Believe it or not in this flat market, some operators are still enjoying 6-8% comp sales.
How? By figuring out how to increase guest count. You can do the same if you’re hyper-committed to doing whatever it takes to get more people to swing the door (or open their app) and have great experiences with your restaurants.
I spoke about this at last week’s DFW Restaurant and Bar Conference.
Inflation Disguises Guest Count Erosion
You compare revenue to prior years like someone taught you to on the first day you entered management. But you have a problem: This calculation is past its freshness date and no longer tells the relevant story.
When you look at your guest count over the past 10 years, you come away shocked because, while your revenue may be comparable, your guest count has badly eroded.
And your menu price increases have kept you from noticing.
Encouraging current guests to eat in your restaurants more frequently won’t do enough to increase sales significantly. If you want a healthy sales increase you’re going to have to win back lapsed guests and win over non-users.
You have no choice: Either accept this reality and take action to increase guest count or stay in denial, misunderstand today’s market, and accept lagging performance.
Take the Right Action
Guest count remains your most important number, but it doesn’t show up on your P&L. To increase guest count and reach more revenue and profit, take these steps now.
- Make guest count the most important topic and set an example. Work on it every day because any day you can finish without impacting something that increases guest count is a misallocation of time.
- Build a system to compare current guest count in each of your units to last year and explain to everyone the importance of these numbers. Start your weekly operations meetings by talking about guest count, not sales. “This year vs last year. How does that look?”
- Start having the conversation about guest count when you hire people. Include that conversation in the interview, FOH and BOH.
- Stretch as far as you can to echo the amazing learning-and-development efforts of your chain competition. One of my clients established a Learning and Development position for the first time, taking that off the plate of their VP of Operations.
- Talk about guest experience every day – in shift meetings, in coaching, and teaching on the shift – and measure it by asking questions and compiling anecdotes about great guest experiences.
Don’t Bring Me Down
A few weeks ago, at an event with a big group of restaurateurs, one of them told me about the market’s awful current conditions.
Feeling a responsibility to give them a reality check as well as hope – and to rescue them from their death spiral – I told him about some of the really successful examples I see right now.
You can still have a great restaurant business in 2026. Don’t allow yourself to think any other way.
