by Abby Henson | Nov 14, 2017 | Blogs
December is a blessing for hospitality. Bookended by autumn’s dwindling trade and a cold, baron January, the “festive season” represents a sparkling opportunity.
Increased footfall and a party atmosphere mean a revenue-boost is all but guaranteed. The best operators will exploit this further, both by maximising immediate profitability and using December to promote the long-term health of their business. Here are our top tips to do just that.
Special occasions warrant exceptional service
Special Experiences Drive Repeat Custom
Christmas brings countless new people to pubs, restaurants, and other hospitality sites. The goal is to convert these seldom-seen seasonals into year-round regulators. Delivering exceptional service is key to this, so adequate staffing is integral.
Rotas should always be written with sales forecasts in mind, but with large, profitable party bookings likely, this is particularly apposite in December. Enough staff should be working to provide guests with truly memorable experiences that will keep them returning long after the decorations are stashed in the attic.
Maximise Spend Per Head
Jovial, festive customers are more willing to treat themselves. Premium drinks upgrades, extra desserts, and mince pies with coffees are all common indulgences that yield high gross profits. Upselling these items is a simple way to lift spend per head, but failure to do so represents a big missed opportunity. Table checks and upselling are common casualties when team members feel stressed, so a little additional initial outlay on staffing can bring great rewards, delivering as much as a tenfold return on investment.
If you are taking bookings for large parties, an effective way of increasing spend per head with minimal labour requirement is agreeing the sale of bottles of wine for the table ahead of time. Wine typically sees one of the highest margins of any product, and having bottles on the table will reduce the need for staff to fetch drinks to the table, allowing them to focus on upselling in other areas.
Festive menus are often preparation-heavy
Stagger Start & End Times
A large Christmas booking will justify having additional team members on shift, but if you know the party will only be on site from seven till ten, there’s little point having everybody working from five to midnight. Staggering start and end times will reduce unnecessary labour spend, keep staff feeling fresh, and promote flexibility of working hours. This is best scheduling practice that can be applied all year round. On a cautionary note, festive menus are often preparation-intensive – be sure to bring your kitchen staff in early enough to be fully ready to serve when bookings arrive.
Around Christmas it’s always a good idea to check your licensing hours and apply for extensions if necessary, as the late drinking trade can be very profitable. Staggering start times will make team members more receptive to a later than usual finish.
Consider Your Team’s Composition
To maximise December’s potential, it is a good idea to spend some time considering the composition of your team, both in terms of the different areas of your business, and employees’ contract types. Christmas menus may bring unfamiliar items, as well as a need for quickfire service, so it’s important to make sure you have enough manpower and expertise in the kitchen to cope.
The month of December is also likely to be see busy shifts seven days a week. If your team largely comprises part-time employees, who are only able to take on a couple of shifts a week, hiring temporary staff for the busy period can ensure you’re never left short. Students returning home for the holidays can be a welcome source of cheap temporary labour.
It doesn’t cost much to boost morale
Reward Your Team!
Moreso at Christmas than ever, employees in hospitality sacrifice their own social lives so guests can enjoy a special occasion. Appreciative words, and the odd drink on the management after a busy shift, cost little but can make a huge positive impact on staff morale at what can be an exhausting time. Happy, motivated staff are much more likely to deliver exceptional service, earning valuable repeat customer into the spring and beyond.
Following the above advice in tamdem with S4Labour’s insight and tools for superior business management will put your business in the best position to truly maximise December’s potential this year.
by Abby Henson | Nov 7, 2017 | Blogs
At S4Labour, we are proud that our labour management system was created by operators for operators.
Our people have a wealth of experience gained from backgrounds in all sectors of hospitality, and we continue to manage three food-led destination pubs, two with bedrooms. These provide the perfect environment to ensure our products stay at the cutting edge of the industry.
We are ideally placed to understand our clients’ challenges and offer genuine insight and innovative solutions that help them achieve their business goals. We appreciate the numerous systems that contribute to running a successful modern hospitality business. Our specialism is enhanced by integrations with a network of trusted partners, allowing S4Labour to function as a central platform, streamlining numerous systems into a unified tool for superior business management.
