All sorts of restaurants face a certain offseason, a predictable or at times a very unpredictable time where restaurants start dropping their usual sales, and for an extended time period. Be it because the summer that sends businesses away to lake house tranquillity or the chilly winters that keeps patrons indoors, a loss is a loss. These things would cause slow periods that will hurt your restaurants’ bottom line in the long run.

Adjust your marketing strategy targeting your offseasons, plan accordingly and keep your business humming.

1. Change the ways things are done:

Wanna stay successful during off seasons? Be sure to keep a unique selling point that customers would attract to and change how you normally do stuff. Find new ways to attract customers. There are many ways your restaurant could do that, for example, host networking events, reach out to other businesses that you think can benefit from your restaurant and space. Events like these gain popularity and will surely drive customers to your restaurant even the ones that don’t usually visit might pop-up. Be sure to follow the trends! Like pop-up restaurants are gradually becoming a big thing and can be really fun. This way you would recreate your restaurant and that might even attract the press, more publicity, more customers and so they would visit following the excitement.

2. Cut out the extras:

Curtail the number of ingredients from your menu that you think won’t really go with the season or you can use menu engineering to highlight the high-cost items that aren’t generating as much revenue and can cut that item out temporarily. Also temporarily remove some of the staff and reduce some hours so you can save up for other things that your restaurant might need in slow periods or just to accommodate slow sales in offseason but remember keeping your committed staff members, as the staff is eventually subjected to financial hit, keep the high performers. With that, reduce your spendings also as using recipe management software, and knowing what ingredients are required and which ones go to waste. Recipe management also helps to ensure that your restaurant won’t run out of the product.  Be sure to keep separate budgets for these slow seasons, depreciating budgets is the best way to track your spendings.

3. Go into hiding:

Sometime’s the odds aren’t in your favour and that too is okay. Don’t feel demotivated, we all have bad days! If you feel you’re losing money and are unable to do much about it, it may be in your favour to close for a bit. While you won’t make any money during this time, look at the bright side? You won’t be losing any too. Even then if you feel that you need to generate some sort of income then consider offering private events and catering during these days.

Keep in mind that restaurants are slow businesses that need immense patience and time to run. f you lose motivation you might lose it all. Be patient, be sure to work hard despite all offseasons at times & you’ll reach to where you want to one day.