigate if there are any groups of clubs that might like to meet on a Sunday, using your café as their meeting place.

6) Can you encourage sports clubs to visit after training or are you lucky enough to live near a sports centre so that you can capture sports fans before or after the even?

To meet your new markets, I would suggest that you set up some new products. Here are a few ideas:

1) How about having a family day? Set up your café to supply a family Sunday meal. You could have the great Sunday Tea, consisting of tea, sodas, sandwiches and cakes as a set price for 3,4 or 5. You could even offer the traditional British Sunday Dinner or roast and vegetables. How about an “eat all you can” buffet. Try and make it special to a Sunday.

2) You could set up Sunday specials to encourage new customers as well as existing customers to visit.

3) You could set up a loyalty card and tell your existing customers that they will get discounts on future drinks for every Sunday meal they have.

4) You could set up special events on Sunday – such as book clubs, entertainment, children stories etc.

5) Set up healthy drinks and eats to attract the Sunday sports person.

To summarise, you need to make Sunday opening that little bit special, tell your existing customers and seek out new customers from Sunday only markets.

Good Luck!

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Consult your customers before you change your procedures.... - Not sure where this topic should go, but... I just finished reading a rather funny series of posts on MySpace. I belong to a group called WritersCafe. This group also has a webpage, where people post their stories and poems for other people to critique. Apparently, today, the Writers Cafe website has undergone a complete makeover...and its users were taken completely by surprise - apparently no one in charge at Writers Cafe bothered to tell anyone that the format would be changing, or asked for any input on what the changes should be. So there's over 2 pages of complaints on the Writers Cafe group message board, with people saying they can't log in, they dont' like the new design (it looks too "girly" - whatever the heck that means!), and other complaints. And while this only happened today, I have seen other instances of this. Every once in a while yahoo.mail or google groups implements a change in design - and it is never as good as it used to be. Then of course there's the IMDB (internet movie database) which also recently changed its design without telling anyone first or solicting input - and the new design stinks. Fortunately there's a button so you can use the old design, which is what I do... But in all these experiences, the main point of irritation is that no one in "charge" ever asks the people who use their site, if they want changes made and what they should be. It's like they've got all these programmers on staff and have to justify their salaries, so they have them work up "improvements" - but these are techheads who probably don't use the site, so they just do what they like, rather than what users like. The fact that it happens continually, across various businesses, is a rather disturbing trend.
Re: What I'm reading this weekend - Sept 10, 2010 - Hi Evan, I have been reading a few of those blog posts and find them very thought provoking. I especially liked the ‘What I believe about…. Work’ post by Perry Marshall and can relate to that very much. In the ‘old days’ whenever they were when we had no gadgets and worked five or six days a week and took Sunday off whether we waned to or not, it was easier to switch off at least for one day of the week. As Internet Marketers we are never more than a few metres away from the tools of our trade and they are all telling us to come back and ‘switch me on’, we have work to do. As I type this it is Sunday morning and I should take Perry’s advice on board and take at least one day off completely to recharge the batteries. regards, Mal.
Re: Moderators on vacation - Hi Everyone, I am back, for now, I see you were busy. The next holiday starts on Sunday Sep 27-28 and then the next one on Oct 4th. I have every day already planed.
Re: High price of entertainment - [quote="TheAnonymousMan":dadh8m1p]Kevin, I went to a Justin Timberlake concert recently where the bottled water was selling for $4 a bottle! I'm talking about the average 600ml bottle that sells for about $1.20 in the supermarket, now that's a rip off but people were buying it because they needed water.[/quote:dadh8m1p] Hi TheAnonymousMan, Can I ask how much you paid for the concert tickets? And more importantly, was the show worth the price? At the Tennis US Open, I had to pay $3.25 for a 500ml bottled water, $8.00 for a "travel size" Hawaiian Tropic bottle of sunscreen, and $13.00 for a Carnegie Deli pastrami sandwich, $4.25 for fries and $2.77 for a Sharpie pen (for autographs), etc... And to make things worse, they don't allow you to carry a backpack for security reasons, so it's very inconvenient to bring your own things to the event (keep in mind I was at the US Open for 7 hours). I mean who wants to carry around 10 lbs worth of stuff (if I were to bring my own necessities like food/water/sunscreen/etc. and have to carry a bunch of souvenirs) in a plastic transparent bag for the whole day?! It's an obvious scam for more profit.
Re: New SEO Tool from WordStream - Looks like an interesting tool to use Evan. I had an email from Jonathan Ledger on Sunday which mentions a new SEO toll that he will be bringing out within the next week or two which also looks quite good, am waiting to see what that one is like. MichelleJ


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