EPoS terminals are a mainstay of modern hospitality sites
Since the turn of the millennium, electronic till systems have become ubiquitous in hospitality sites. Users rely on their EPoS for smooth, accurate service, but their potential to promote efficiency savings goes beyond rapid price calculations and user-friendly interfaces. Analysis of EPoS data provides enormous insight both into the distribution of sales across the hours of a day and longer-term trading patterns and trends. This promotes optimised scheduling of staff to deliver desired service standards without overspending on labour.
S4Labour integrates with the UK’s biggest EPoS providers, as well as numerous smaller regional suppliers, to present sales data in an intuitive graphical format, encouraging effective labour deployment decisions to be made. We are also working on future system developments which will allow managers to consider labour in the context of sales in real time, delivering further cost and efficiency savings.
Time & Attendance
Often a sub-category of EPoS, time and attendance systems allow operators to electronically, and accurately, record employees’ shift start and end times. This data automatically populates in S4Labour, reducing the likelihood of errors or unearned overpayments. This removes the need for time-consuming manual updates to rotas, and boosts staff morale through increased confidence in correct and timely receipt of wages.
This data also feeds the Lateness Report in S4Labour’s HR Module, allowing managers and head office staff unrivalled insight into employee timekeeping.
Effective training boosts staff morale and productivity
Although technological advancements are increasingly influencing hospitality, the industry still has people at its heart. Effective training of employees remains as important as ever, and money spent on staff development usually pays dividends in terms of increasing efficiency of service and customer spend per head, as well as reducing losses through errors and wastage and encouraging longevity of service.
Online training courses, typically provided by third parties, are a popular and convenient way for operators to ensure all team members are complicit with laws and regulations and equipped with the skills and knowledge they need to work effectively. S4Labour is integrated with leading providers of e-training, with course completion data automatically feeding into the system, allowing managers to quickly identify and rectify gaps in knowledge and compliance.
Increasingly, operators – including market leaders such as Loungers and JD Wetherspoon – are seeking to maximise profitability through adding overnight accommodation as an additional revenue stream. The potential returns on investment are high, especially when labour can be aligned to room occupancy rates and meal package purchases, optimising efficiency of housekeeping and food service teams.
S4Labour partners with leading property management systems to automatically populate with room reservation data, allowing managers to make effective decisions on staffing to meet the demand for overnight stays and boost profits.
S4Labour can take the hassle away from running payroll
Accurate, timely payment of staff is critically important to the smooth operations of any business and particularly pertinent in hospitality, with hourly pay and variable shifts commonplace. Correctly running payroll can be a time-consuming burden to operators, either through hours spent managing wages in-house, or through preparing the information that needs to be sent to outsourced accountants.
S4Labour takes shift data from its rotas – often generated by a time and attendance link – and uses it to generate CSV format payroll exports at the click of a button. These conveniently provide payroll departments and services everything they need to ensure that all members of staff correctly receive the wages they have earned.
For hospitality’s decision-makers, so-called “Big Data” is becoming an ever more useful resource. Cutting edge analytical techniques provide unparalleled insight to guide decisions on everything from which products to stock up before a busy weekend to the best location for a new site.
The scope for cross-platform pollination of data is massive, so we are working closely with the foremost firms specialising in data for hospitality. This integration will allow managers to make confident staffing details informed by high-level analysis. Stay tuned for more information soon.
The advantages of a fully-integrated labour management system are self-evident. We are dedicated to making S4Labour’s integrations comprehensive and their functionality intuitive in line with our mission to maximise efficiency and profits for our clients.
by Abby Henson | Nov 6, 2017 | Blogs
At S4Labour, we understand the wide range of systems that contribute to the successful running of a modern hospitality business.
S4Labour’s Gareth Thomas
We have an active integration with Welcome Systems, market-leading providers of Property Management software. This allows optimisation of scheduling in sites offering overnight accommodation, with demand for housekeeping and food service staff driven by room occupancy rates and sales of meal packages.
Welcome Systems produce an informative monthly podcast, which this month featured S4Labour’s Gareth Thomas. In Gareth’s role of Business Development Manager, he works closely with key people at our integration partners to ensure our relationships stay strong and productive. Here he joined John Jones, Welcome Systems’ MD, to discuss an analytical approach to labour management and its impact on productivity, staff satisfaction, profits, and the guest experience. The podcast can be heard below.
