Running Restaurant Revenue Management Initiatives with Avero
Avero is a dynamic reporting and analysis tool that puts data behind your business decisions. Use Avero to create benchmarks to evaluate your performance, predict demand and forecast future business, identify and react to changing circumstances, and optimize your revenue and profitability. We'll walk you through the theory and practice of Revenue Management for Restaurants and help you apply these principles to your business. Let's get started!
What does a Restaurant Revenue Management Initiative entail?
There are 4 sections to a Restaurant Revenue Management (or RRM) initiative.
- Learn the Theory behind the practice
- Revenue Management is a discipline that analyzes current and past performance to predict demand and adjust operations and offerings to optimize revenue. Understanding the discipline and approach is vital to the success of your plan.
- Perform some basic or complex Analysis
- These principles and tactics can be applied hyper-focused on a single area of business or broadly across a portfolio of multiple businesses; the analysis to get started can be very simple or quite complex, depending on your familiarity and needs. We recommend starting small and building as you go. You can always do more in the future, but you can't do less in the past!
- The main goals of your analysis are to establish a baseline of current performance, understand demand drivers to optimize revenue generation and identify areas for strategic action.
- Take Action based on your analysis
- Once you've identified areas of need, you'll create a strategy to improve, and Avero will help you take action on your plan!
- Monitor and evaluate the Results
- Track the effects of your changes on an Avero data-driven dashboard and watch your goals materialize. Don't forget to broadcast your successes and mine your ineffective actions for intelligence to inform your future efforts.
What will I need to do?
- Reading & watching
- Running reports
- Coming up with ideas specific to your business
- Communicating the plan to your team
- Following up with your team on further actions, results, and next steps
To learn the Theory, you'll do some reading and viewing of articles and guides. Don't worry; these materials are always available to reference, so you don't need to remember it all immediately, and the guides you go through further down the line will refer back to these materials.
To perform the Analysis, you'll run reports in Avero (don't worry, we will show you each step of the way!) and think critically about what you find. You'll then brainstorm the Actions and tactics that best fit your business strategy. This will be specific to your business, so it will come from you, but we will provide examples, and by this point in the process, you'll understand how RRM works!
Tracking the Results is as easy as logging into Avero to view your data-driven dashboard and see your progress at-a-glance. Then share those insights with your team!
How long will it take?
That depends on you and the complexity of the plan you create! We recommend starting small with some simple actions that can have an immediate effect on your business (like performing Menu Engineering on your Wine List first) and then building on your early success to bigger strategic initiatives.
For small initiatives you may dedicate a one-month action plan. For larger initiatives, no more than quarterly is recommended. Menu Engineering, for example, is best with a larger data set to minimize the impact of outliers, so we recommend a three-month cadence for these activities.
Making too many changes too quickly confuses your customers and may cause your team to burn out or fail to implement your initiative.
Start small. Go slow. Involve your team. It works!
You'll spend about an hour reading through the theory and going through our pop-up tutorials initially, and you can revisit these materials at any time. We recommend getting your whole team involved and breaking up the responsibilities among multiple team members - this makes everyone feel like part of the process (get their buy-in!) and keeps the workload low for each employee.
How do I get started?
First, familiarize yourself with Restaurant Revenue Management by reading our guides:
- Revenue Management Overview
- Establishing a Baseline & Understanding Demand
- Developing & Implementing a Strategic Action Plan
- Monitoring Outcomes & Communicating Results
Then, select one of the initiatives in this section to get started. We recommend starting with the Beginner or Starter efforts and building up to Intermediate and Advanced.
Pro-tip: We have a pop-up tutorial for each guide, these tutorials will walk your through where to click in Avero and how to save and share your findings, like a personal consultant for Restaurant Revenue Management. Come armed with your ideas and insight, and we will show you the path to success for your initiatives!