Q: How can I tailor my second unit to more effectively handle high traffic?

First of all what you need to do is a lot of homework on what you have learned about your first unit that can make your second unit look better. In many cases people do that, but they don’t do it in enough detail or sufficiently to really maximize the potential improvements for unit No. 2.

They don’t need just to think total number of customers a day. They need to think about peak order per hour, per half hour, maybe even by 15-minute increments, so they understand what the capacity requirements are on the system.

In the front of the house, the biggest opportunity is going to be an allocation of dining room space. The most common mistake people make is they think about the number of seats. It’s not about the number of seats; it’s about the number of tables. Almost invariably, restaurants do a poor job of matching table compliment to customer compliment.

Typically what happens is they grossly overload the number of four-tops, relative to the number of parties of two that come in. You can walk into almost any dining room and see a third of the four-top tables having two people sitting at them, or even one person sitting at them.

One of the things that they can do is evaluate what their party size usually is for dine-in, keeping in mind it changes—it changes by daypart and it changes by day and week. Try to get closer than your first store at matching deuces to your four-tops, which allows you to get more tables in the same amount of space or the same amount of tables in a smaller space. Either one will help unit economics improve.

The second mistake operators make is they don’t make the seating flexible enough. If you think about a banquette wall of deuces, it’s very easy for consumers to slide them together efficiently and easily and make a party of two, a party of four, or a party of six. Bolted seats to the floor aren’t going to be moved.

You need to design your stations in the dining room—napkins, straws, all that type of stuff—to be able to handle a whole peak-period load without restocking. If you need to restock it needs to be fast, convenient, and with minimal walking requirements of the staff.

The next thing you’ve got to do is understand how your second unit is going to be different from your first unit. You’ve got to be able to have a pretty good estimate, not just of what your total volume’s going to be in the store, but what is going to be your peak-period capacity.

There are two things in the front of house to worry about. Table compliment is the biggest and then customer pinch points. In many cases, the beverage station is too close to the order process, and it creates customer congestion. Operators want to put it close because they don’t want to run the lines another 10 feet. Well run the lines another 10 feet; open up the space if it really is going to help move people through the line.

One of the things behind the counter that you really want to take a look at is the workstation design. The first thing you need to really understand is how efficient is the workstation and is there enough space for the necessary tasks—not excess, unused space that just wastes time and energy.

Workstations should be designed so they don’t have to be restocked during a peak meal period. If in fact someone has to run to the back of the kitchen or the store room to get more lettuce and bring it up to the make station at 12:30 p.m., something’s been designed wrong.