Growth is one of the major goals of any restaurant business. One of the best ways to achieve this is to open additional venues to expand your brand and find new customers in new locations.
In fact, ResDiary’s Beyond the Booking report on hospitality trends suggests that over 29% of Australian and New Zealand venue operators are considering opening an additional venue in 2025, while 17% say they definitely will. In the UK and Ireland, 17% of respondents are considering opening a new location while 11% said they’re committed to opening one.
However, managing multiple restaurants at once creates specific issues that need long-term solutions. In this guide, we’ll break down the challenges of managing multiple restaurants and how to do so effectively.
Some of the major challenges of managing multiple restaurants include:
Here are 10 tips to help you navigate the challenges that come with managing multiple restaurant locations.
It is crucial to have a solid business and financial strategy in place before committing to restaurant expansion. With improper planning, you could be taking unnecessary risks and hurting your eventual profits. Precisely planning and strategising for managing multiple restaurant sites involves:
Effectively operating multiple venues at once will require a competent team capable of following your brand’s standard operating procedures and managing daily tasks.
To find the best staff possible, your hiring process should be thorough and clearly outline expectations and required skills. Ensure your job ad is high quality, represents your staffing needs, and clearly communicates the personality and values of your brand. This helps to ensure you can find compatible employees easily.
Check out some of our sample job descriptions if you need inspiration for your own job ads.
Before you meet face-to-face with any potential employees, ensure you have relevant and precise interview questions that communicate the exact demands of the role. Every question must have a specific aim, and you should have a logical expectation of what a good answer for your business is.
Unified standard operating procedures can seriously help multiple venues under singular management thrive. They allow restaurant owners and managers to streamline vital operations across each business. Useful SOPS for a brand with multiple branches include:
By using a quality checklist app like Trail, your team has uniform checklists of priorities and health and safety requirements across multiple venues. It can easily be used across your locations, offering complete control and oversight of standards in your business.
To run multiple venues at once, you will need a centralised reservation management system with features built for multi-site businesses. A solid central reservation management system features:
Having multi-location restaurants presents a unique and profitable opportunity for cross-selling. Through cross-selling, if a diner’s preferred reservation time is unavailable, you can offer them the time they prefer at a different location.
This means you won’t miss out on valuable business as you can ensure each of your sites is receiving enough traffic to turn a profit across your business, instead of only relying on your more popular restaurant locations.
ResDiary’s Cross-Sell Widget captures your customers’ preferred booking date, their group size and their desired time slot, and presents alternative venues in your business that meet their preferences when their chosen location isn’t available. This makes it easier to capture more reservations within your brand.
Managing inventory is crucial at any restaurant. Proper inventory management optimises the daily operations of your back-of-the-house staff and ensures your business is throwing out any expired produce, keeping you in line with health and safety regulations.
By optimising your inventory management process, you are improving overall daily operations across your brand, reducing total costs and preventing costly bottlenecks from forming.
ResDiary’s quality EPOS system integrations like PowerEPOS from Triniteq or AccessEPoS can be used to help staff track the inventory status of menu items. You can combine your sales data with booking data to more accurately understand your inventory needs.
Using a unified tech stack to oversee multiple restaurants at once gives you the tools and integrations you need for oversight over each of your venues. This makes management easier and helps you see better results.
With quality reservation management software and a wide array of integrations, ResDiary is an excellent linchpin for your tech stack. A unified tech stack with ResDiary gives your business:
You must offer a great customer experience across all your premises to maximise the chances of success for your business. When your diners have a good meal at one of your restaurants, it will increase the reputation and value of your brand as a whole.
A great way to improve your brand's customer experience is to streamline your daily operations, giving your staff more time to focus on customer needs. Comparatively, with a pen and paper booking diary, staff may take too much time to create and find reservations. This may end up disrupting the workflow of other team members.
By using table management software, you can move your staff away from costly pen-and-paper systems and automate admin tasks. By streamlining your operations, you will give your staff more time to focus on crafting an exceptional customer experience and improving your brand's reputation.
Senior staff from each restaurant in your portfolio must be able to effectively communicate with upper management and each other to keep each establishment running smoothly. Effective internal communication will also ensure a consistent brand experience across multiple premises.
High-quality communication can be encouraged by using centralised management software. If each location uses different software, sharing important updates across the brand may be difficult. Important areas such as inventory and staff management may not be effectively communicated, causing misalignment and confusion.
Tools like ResDiary and Rotaready are designed to meet the needs of restaurant brands with multiple locations. With a single system capable of segmenting each restaurant branch separately, ResDiary can facilitate excellent communication and allow staff to share data between locations for better general oversight.
When running multiple venues, you need objective, proven facts and insights to determine how to improve your business. This involves understanding what is most appealing about your brand and exactly what parts of your restaurant group could be improved.
Without clear insights, any adjustments or changes to your business have unnecessary risks that could affect your business’ performance.
With unified tech stacks and management systems, each booking or payment can be easily registered and transferred into actionable data you can use to improve your business. By analysing data like booking times or the most popular items on your menu, you can optimise your business and improve your total revenue.
Using ResDiary’s analytics suite, you can effectively explore all of your data to draw out the most important insights. For more information, check out our complete guide to restaurant analytics.
ResDiary’s table management software and quality integrations can easily and efficiently oversee multiple restaurants at once. Our system was built to meet the needs of restaurant groups with flexible and smart solutions that can be applied across your entire brand.
ResDiary offers a high-quality centralised managing system as versatile as it is easy to use. Using our built-in features and integrations, you can cut down on costly, time-consuming operation tasks and streamline your admin process across all your venues for more efficient man
Manage your restaurant portfolio with effective solutions today by booking a demo with ResDiary.