Start a Restaurant

Keep Focused on the Restaurant Business

The food service industry caters to a universal need of humans – to be nourished. However, the way food appeals to humans isn’t at all universal. Mankind is a diverse group and there isn’t one particular operation of food service that could satisfy this diversity. This is one reality that aspirants in the restaurant business find difficulty to accept. Many hopefuls think they can catch everyone, but such efforts end up in failure. Trying to cater to everyone results into not being able to cater to anyone at all. It is best to just concentrate on a small part of the market, say ten percent or so, this way, you can offer the best service for that part of your choice. This is done by doing a market analysis – the study of the potential target market.

The senior market is composed of people who are 65 years or older. Seniors generally live on fixed incomes, from their pension or sustenance by relatives, and thus have a rather inflexible spending power. Most seniors usually go to family-oriented eating places such as lunch buffets because they offer good food and services at affordable prizes. Less active seniors usually prefer smaller portions as they may have smaller appetites. When targeting seniors, it is best to make them special by offering senior promotions, or lowered rates. You can also market your restaurant as senior-friendly by emphasizing safety features such as ramps and handlebars.

The late adult market is composed of people aged 50 to 64. They are usually the ones who are experiencing the empty nest syndrome, where grownup children have left the home. This market usually has the most stable financial status as they could be in the most advanced stages in their careers. At this point, price usually doesn’t matter. This is the age when people start trying to really enjoy life and its pleasures. So the main concern is good food and service. When targeting this market, it is good to present your restaurant with elegance and sophistication. It would be wise to invest more on ambience and class. › Continue reading

Tags: Restaurant Business Management

Permits Needed To Start A Restaurant Business

When you open a restaurant business, there are many permits and licenses you will be required to have. The type of business license you will need will be different in each city, county, and state. There are some who require each business to register yearly, and they collect a fee from each registration. There are others that do not require a business to register if the business is not incorporated, unless you will be operating under an assumed or fictitious name.

To learn what type of licenses and permits you will need for the area your business will be located in, you need to talk to your county or city clerk. You will also want to check out the zoning ordinances and sign regulations that may apply to the type and location of your business.

Before you even think about obtaining licenses and permits, you will need to apply for a Federal Employer Identification Number or EIN. You can do this by visiting the IRS website. They will ask a few questions and you will be issued an EIN. This number identifies you to the government (IRS) as a business owner. Everyone who owns a business must have an EIN.

Below are some of the licenses and permits that you may need for your restaurant business.

1. A License for Business– Depending on your restaurant business location, you may be charged a percentage of your gross sales, or a simple yearly fee to operate your business.

2. A Food Handler’s License or Permit– This is necessary for the selling of edible goods. Each state and county have their own set of rules and amount of fee charged. You will be inspected regularly by health inspectors to make sure you are running a clean restaurant business. › Continue reading

Tags: Restaurant Business Management

How to Start a Restaurant Business Following a Profitable System

If you’ve been looking into starting a restaurant business, this could be the information you need to become successful. Anyone who has never worked in a restaurant before can really understand how difficult it can be to make something like this successful. It doesn’t matter if it’s the food, the bar area, the employees or even the distributors, every facet of the business has to be complete or your new venture won’t run smoothly.

This is why learning How to Start a Restaurant Business can make or break you within the first two years. However, we came across this profitable system that delivers a success rate over around 80% according to their sales page. This is enough to have us take a deeper look and find what exactly you can learn and accomplish from using this program. The results are quite interesting.

The Last Thirty Years Have Been Crazy

Let’s face it. Restaurant sales have gone up tremendously over the last thirty years. When you look on their sales page, you’ll find a snapshot of the progression that has taken place over the last three decades. What started out as 42.8 billion dollars has now risen to 558.3 billion dollars. We aren’t great mathematicians or anything, but that type of increase is definitely monumental. › Continue reading

Time to Sell your Restaurant? Some Advice from Restaurant Consultants, Inc.

As a specialist in getting restaurants open, it is surprising how many people ask, “How can I get out of my restaurant?” Reasons for this question vary greatly, from a death in the family to a merger with another firm, to the end of a lease.

