Operations, marketing and menu consulting.

Too frequently, the person tasked with generating revenue on a day-to-day basis is the least experienced employee on staff—the host.

Hundreds of thousands (and often millions) of dollars are spent building beautiful restaurants. Thousands are spent on marketing and advertising to attract customers. Highly skilled and well-compensated chefs, managers and servers are hired, with the front desk as an afterthought.

An experienced hostess knows how to maximize seating and understands how to juggle reservations with walk-ins. An inexperienced front desk tells callers your restaurant is “fully committed” when in reality they could serve more guests, and turns walk-ins away if he or she decides that they are not in the mood to have guests wait—even when it’s a short five to ten minutes. Unnecessarily turning away walk-in guests during the course of a shift—particularly right at opening—is one clear way of losing valuable revenue that even the most seasoned restaurateur would kill for. A large number of the restaurants suffer unaccountable daily losses in revenue from these mistakes.

Recently my wife and I were in Las Vegas. We had tickets for a 7pm show and decided to have an early dinner at Mix restaurant in Mandalay Bay—owned by an internationally-known chef and operated by a well-established management team. We arrived at opening, and a young, sullen hostess casually walked up to greet us. When we asked for a table, she told us they were “fully committed.” I informed her we would be but one hour and out by 6:30pm. That didn’t appear to help her. I asked if she could tell me how many reservations were on the books up to 6:30pm. With some hesitation, she said there were only two reservations up to 7pm! She then tried to convince us that by 8pm the restaurant would be full and they couldn’t accommodate us.

Be selective when it comes to hiring staff for your restaurant, and even more selective when it comes to hiring your front desk or reservationists. Hire bright, cheery and knowledgeable people. Pay them well and make sure they are included in the tip pool! Make time to spend a few minutes with them before every shift. After all, they are the ones who decide how much revenue you will have that day. That alone earns them your daily attention!