When you own a restaurant or a pub, the number of customers you can fit into your establishment has a direct impact on how much money you can make. Whilst you don't want people to be bumping elbows, you may want to explore a few creative ways to fit more people into your space. If you're thinking about a commercial renovation with a company like Randstar Building Services, consider the following ideas.
1. Change Bars to Standing Only Areas
When people are dining, they obviously want (and need) to be able to sit down, but if they're just enjoying a cocktail or a beer, standing is typically fine. If you own a club or pub and only focus on drinks or small plates, you may want to change the whole establishment to standing only.
Similarly, if you have a restaurant with a small bar area where customers can grab a drink before their meal, you may want to turn that into a standing only area. To illustrate how this saves space, imagine a high top table that people stand around.
Then, imagine the same size of table but lower and surrounded by chairs. Pushing chairs in and out takes up a lot more space than the former option.
2. Get Rid of Dead Spaces
Depending on the layout of your restaurant, you may have a lot of dead spaces. That may include unnecessary hallways, walls that cut through your establishment at weird angles, or even odd raised areas.
To explain how a raised area may be limiting your available space, imagine that you have a small raised stage to host bands or entertainment. However, you no longer use this area. As a result, you have a single table placed there.
If you work with a commercial renovator to get rid of that raised space, you would have continuity between that area and the rest of your floor. By extension, you would be able to fit more tables into the space.
3. Work From Home
You likely have office space in your restaurant. That's probably where you write schedules, fill out order forms and do other management type activities. In some cases, you may be able to get rid of this space or make it smaller. Then, you can handle these tasks from home and become one of the one in three Australians who occasionally works from home. .
If that's possible, you can turn these spaces into dining areas during your next commercial renovation. Depending on your needs, you could turn these areas into small areas for private functions, or you could knock down a few walls and incorporate the spaces into the rest of your restaurant.
4. Streamline Storage Spaces
Just as you may be able to get rid of offices, you may also be able to get rid of some storage spaces. Do you have large store rooms that are only half used? Is it possible to reduce how much food you keep on site and just order from your vendors more frequently?
If you've answered yes to those questions, you may be able to convert some storage spaces to dining spaces as well.
5. Think Outside the Box
To fit as many diners as possible into your establishment, you may need to think outside the box—literally. If your restaurant is in its own building, can you add dining space to the roof? Even if you share a space, is it possible to add tables outside on the sidewalk or in the hallways that you share with other businesses? During your next commercial renovation, it may be time to spill outside your traditional borders.
To get more ideas and start the process, contact a commercial renovation expert.
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