Selling your restaurant requires quality prior planning if you are going to realize the maximum value for the business. This planning is not much different when getting out than when you first got into that business.

What things did you look for when you bought your restaurant? Of course, profit was probably the key consideration, followed by a great location, a niche market, a solid system of operations, and a vision for growth. Aren’t these the same things you need to concentrate on if you are going to market your operation to someone else?

A strong focus on the basics, about twelve months prior to getting out of your operation can take you from where you are at now, to a maximum market value. Let’s look at some of the top areas you may wish to concentrate on right away:

1. Bookkeeping. A clean, organized and understandable set of financials are critical to the sale. A close friend once said, “A business with no profits on paper has no value”, and this statement is close to being very true. You will want to show where your income came from, what you spent on expenses, and what kind of cash flow exists. If you cannot show these numbers, all the profit in the world will not make any difference to a buyer if you cannot prove it. A professional accounting firm can give you feedback on how to structure your systems.

2. Profits. You simply must be profitable and there are ways to do it. By concentrating on your highest cost areas such as labor, food and beverage, you can make good headway by making your purchasing more efficient, watching your inventory levels, and what you are charging for your products. Obviously profit generation is a very large topic and worth looking at closely. Have you had an operations analysis done on your business recently? A restaurant consultant can conduct this analysis inexpensively and give you a list of things to work on. › Continue reading

Tags: Restaurant Business Management

How To Avoid Restaurant Sales Stagnation

Restaurant Management experts contend that there are four ways in which hospitality businesses can improve their financial performance. None of these ways are mutually exclusive, so you can try any combination of these four variables at any given time and in any order of importance:

Increasing sales volume (getting more customers to your venue)
Increasing price (put up your prices on your menus)
Cutting costs (decrease your food, beverage and wage costs)
Increasing the average spend (get your customers to buy more every time they buy of you)
Combining price and sales volume will no doubt post increased revenue. Cutting costs will also result in savings.

Restaurant marketers (ie you the business owner or manager) mistakenly assume that the only means of increasing sales is to net more customers. While its true that selling to more people will definitely make your sales go up, there can also be several other, more innovative ways of increasing turnover, such as increasing frequency of sales to the same customer or making higher value sales to him/her.

It does follows that turnover also increases when customers spend more each time they buy from you (increasing spend) and when they do it more often (increasing frequency). McDonalds used this technique to great aplomb when it taught its sales force to prod customers with the seemingly innocuous poser: “Would you like fries with your burgers, please?” A simple question like that, marketers testify enabled the snack food giant to increase its turnover worldwide by $19 million a day!

Hence the four variables that impact sales in any business are: › Continue reading

Tags: Restaurant Business Management

Competition in the Restaurant Industry

Have you heard the term Coopetition? If not, you’ll hear it soon. It is causing quite a stir in the marketing circles.

So in case that you are not familiar with the term, let’s start by defining coopetition. If we check Wikipedia, we find the following definition:

“Coopetition or Co-opetition is a neologism coined to describe cooperative competition. Co-opetition occurs when companies work together for parts of their business where they do not believe they have competitive advantage, and where they believe they can share common costs. For instance, the cooperation between Peugeot and Toyota on shared components for a new city car for Europe in 2005. In this case, companies will save money on shared costs, while remaining fiercely competitive in other areas. For co-opetition to work, companies need to very clearly define where they are working together, and where they are competing.” › Continue reading

Tags: Business, Competition, French cuisine, Italian cuisine, Marketing, Marketing and Advertising, Marketing strategy, United States

Restaurant Loans – Credit Crisis

As you may have guessed restaurant loans are taking a serious beating in the current credit crisis. A year ago, and even 6 months ago there were many options. In fact, 30 year fixed programs on restaurant loans where an option, stated income commercial loans where available, borrowers with very low and or no net income could still get decent restaurant loans. Even borrowers with other issues like bad credit could find restaurant loans.

Now almost all of these creative options have frozen up and or are simply gone. What’s left are traditional loans. Primarily SBA commercial loans and a few, scattered, and only for very strong borrowers, conventional commercial mortgages. With these types of options, restaurant owners are going to have to start planning for the future and be more conscious of playing the traditional game. In other words, you’ve got to show some income! If you don’t show any income on your tax returns you’re not going to get a loan.

