Every March, you can count on two things: hordes of college students flocking to the beach for Spring Break and sports fans tuning in to the college basketball playoffs. March Madness has gotten so big that even those who aren’t inclined to fol...

We all strive for consistency. In sports, you’ll hear players and coaches say all they ask from officials is that they be consistent. The word choice is interesting. They don’t demand accuracy, they demand consistency. In baseball, for ex...

A growing number of my customers use credit cards, but the fees are killing me. Anything I can do? A: I feel your pain! If the fees are killing you, then the sales are saving you! We can no longer live without accepting credit cards, because almost e...

I’m opening my first pizzeria and am building a freestanding unit. My question is: is it worth the extra construction expense to add a lobby/waiting area? I’m going to have 32 four-top tables and eight six-person booths. With a resta...

How do you compensate your delivery drivers? I paid my drivers regular minimum wage, plus they earned their tips. I also paid them a 50 cent commission for each delivery. I recently started charging customers a one dollar delivery charge, which defer...

The other day, I was talking to a young woman who worked her way through college by bartending at a busy restaurant. I asked her if all the second-hand cigarette smoke she had to inhale in order to do her job bothered her. She answered in the affirma...

My son just over a small bar/restaurant and really wants to offer hand-tossed pizzas. Can they be cooked in the convection oven? A: You can bake a decent pizza in a convection oven, but you can’t bake it in a pizza pan. See, in a traditional pi...

One of my first assignments as a consultant was to implement a turnaround for a group of pizzerias. They were hanging on by a thread. They had cashed in all of their CDs, 401ks and charged their credit cards to the max. I had made seve...

Right behind food cost is your second most expensive controllable expense: labor. Labor cost, or L/C, is usually referred to as a percentage of gross sales. I stayed on top of hourly labor like a hawk. My point of sale system served as my time clock ...

Big Dave Ostrander Crunch Time Remedy Cross training covers all your bases By Big Dave Ostrander Its late afternoon Friday. Within an hour, the phones will be ringing off the wall. Your best crew is checking and double checking stock levels and ...

The more your crew can do, the better your operation will run. In baseball, triple threats — players who can hit, field and run brilliantly — are rare gems. Entertainers who can sing, dance and act are called triple threats. In our world,...

It was a hot summer night. I was cruising with my friends. We were a carload of young guys, fresh out of high school, approaching a college campus, looking for a good time. The driver pulled into a drive thru burger place. He said “these burger...