So you opened your new Restaurant

We previously talked about hosting your own dinner parties, things to consider if you want your very own restaurant and what drives restaurateurs to start their own restaurant business. We covered some ideas about their love for food, that they love working with and leading a team of people and managing finances, or even making a good business stand out amongst the competition.

We also talked about how technology is influencing dining out and restaurants in 2022. How it changed reservations and order taking from a staffing point of view along with management keeping an eye on sales and the team performance..

But what about how your internal IT infrastructure works? Who do you contact if things go wrong especially if its during busy time of day or ever after hours?

Managed IT solutions

Sure you have your team, your menu and suppliers all organised but who is going to look after your network and IT related components. Restaurants are complicated affairs in 2023 and working with the right Managed IT solutions provider is going to set you up for success or working with the wrong one may set you back months of work if something goes wrong.

With both physical hardware along with the network requirements for the hardware having someone on call is important. With Cloud based solutions and remote managed IT a good IT support company can be proactive in monitoring your network and monitoring the performance of your hardware. They will take action before you notice something in the middle of a busy dining session.

Communications

Having a phone outage during business hours for most businesses can be a problem but for a restaurant with high overheads and staff on site during the busy evening hours it could be a catastrophe. Some restaurants may rely on certain nights for 90% of their days trading and a large percentage of the total week. Consider a Saturday night and having no ability to accept bookings at 5pm in the afternoon and how this may affect your takings for the evening.

A good communications provider either through a managed virtual PBX system or via business phone systems will have layers of redundancy. So when something goes wrong either your fail safe system (like a mobile phone) switches over automatically or via support team which you can contact after hours can divert your phones.

This would create minimal downtime and put your restaurant back and taking orders before you noticed.

Printer Systems

Yes society is turning towards toward less paper intensive systems but your new restaurant will still require at least one printer for tax invoices for clients or for reporting for book keeping. Modern printers are attached to your network and also can be monitored by your Managed IT provider who can also send consumable and schedule servicing when notified by the printer.

These all in one systems can print, scan, photocopy and work across your network for all the devices and are a far cry from the $80 inkjets some stores are used to using.

So whats next?

You have your team, you have the infrastructure, your love of food and a menu you feel people are going to love so whats the next step in your restaurateur journey?