Top 12 Tips To Grow Your O’CHARLEY’S

O’Charley’s is a casual, All-American eatery that serves up delicious O’charley’s menu items like burgers, sandwiches and salads. Its huge menu also includes many more traditional American food items like steak with fries. O’Charley’s signature drink is a wine spritzer served in its signature red mug created by the “King of Mugs.”

For over thirty years, O’Charley’s has been serving guests our craveable entrees along with our famous red mug wine spritzers and our fun atmosphere that feels like cooking in a home kitchen.

Here are some tips that will help you grow your O’Charley’s Restaurant:

A great location can make or break a restaurant.

Here are some of the features we look for in a great location:

1. Parking:

There should be ample off-street parking with access gates. The height of the trees and fencing should be high enough to prevent people from entering the lot illegally. The entrance should be marked with signs and lighting to ensure customers’ safety at night.

2. Picnic tables:

We need enough picnic tables that can hold large groups so that we won’t have to turn people away at peak times. It is best to have a mix of patio tables and bench seating options.

3. Location:

The neighborhood area should be safe and quiet with a good flow of foot traffic. Ideally, there should be great access to major routes so that our food items (burgers, salads, drinks etc.) can be easily delivered from our distribution hub.

4. Construction:

We need a construction site or older building that does not interfere with the restaurant’s view or business operational needs. In addition, the building needs to be able to accommodate the following: a walk-in cooler, display cases and freezer units, prep and line areas including cutting boards/liquids sinks, utensils storage etc.

Features for delivery

O’Charley’s started with a home kitchen, so we understand the importance of a convenient menu delivery system. We need to deliver our food, ready to eat or all hot from the kitchen, to the tables as quickly as possible. We also need to have enough storage space on site for our items and our restaurant staff so that they can prepare and serve faster. Here are some features we look for in this system:

5. Temperature control:

Restaurant kitchens are hot places to work in summer and cold in winter, so it is important that our food delivery system maintain a consistent temperature throughout the day. Ideal temperature range should be between 40 degrees Fahrenheit and 85 degrees Fahrenheit.

6. Delivery:

The delivery system should be fast, clean, organized and efficient.

O’Charley’s training programs are a key part of our success. 

We hold trainings on a regular basis to ensure that our staff members can provide the best possible service to our customers. Here are some training tips that we follow in order to ensure that every restaurant is ready for opening day:

7. Staffing:

Up to three weeks before the restaurant opens, we send out a marketing blitz, listing all of the available positions for hire for our new location. We typically have over 1,500 applicants at a time and 600 appointments per location per week. This leaves approximately 20-50 open positions for training.

8. Training:

Our training programs include not only how to cook our food items, but also customer service and safety topics. Each trainee is assigned a “sous chef” to help them with their duties and they are expected to hold training sessions with other staff members on multiple occasions throughout the week.

9. Safety:

We finish the initial training with an in-house safety orientation and one-week crash course on health, safety and sanitation. The final section of the mandatory training prior to opening day involves reviewing all of our policies, procedures and walkthroughs.

We need to choose an appropriate menu for our new location.

Here are tips that we follow in order to make sure that we choose the correct items:

10. Menu categories:

We need to choose what categories of food we want to serve at our new location. The most common options include burgers, sandwiches, salads, appetizers and desserts. We want to cover all possible food orders (both breakfast and lunch), so that when someone orders a burger / sandwich / salad etc., they will receive exactly what they ordered and not something smaller or less appetizing than their original order.

11. Menu items:

We like to offer a wide variety of menu items so that we have something for everyone. We also want to offer several different sizes (small, medium and large) of each category so that we can work with customers who want to add extra toppings (lettuce, onions, tomatoes etc.) or upgrading their orders to larger sizes.

12. Ordering:

We need a system in place that lets the customer choose their preferred size by entering an order on our website. Once they input the correct information into their phone or other mobile device, they should be able to select the food item they want and it will save their order choice so they do not need to re-enter it later. We need this to work with both our pick up and delivery systems so that all orders can be filled and fulfilled at the same time.

Conclusion:

We are now in the process of moving our O’Charley’s restaurant and we need your help. The key elements that we have outlined above will help us to succeed as a restaurant chain. We hope you will be part of our team and help us to grow from a startup to a flourishing, nationwide chain!