You can take a restaurant management course if you’re passionate about restaurants or need to learn to manage one. During the course, you’ll learn how to handle finances, conduct food industry market analysis, and monitor food supply chain management. However, learning the concepts of restaurant management isn’t enough – you should also understand how to apply that knowledge to real-life situations.
Financing
While trying a restaurant management degree, you will get resources for handling finances to optimize profit. Most degrees include lessons on budgeting, maintaining a cash flow statement, reducing food costs and waste, and accounting. Putting the theoretical knowledge of those financing concepts into practice requires a high level of discipline and, sometimes, trial and error.
Financing problems could demand you to alter the food menu based on ingredient cost and availability. You may also need to closely monitor vendor relations to reduce cost and monitor average spending per customer. To monitor vendors well, you need to have good communication skills.
Overseeing Restaurant Staff
Regardless of what you were taught in your restaurant management degree, a general requirement for managers is staffing. You will be responsible for staff training, retention, and scheduling (if they do shifts). Depending on the restaurant, managers may also handle the hiring and firing of staff.
To effectively manage staff in the real world, you must be empathetic and stern. You should know the right steps to take when a staff issue occurs. In the real world, you can’t just order staff around – you need to create a sense of community that sets everyone up for success.
Applying Techniques for Food Purchasing
Your online management course will not specify the best locations for ingredients. However, you can apply the techniques learned to identify the best places for ingredients and food materials. When making a food purchase, you need to consider:
Freshness of food: Before buying food, you need to check for signs of staleness. Only buy fresh food, even when you plan to cook them early.
Cost per item: Your budget determines how much you can spend each time you need to purchase.
Final sale price: Before buying all ingredients and raw materials needed for food production, compare the total costs of purchase to the sale price to determine if you’ll have to make any adjustments.
Inventory needs: Prioritize purchasing high-demand food instead of low-demand food materials.
Knowing the Basics of Food Preparation
In the real world, you must know when the restaurant’s food is well-prepared and poorly prepared. You wouldn’t be cooking, but knowing the basics of food preparation will help in quality control. In some cases, you may not learn some of these basics in your online degree, but you can learn as you advance in your career. It’s much easier to scale when you note what makes the customers happy, and their complaints.
You’ll closely review different aspects like:
Recipe standardization
Equipment use
Food presentation
Awareness of Law Standards
To avoid legal issues, you must abide by local, state, and federal laws for food and beverage services. To make things easier, you can create a checklist of these standards and ensure every box is checked off.
Below are some of the rules and regulations you need to know:
Fair labor practices by The Department of Labor’s FLSA.
Inclusive Workplaces by the EEOC
Cleaning policy
Food handler licenses
Worker injury prevention policies and avoiding OSHA violations
How the Pandemic Has Affected Restaurant Workers(Opens in a new browser tab)
Final Thoughts
Getting a restaurant management degree will help you understand the fundamentals of successful management. It teaches you the technical approaches to solve problems during management and sets you up for success. However, even though these degrees are helpful, you should also learn from real-world situations and experiences.