Tips From Retailers and Restaurateurs
Part of the allure of starting an online business was always that you could run your business from anywhere you can find a connection to the internet. Owners of boutiques, retail outlets and restaurants did not have that same luxury. But with the advent of iPad POS systems and cloud POS solutions, even owners of these “hands-on” businesses can manage their operation from afar. While most beloved restaurants and specialized boutiques still rely on the personal touch of their founder in order to thrive, now they can at least leave town for a week without being completely out of the loop of daily operations.
Remote Management with a Retail POS System
From CBD stores to clothing boutiques, you can manage your store remotely with a cutting-edge POS system such as Lightspeed.
“Honestly, one of the best features is that I can just log in anywhere and I can view all of my stores right there. It’s very easy for me to help one of my stores remotely and figure out a problem,” reports Britney Stone of CBD Plus USA, a CBD store with over 100 branches around the country.
In the past, if your business had more than one location, you as the owner risked allowing things to fall through the cracks. You would need to read reports that may not have been accurate by the time you actually read them. If you found a problem, you would need to contact the manager of that location to fix it.
Now with scalable cloud POS systems, owners can truly get a birds-eye view of their shops and drill down as deep as they need to in order to keep operations running without a hiccup.
Remote Management With a Restaurant POS System
From tweaking the menu from across the country to seeing exactly how many tables in each location are full while on vacation, the ability of restaurant owners to check on and tweak their operations remotely has made great strides in recent years.
“I can just log in and with the click of a button, see what happens in Bath and how many tables are open in Exeter, and that’s amazing,” boasted Norbert Swierad of Absurd Bird, a New Orleans-themed soul food restaurant making waves across the UK. He can even monitor his new food truck from anywhere.
Kabir Kapoor recently opened Pastel, a high-end restaurant in Montreal. With Lightspeed, Kapoor can manage the restaurant from anywhere with just an iPad, which means he can make changes to Pastel’s unique menu on the fly and pull reports to make informed decisions for the future of Pastel. “When I open up Lightspeed, my main focus is the reports. The more data I can get about what customers ate and what they spent their money on, the better an experience I can create,” says Kapoor.
These capabilities pave the way for new management paradigms that simply weren’t feasible five years ago. While restaurant owners will no doubt find that the personal touch is essential for imparting their unique style and charisma into staff and diners alike, today’s POS software makes it possible to step back for a bit without being totally out of touch and hence worrying how things are going in your absence.
Restaurant and retail owners have both reaped significant benefits from the emergence of remote management and monitoring capabilities. The fact that these can be utilized with only an iPad rather than a full laptop gives owners and managers even more flexibility to take their business with them wherever their travel brings them.
