Set a Goal for the Next Year: If You’re to Reach A Million Baht, What Do You Have to Improve, Change or Do to Reach Your Sales Goal?
Dec 23, 2021
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This year is ending. A new year is around the corner. Evaluate your own restaurant business, so you can set new goals for yourself for the New Year. Make those resolutions and achieve your goals. Today, MHA is inviting you to check out essential information for how to plan your sales goals and operational guidelines that’ll make your restaurant achieve the goals you’ve set for the next year. Extra! We’re giving out files that’ll help you plan your sales goals as well as a free course on how to create a sales projection!!!
Know Your Restaurant - Before you can set your goals, you need to understand your restaurant and the overall operations in the past as follows:
How much income are you earning daily and monthly? To find out, use the sales data you’ve collected over the past year. If you have a POS system, the record will be easy to look at. However, if you’ve written it down, try entering the data into an MS Excel table first and it’ll be easier to see the trends and details.
Categorize the sales total as daily and monthly sales. Although it’ll take a lot of time if you’re new at it, the more details you can gather, the more clearly you can see the performance trend of each day and it’ll reflect the sales trend of each month in the past year. All of this can show you which day of the week and which month you sell well or don’t meet your sales goal. More importantly, the record is also used when filing your annual taxes.
Try looking back at the goals you set at the beginning of the year and see whether you’ve achieved them. If you have, assess whether you can do better next year. If you haven’t, check the record to see when the lowest sales total is using the table you made earlier and try to consider the cause of poor sales during that period.
Set goals for the new year. How much income do you want to earn? Look at this year’s overall sales and set a goal to be better, or at least maintain the sales goals. If you see a way to increase the sales total for the next year, try looking back and consider the additional environmental factors and find the answers to the following questions: If you want to increase the daily or monthly sales, what’s your restaurant’s maximum seating capacity. Are there any other obstacles such as space, number of tables, employees and other factors? And, are you ready to invest more into what you’re still lacking? Otherwise, if you just have poor management and you can just change your management methods to boost your sales potential, you should try it.
2. Try Creating a Sales Projection - This is to find out how much income you’ll earn each month, how much more you need to achieve your goals and which month you have the most or least customers. That way, you can forecast your income.
A sales projection forecasts your sales using the data collected from employees, customer satisfaction surveys and surveys of the nearby restaurants. In creating a restaurant sales projection, Ajarn Mathurot Wongpradu (Ajarn Bow), restaurant guru and current director of PRCM Thailand, a company that provides consultation services and sets up restaurant systems, has advised us to use the following methods:
Set a monthly sales budget. Start by separating out the days (Sunday-Saturday) in a month. Determine the number of customers on each day of the month and separate out the public holidays so you can use that information as the daily data.
Determine the number of customers. Categorize them by meals such as lunch and dinner customers (if your restaurant sells from noon until evening). The reason for sorting by meal is because each customer group has different eating behaviors. For example, for lunch people tend to rush to eat and not spend a lot of money, etc. In addition, separate out sales by delivery channels so you can see the sales via these channels. Next, use your old data or survey data to determine the number of customers in each day.
Determine the sales amount per head, also sorted by meal and delivery channel.
Then, you’ll get the calculated income according to total customers and total sales per head.
Sum up the daily and monthly income (excluding Sundays and Saturdays).
Sum up the total monthly sales and you’ll have your monthly sales projection. (For this step, exclude the public holidays because it would be redundant.)
And now you have the monthly sales projection. This will be your goal for your operations as well as for setting daily goals.
Other than sales projection, try creating a daily sales table (if you don’t have a POS system). Enter the daily sales budget from the abovementioned table into the daily sales table and record the actual daily sales and you’ll have the difference between the budget and actual sales. This’ll help you see each day’s sales and the daily performance trend more clearly. What’s more, all of this can lead you to improve your sales strategies or reduce your budget, so it’s more appropriate.
If you still don’t understand sales projection, try taking the “Formula for Analyzing Sales for Superior Profits” Course by Ajarn Mathurot Wongpradu (Ajarn Bow) and download the tool (file) which will help you create restaurant sales projections for free! Click => “Formula for Analyzing Sales for Superior Profits”(Log in at the upper right corner before entering the course.) 3. Unmet Sales Goals - Plan Ahead So You’ll Know What to Do to Achieve Your Goals
If you haven’t achieved the goals you set for the past year, find out why. If you keep daily sales records, you’ll see the remarks from each day. You need to record the cause for both good and bad sales days, for example, during school holidays, students who are your main customers disappear or there was heavy rain and your customers couldn’t come to the restaurant, etc.
As for external factors you can’t control, you have to keep a record to show that you’ll just have to accept the poor sales during the aforementioned period and focus on selling at times when you sell better. As for other factors that you can fix, however, you should start planning how to handle them now. MHA recommends the following sales-boosting plans:
- Boost the sales per head (A/C) as follows: 1. Recommend new menu items to customers. Try recommending new shared dishes or drinks, so customers are tempted to order more. 2. Offer promotional sets. For example, if customers usually order a single dish, try pairing the dish up with soup and sell them for a special price. This will make customers feel like it’s more worthwhile to spend a little more. 3. Offer promotional menu items. If you add menu items that cost a just a little more, customers will feel that the price isn’t very different from usual but they get to try a new dish. 4. Recommend desserts after the main course.
- Increase your customer base (T/C) as follows: 1. Increase your dish size, for example, if you have a som tam shop, offer som tam platters so customers can share. Customers will invite their friends for a meal and may order other dishes. 2. Offer discount promotions to persuade customers to try your services. 3. Offer limited-time loyalty points so customers will return within the specified period. 4. Don’t forget to promote your restaurant through various media.
- Increase your distribution channels. Your restaurant could make deliveries or collaborate with food delivery apps. Offering catering services is a great way to boost sales.
4. Plan How to Handle Unexpected Events in Advance
Since the Covid situation is still uncertain and will stay with us for a long while and we’ve learned some lessons in the past 1-2 years, this New Year’s we need plans to handle the situation from the start. From a regular restaurant that sells from the storefront, you need to adapt and sell via delivery because consumer behavior has changed. Although they’ll be able to eat at restaurants in the future, the number of customers who order food delivery will certainly increase. You need to learn about ordering food delivery via apps, GP fees and ordering and offering promotions through apps. Moreover, you should learn how to do online marketing because online is where you’ll survive. It’s not just an option like before. You’ll also have to learn how to advertise via social media or launch ads, create sales content on social media and go live to sell your products to attract more customers.
Remarks: Ajarn Mathurot Wongpradu (Ajarn Bow) has over 15 years of experience managing Thai and leading brands. Her previous positions include operation manager at BreadTalk Thailand, vice president of Din Tai Fung and operation director supervising overseas branches for the Mango Tree Brand. She is currently the director of PRCM Thailand, a company that provides consultation services and sets up restaurant systems.
