Community involvement is essential for any business but is even more vital for a restaurant. Without a good reputation, a restaurant can have the best food in the world, but few people will actually want to eat there. Being actively involved in the community provides many benefits, but a key advantage is building and maintaining a good reputation for your business.
1. Gets Your Name Out There
The biggest challenge facing approximately 10% of all restaurants is getting your name out there and standing out from the competition. But, by diving headfirst into community matters, you can help solve this issue.
By sponsoring local sports teams, or various events throughout the community, you often get your name and/or logo included in of any marketing materials they create. For a small sponsorship fee, you can gain an entirely new megaphone from which to shout out your restaurant’s name.
2. Builds Trust With Your Customers
Whether you’re an independent pizzeria or a massive multi-national chain, trust is a cornerstone of any business. Not only do you need the trust of your employees, but you also need the trust of your customers. One of the fastest ways to get the latter is to show your customers that you care about more than just selling your food.
You can show customers you care by becoming more heavily involved in the community by donating to local fundraisers, volunteering at non-profit events, or offering your restaurant as a site for community groups to have meetings. Once your customers see that you’re doing things for your community that don't directly result in you selling more items, their trust for your business will shoot through the roof.
3. Forms Relationships With Other Businesses
The small business community is a close group of people, and as a restaurant owner, there are a lot of benefits to being part of this community. One of the biggest is that it allows you to exchange products with one another, likely at a discounted rate.
Being involved in the community gives you a chance to interact with a local grocery store, bakery, or other small business that would make a good partnership opportunity. You put your products on their shelves (in the form of frozen take-home pizzas or premade dough), you can offer a select lineup of their products in your restaurant, or you can find some other way to collaborate with other small businesses. Collaboration allows you to service more of your customer’s needs while also strengthening community ties.
4. Attracts Better Employees
Hiring is already enough of a challenge for restaurants, with 93% of pizzeria owners being short-staffed, so anything you can do to make the hiring process easier will go a long way. And it might be surprising, but community involvement can be a significant factor in attracting the best employees possible.
By sponsoring local events and donating to good causes, you can give your restaurant the image of a business that cares about more than just making money. But to get the full benefits of community volunteerism, it will require you to give your employees some paid volunteering time off from work. Just a handful of paid volunteering hours per year is enough to make 71% of employees like their workplace more.
Whether you’re hiring delivery drivers, servers, or cooks, you need candidates to like you more than the restaurant down the road that is hiring. And with the ongoing labor shortage, the last thing you want to do is be left with the subpar leftover employees that no other pizzeria wants. So it’s in your best interest to be more involved in the community and allow your employees to be as involved as they’d like as well.
Between the improvement to your business’s public image, the relationship with your customers, the bond between your business and other local businesses, and the pool of applicants that you receive, it’s evident that regular community involvement is key to your restaurant’s continued success. If you’d like to learn about other ways to improve your restaurant’s bottom line, check out our article on how the right POS can change the way you do delivery.
