If you are in food service management, you may be interested in taking professional education courses that are relevant to your workplace and that can help you expand and improve your skills. Food service manager training is important because many food service managers are promoted from within and come into a management position with little to no managerial training. An intro course could cover basics such as what makes restaurants succeed or fail and the phases of the restaurant life cycle.

A comprehensive course in food service manager training will teach you:

– How to understand what improves customer satisfaction and how to get those customers to recommend your restaurant/hotel/resort/spa to others
– About the various issues one faces in the foodservice business and what challenges may arise
– How to approach a plan to incorporate current trends into your products
– How to integrate a human resources strategy into your company
– About the different life cycles phases for restaurants/hotels/foodservice companies
– How to use and incorporate market research that applies to your business
– What ultimately can push a restaurant towards success or failure

Probably the most controversial question is the last listed above: what makes a restaurant fail? There are many different answers to this difficult question. Did you know that over half of all businesses fail within their first year? Customers decide fairly quickly whether or not they like a restaurant and it is usually clear within just months whether or not your restaurant is well-liked. The reasons may not seem obvious at first, but think about the restaurants that have not lasted. Did you enjoy your meals there? What did you dislike? If you start to dig deep, you will discover the major reasons for restaurant failure. Some of my own critiques of a restaurant are:

1. Location, location, location. If a restaurant is out in the open and visible, you will get many more customers of the drive-by type. This is critical especially in the early stages of a restaurant.

2. Inefficiency. This could be operational(you over-order, under-order, over/under-pay) or service-oriented, so that it starts to affect the ambiance of the restaurant (over/under-staff, have an inefficient kitchen with long wait times, etc…). If you don’t have these issues sorted out almost immediately you are facing a serious problem.

3. Promotion and advertising. This relates to #1 (location) – if you are not advertising constantly (especially at first), you will not get the customers you need to sustain and then grow your business. Make sure you are advertising to the right people (if you have a vegetarian restaurant make sure you are putting ads in local animal rights newsletters, etc…). Make sure you know who you want to advertise to as well.

4. Your name. This may be silly, but when it comes to restaurants, name is (just about) everything! It should be descriptive of what your restaurant is about – for example, don’t jokingly call your restaurant a steak house if your specialty is tofu. The people that go expecting steak will be disappointed and you may lose those tofu-lovers because they have the wrong idea about your name.

These are just some of the topics that might be covered in food service manager training. To be successful in food service management you should be familiar with these concepts and apply them effectively to your own restaurant or foodservice endeavor. Food service manager training can be very helpful for those that are both new to the industry or more experienced – there are always nuances to learn.

Author Bio: David Shoemaker is Vice President of Learning Solutions and Innovation at eCornell. For more information on food service manager training, food service management, or eCornell, please visit http://www.eCornell.com

Category: Business
Keywords: food service manager training, food service management