Secure Investments: Restaurant Surveillance Systems

Surveillance systems protect restaurant owners from loss and offer other operational advantages.

By Derek Gale, Associate Editor -- Restaurants & Institutions, 9/15/2007

Surveillance systems allow for remote monitoring of multiple operations from a single location.

Brian Olson, owner of Café Intermezzo, a European-style coffeehouse with two locations around Atlanta, had a dishwasher try to steal $600. And John Tzantarmas, who with his father runs The New Copper Penny, a restaurant/nightclub in Portland, Ore., was sued as part of a case involving the assault of a waitress at another establishment. In both cases, security systems helped the operators resolve the problems without losing money.

"We’ve saved on our investment a hundred times over," Tzantarmas says. "I think [such systems are] a necessity when someone’s in the kind of business we’re in. If you have just one slip-and-fall case you can disprove, and the case gets dismissed, you’re talking about a benefit to insurance … it has a pretty high trickle-down effect."

Olson agrees. "We really feel that we paid for the system easily in the first year of ownership," he says. "One of the tangible things is that [such systems] might have an impact on one’s insurance premiums—both property and liability coverage. We serve alcohol, so the insurer likes that we have these cameras."

When the Cat’s Away …

In addition to protecting operators against theft and false or fraudulent claims, security systems can provide insights into how to deliver better service, make operations run more smoothly and enhance guest satisfaction.

"Operationally, you might see staff members doing things [that] are not correct according to procedures," Olson says. "[This provides] a way of nicely and gently correcting people."

And "there is certainly an advantage to being able to bring eyes into the operation when [employees] don’t know you’re there," Olson says. "As an owner, one can sense that when you walk in, the demeanor and attitude changes a little—just like children do when parents come home."

Olson is able to monitor his operations from any computer with a high-speed Internet connection. He uses this feature when he is at one Café Intermezzo location to watch what’s happening at the other. "As we grow and open more locations," he says, "it’s going to be extremely helpful as a way to manage and watch operations."

Lenny Valentino Jr., chief operating officer of Trevose, Pa.-based Rita’s Water Ice, uses a closed-circuit television system to monitor the eight corporate-owned Rita’s locations from one site. "I can’t be everywhere," he says, "but I can look onscreen and see what types of operational situations are occurring—it’s my way of getting the pulse of our business."

Return on Investment

Security systems can be a substantial investment, but they don’t have to be. "You can do it two ways," Tzantarmas says. "You can jump in and pay for everything as you first put it in, or you can grow the system, which is what we did. We added cameras little by little."

Olson tried to understand the cost versus return by calculating the various benefits such systems offer and giving those a value. "I make decision-making grids when investing money and try to determine what the yield will be," he says. "I give point values to various things. This is not like an espresso machine where you determine how many cups will make a gross profit to yield a return."

In the end, if operators are able to save even a few dollars a day by preventing employees from skimming cash or giving away product, over a few years, the systems can pay for themselves.