Unique Serving Platter

As a restaurant owner, you must give value to keep current customers and gain new ones. Competition in the restaurant business is stiff. Learn how you can profit from a new menu design. A good menu design can boost sales by ten to twenty percent in one month! Assess your customer base. Are you in tune with their lifestyle and what attracts them to visit your restaurant? Restaurant dining is theater, after all, and menu design is an important aspect of the diners’ experience.

Take a critical look at your current menu design. Perhaps you’ve felt comfortable with it, but the design is dated. Give it a face lift with a new menu design. Monitor food trends to keep your menu “fresh”. For example, fatty foods are out, heart healthy is in, “energy” drinks are popular and juice smoothies are healthy and appealing across age markets. Target your market and consider changes to your menu that will bring new customers.

The visual impact of your menu design is more important than you may realize. The 8 ½ x 11 format in a menu folder lends weight to the presentation. The cover should contain your logo or a graphic fitting your theme, centered with the name of your restaurant above and your address, hours and phone below. If you offer online ordering, include that information as well. A picture of a menu item, positioned to the right on a right hand page draws the eye of the customer, and produces more sales for that item. You’d do well to picture some of your best and high profit dishes. Use the small insert sleeves to advertise your daily specials or soup of the day. The sleeve sets the item apart and also makes it seem, well, special.

Choose fonts and colors to suit your restaurants’ style. Think of your menu as a picture book of your restaurant. When you convey quality in your menu design, your customer perceives value and has a positive expectation even before the food arrives. Good copy in your food descriptions can make your customers salivate because it sounds so good. Again, increased sales are yours. Take a simple hamburger. Read two descriptions:

Bacon Burger: served with lettuce, tomatoes and onion. Your choice of fries or coleslaw.

Our Famous Bacon Burger: Grilled and piled high with bacon, Spanish onions, cheddar, garden tomatoes and crisp lettuce. Our own barbecue sauce dresses the bun, fit for a king. Choose fries or coleslaw.

Of course, your food has to measure up, but you can see that copy matters.

Order a “take one” downsized tri-fold duplicate of your new menu design. Place near the register and entry. This is low cost advertising and keeps you in your customers mind after they’ve gone home. There are design firms specializing in menu design. When you’ve sketched out your new look, give one of these pros a call. A thoughtfully designed menu pays.

As the wife of a business owner, I know how frustrating and annoying it can be when you end up receiving a bad check. This happens more often than it should and can really cause some major frustrations. Often times, the person who wrote the check is incredibly embarrassed and apologetic and corrects the situation immediately. Other times, we have encountered people who cannot be reached or promise to rectify the situation and we never seem them again. We are left holding a bad check and being out the money for merchandise they purchased and in essence, never paid for. We have contemplated whether or not we should even allow our customers to write a check, but we simply cannot do away with that practice. Our bank has given us some helpful tips to possibly avoid receiving a bad check but we cannot catch every single one.

I am the first to admit that I have written a check before and had to have my bank draw finances out of my savings account. However, I have overdraft protection so the only people who are inconvenienced are myself and the bank. Apparently, many people out there do not have this advantage and bounce checks left and right. I don’t mind getting a bad check if it was a mistake. If you go shopping and have no doubts that you are paying with a bad check, you deserve to pay the consequences. The state governments have started to really take action with people who are passing bad checks around without a second thought. Instead of fines, some people face jail time now.

Our bank told us that we can always refuse to accept a check from a customer. We have the right to ask for a cash payment if we simply do not feel comfortable with taking a check. Refusing to accept a customer’s payment could very well be saving us from receiving a bad check. I make a point of getting a phone number and driver’s license number at all times. I hesitate to take a check that has a low check number on it. I have on occasion refused out of state checks which has upset some individuals, but I need to watch out for my business and cannot chance whether or not that may be a bad check.

Most people have taken to paying with a check card or a credit card. When using a check card, I know that there cannot be a bad check. If there isn’t any money there, it will not allow the transaction to be completed. A check card is a blessing for business owners. No longer do we have to wonder if we have a bad check that we’ll be depositing into our account. We will know immediately whether or not a sale can be made. I try to pay for purchases as often as possible with my own check card simply because I understand the frustrations of receiving a bad check. I am always on guard when working at the store.