Beyond their popular menus, Mcdonald's, KFC, Dominoes, and Starbucks all have one thing in common: they're redefining what it means for a chain restaurant to prosper. 

Chain restaurants are trending and presenting promising growth. Staying ahead of the curve and establishing a successful venture requires a fitting and doable chain restaurant growth strategy, which we will discuss in this article.

Why Chain Restaurants for Sustainable Growth?

The restaurant industry is growing steadily. As of 2021, there were 103,323 chain restaurants in the United States, and this industry is anticipated to expand at a CAGR of 3.9% and have 6.3% profitability for the 2019-2024 period.

Despite the tremendous growth of online food delivery services, the love of dining out is nowhere near drying out. Two in three US citizens favor dining out over ordering online food.

Successful chain restaurants benefit from brand recognition and customer loyalty. McDonald's serves over 69 million customers daily in over 100 countries. Chain restaurants can leverage economies of scale in purchasing, operations, marketing, and operations, leading to great cost savings and higher profit margins.

From expanded sales opportunities to remarkable brand recognition, chain restaurants are here to take your food business to new heights. If you haven’t thought of opening chain restaurants, then it’s high time to do that because the top 50 restaurant chains grew 7% in 2023, compared to 5% growth across the overall industry.

Chain Restaurant Growth Mastery: Bulletproof Strategies for Success

Follow the strategies mentioned below while setting up chain restaurants.

Start Growth from Within

Accomplishing long-term success is possible by growing your customer base organically. You can focus on your customers and understand their needs to serve them better.

• Know your customers: You must work to understand customer demographics, preferences, and dining habits. Start by deploying cutting-edge data analytics to recognize trends, favored menu items, and areas for improvement. You can use technology for your restaurants from providers like OrderEm to give you such insights. Conducting surveys to gather direct feedback is also a practicable approach. 

• Training your staff: In a food business, your staff is the backbone, and you can’t anticipate having flourishing chain restaurants- growth if your staff does not maintain quality standards. Work extensively to equip your staff with the expected knowledge and skills to provide outstanding service. They should maintain the brand identity and quality standards throughout the outlets. 

Through these, chain restaurant owners can incubate a growth culture from within to facilitate revenue expansion.

Do Effective Financial Planning

Expansion requires expenditure. Lack of efficient financial planning leads to failure in 60% of restaurants. To avoid this pitfall, it’s important to consider the success and profitability of the current restaurant model.

Executing a SWOT analysis is a great move to comprehend the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your business model.

Sort out the funding means and construct the right strategy for managing financial risks and promoting sustainable growth. It ensures that the available funds are invested correctly, resulting in a high marginal profit.

Invest in Central Data Management

Fragmented data will impede your growth strategy and lead to unsuitable insights into market trends, employee performance, and revenue generated.

You can use an order management solution by OrderEM that will link data from multiple restaurants under one umbrella and give you valued insights. It can help you collect real-time data from multiple restaurants through centralized data management.

From a single platform, you can track orders, invoices, vendor payments, customer feedback, and even conduct surveys from customers of all your restaurants.

It collects and analyzes data, providing useful insights into performance bottlenecks. It simplifies everything related to data management and enables growth for your business.

Choose Locations Wisely

55% of diners choose a restaurant according to the location and if you’re not mastering that front then you’re missing out on a crucial growth factor. Keep a few things in mind while selecting a location for your chain restaurant.

• Choose a location that has great visibility and less competition.
• Keep accessibility in mind. The location should have ample space and has great connectivity through public & private transport. 
• Consider the surrounding neighborhood and invest in proper security measures for your restaurant.

Integrate Online Ordering Facility

Don’t overlook having an online presence for your chain restaurants. The online food delivery market is likely to expand at a CAGR of 10.06% and reach US$1.79tn by 2028. If you’re not tapping into this vertical, you’re impeding your growth.

However, you need to preserve quality and consistency in online food delivery for all the chain restaurants under your brand. Restaurant management software like OrderEM enables chains to offer online food delivery through multiple channels. In addition, it lets your delivery partners and customers get real-time order updates, track the order status, and record the order delivery performance.

Efficient Customer Management with a Loyalty Program

In a world where 78% of customers are backing off just because of a poor customer experience, you can’t afford to compromise on customer management. Giving utmost attention to promoting customer loyalty and satisfaction always drives benefits.

For instance, it spreads word of mouth, fosters customer trust, boosts sales, and increases the customer repeat rate. All these things combined lead to higher profitability for restaurants.. However, it is not easy and you must stay on your toes to move ahead of the herd. Chain restaurants can offering personalized loyalty programs.

You can have powerful and tech-driven technology loyalty management solution for your chain restaurants. It permits restaurant owners to collect real-time data from different locations and provide a holistic view of the entire customer journey.

It presents accurate and reliable data on past dining experiences, issues or complaints, and average order value. This data is further used to furnish targeted loyalty programs. It can send automated emails, messages, and push notifications, leading to better customer management.

Maintain an Identical Brand Image

Chain restaurants help a business build a uniform brand identity. But you should ensure the same level of service delivery, professionalism, and taste. Any disparities can cause uneven revenue growth in your chain restaurants and you might have difficulties meeting the breakeven.

Maintaining a brand image is not tough provided you:

• Make sure that all your chain restaurants have a consistent look and feel. 
• Standardize your menu. While you can leave scope for some regional variations, try to maintain a core menu with consistent recipes and quality standards across all locations. You can a use digital menus through barcodes that your customers can access on their devices to gain an edge. 
• Deploy strict quality control measures to monitor food preparation, service delivery, and customer management. Poor service delivery at one of your chain restaurants can have a negative influence on your brand.

Can Your Chain Restaurant Conquer the Growth Frontier?

Growing your chain restaurants parallel fashion should not be challenging by leveraging technology. The seeds of revenue growth in chain restaurants are effective customer management and having an online presence for your business..

High-tech software solutions have the potential to streamline every key aspect of your business, crucial for continual growth and giving you much-needed peace of mind.