I want to start out by thanking everyone on the board for thier great advice. I would not have been able to get my restaurant up and running without the messages posted on this board.
I have my BBQ restaurant up and going and we have been open for going on our 7th week now. We've had our ups and downs, but it has been good so far. We, as expected, started out strong for the first week, faded for about two weeks, and have been increasing in business since then.
We seat about 50 people and have a fairly new building (3-4 years old) with a nice atmosphere.
We have a unique market. We are in a fairly rural area and there are only 2 other restaurants within 15 miles, with one of those about 10 miles away. Both of these other restaurants specialize in catfish and sell no BBQ at all. You have to drive 15 miles West, 20 miles East, 20 miles North, and 15 miles South to get BBQ. We are located at the intersection of the only two main highways that go through our town.
However, being in a rural area, our lunch is slow. There are very few business in our area and most people commute to neighboring towns to work. This also hurts some at dinner because many of those people eat before they go home. Breakfast is out of the question as most people here cook. NO RESTARAUNT HAS successfully served breakfast here, and several have tried.
Our main competition is in a new $300,000+ plus log cabin style building that is between 4-5 times our size and is 1 mile from our restaurant. He has been around (although he now has a new building) for about 5 years.
This restaurant is your typical grille and serves steaks, burgers, shrimp, fish, etc...
I am looking for ideas to increase business and pull some more customers. We have done three things already that have really seemed to help:
One thing we have done is to offer "Sunday Lunch", which is a non-BBQ meal on Sundays (although you can still get BBQ). This increased Sunday sales by over 250%.
We expanded our menu from our original "BBQ only" to include chicken fingers, and Hickory Smoked Cheeseburgers. This was necessary in such a small market to help get our regulars back more frequently by improving the selection.
We have been advertising on the closest country station, and it has helped some.
My question(s) are:
Does anyone have suggestions for increasing business?
What types of sales figures do you guys try to hit daily?
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