If for example you know you have a loan ballooning soon or if you’re in the process of expanding locations you’ve got to tell your CPA now to start showing some income. Yes you might increase the amount of tax you will have to pay but the alternative could be much more expensive. › Continue reading

Your Restaurant Business Plan

To obtain funding for your endeavor, you will need to have a well thought out restaurant business plan. This restaurant business plan will need to be top notch or you may not get the startup money you need.

You can find websites who offer templates and resources to help you devise a workable business plan. This approach to writing a restaurant business plan, will help you to think about all of the major and minor costs that you will need to attend to. All of these things are vital in a restaurant startup. You can use the resources on these sites to make the process easier, and get your restaurant business plan out there faster. They provide templates that will allow you to write a professional business plan that will attract investors to you.

Many of these sites will provide you with checklists for your startup, and other resources for budgeting and to stay on track. You will also have access to tools to develop how your business will operate and procedures to help you get organized and be ready when the day comes to open your restaurant business.

You can find sites that will provide you with customizable documents and detailed business plans, to make everything faster and easier to formulate a concise and professional restaurant business plan. They also provide guidance for the preparation of a business plan. This includes business concept, market analysis, marketing strategies, operational plan, and more. You will have access to everything you need to produce a professional restaurant business plan. › Continue reading

Tags: Restaurant Design and Concept

Five Valuable Tips For Training Restaurant/Bar Staff

Hiring restaurant and bar staff is an ongoing job. Even if you have enough staff, you should be looking for others at all times. When you go out to eat, when they come in to eat. Friends of your staff are a great way to find good people.

Once you have the “right” person hired, there are some key things that you should keep in mind.

1. Develop a training schedule. Unscheduled training will lead to extra hours and lower productivity. Explain daily objectives for each trainee and trainer. Create a training program and checklist. Have the trainee and the trainer sign off each shift that the objectives have been completed. This also helps to ensure that they trainee is staying on schedule and your training is consistent. Keep the sheets in the staff’s file in the office.
2. Provide a free meal each shift to each trainee. Allow them to order from certain sections each shift. This will give them a chance to try different items. Example: Day 1 – Apps, Day 2 – soup/salads, Day 3 – mains… How do you expect them to sell the items if they have never tried them? “Oh, I’m sorry, I’ve never tried that.” Would you order it?
3. You need to compensate the trainer as their productivity will be lower. They will not be able to take as much of their normal workload. Less tables for them = less money. See if giving a free meal to the trainer is enough compensation for training vs. extra hourly. If not, perhaps you could let them make their own schedule the following week. Look for something that they will find a bonus, without costing you extra dollars. paying them more is an option, but the most expensive option.
4. Document the training. This will save you piles of money if you end up in Labour Court down the road. See point number 2. › Continue reading

Tags: Restaurant Business Management

Restaurant Profits Soar With Required Beverage Feature

The History of Server Prepared Drinks

Since the creation of food service waiters and servers have been pouring coffees, teas and sodas for their customers. A tradition of service that dates back as far as history records serving food.

Nothing new for today’s restaurant diner except maybe a bit more variety in the choices of drink. And with servers and waiters vying for more and more tip income it only stands to reason that they are pouring more and more free refills.

So where is the problem? Your customers are getting better service and your wait staff is getting better compensated. All looks good on the surface.

But the question arises, are you getting paid for all those drinks, sodas and coffees? You certainly are paying for all the ingredients. Do your sales reflect the prices that should be charged?

The Need to Control Server Prepared Drinks

But what happens when the server forgets to ring up the soft beverage? Your servers and waiters are already pouring the same amounts of soft beverages so your food cost takes a hit. If they don’t ring the drink to begin with (even if by mistake) then you are out the income that is supposed to offset the heavy pouring that is already taking place.

What you need is a way to enforce the ringing of at least 1 beverage/drink per person ordering food. Sounds simple, but not all point of sale systems can do this. › Continue reading

Tags: Restaurant Business Management