If you would like to discuss implementing a Property Management System integration to your S4Labour account, call 01295 267400 or email your account manager today.
by Abby Henson | Oct 12, 2017 | Blogs
S4Labour are continuing our sponsorship of Propel events with the final Multi-Club Conference of 2017. The conference will take place on Wednesday 1st November at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel in London.
We will have a stand in the refreshments and networking area and will be available throughout the day to discuss controlling costs, driving greater sales, improving HR processes, and just about anything else of interest.
The day will as ever see a host of informative and inspiring speakers from all sectors of hospitality taking the stage. Amongst them will be Darrel Connel of investment fund Imbiba, which backs several S4Labour clients, and Richard Boon, founder of burger concept Hubbox, who recently signed up to use our labour scheduling and HR software. The full schedule for the day can be viewed here.
Operators of multi-site companies can claim two free places at the conference, which will also provide ample opportunities for networking with some of the industry’s most skilled and visionary figures.
As demonstrated by the summer conference, Propel events are always a fantastic opportunity to hear from and interact with hospitality’s best people. We’re looking forward to seeing many S4Labour customers – old, new, and future – there.
by Abby Henson | Oct 11, 2017 | Blogs
At S4Labour we work with over 100 of Britain’s best hospitality organisations, ranging from award-winning single site and small multi-site operators right up to some of the country’s best-loved national brands.
There are numerous reasons why they find us to be the perfect partner in ensuring their sustained success, but don’t just take our word for it, here are six reasons to work with S4Labour, backed up by testimonials from six of the very best operators around.
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1 – Control Labour Spend
With rent increases, business rent hikes, and a rise in commodity prices all too familiar to today’s hospitality industry, keeping costs down in other areas can be critical to profitability. Labour is often the biggest cost to operators, but one that can be typically reduced without diminishing sales by identifying overstaffing and promoting better deployment. S4Labour makes this easy, leading to savings of 10% on annual labour spend for many of our clients.
“Since the introduction of S4Labour we have had total control over our labour, allowing us to make educated decisions on staffing. It is the best addition to our set-up that we have made this year.” – Patrick Gray, Ops Director, Kua Aina
2 – Drive Record Sales
S4Labour is not just a tool for reducing overstaffing. By using its intuitive labour demand graph to identify and rectify overstaffing, its users can drive increased sales by ensuring attentive service and maximised upselling opportunities. Record sales, coupled with tight controls on labour, result in maximum profitability.
“Your labour system is doing wonders at City Pub Co – well done!” – John Roberts, Founder, City Pub Company.
3 – Improve HR Processes
People are at the heart of any hospitality operation. S4Labour’s extensive HR module allows users to quickly and easily manage the human side of their business, making everything from managing holiday accrual to staff contracts run more efficiently than ever before.
“We couldn’t have won without S4Labour” – Chris Carsons, CEO, Deviate Bars, Winner of Best Turnaround at the Great British Pub Awards 2017
4 – A Fully Integrated System
We understand the numerous systems that contribute to running a successful hospitality business. We partner with EPoS firms, training providers, payroll bureaus, property management systems, and others to ensure our clients have a seamless, integrated solution.
“We use Zonal for our EPoS system, and the fact that S4Labour run a seamless integration with Zonal for importing sales figures has always been a real benefit. Our accountant has found S4Labour’s payroll export to be a hassle-free way of ensuring staff are paid correctly and on time.” – Clive Price, Managing Director, Barons Pub Co.
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5 – Designed by Operators for Operators
S4Labour was created by people with a wealth of hospitality industry experience across all industry sectors, with our management team having held senior positions at leading brands including Mitchells & Butlers, Whitbread, and ASK Italian.
“It is clear that the program has been designed by actual restaurateurs for true life operations, as opposed to theoretical programs that serve very little purpose in the real world. This is a very refreshing change.” – James Kerry, Owner, The Winery
6 – Quality Ongoing Relationship
Our clients regularly tell us how much they value the quality of the ongoing relationship they have with S4Labour’s people. With first-rate trainers, account managers dedicated to helping your business succeed, and a seven day support desk service, an experienced professional is always on hand to help you get the best results.
“The training provided was extremely efficient and help and support has been ongoing. S4Labour is a key tool in our labour management and in increasing our productivity and efficiency.” Darren Rumbelow, Operations Manager, Albion & East, Part of Imbiba Partnership
