When an entrepreneur starts a new restaurant, they envision sackloads of cash piling up on their doorstep. After all, there’s hundreds of thousands of restaurants across the nation. It’s gotta work, right? What they don’t realize is that 60 percent of independent restaurants fail within that first year of opening.
The biggest thing that people neglect is the planning stage. There are no miraculous ‘step 2’s when talking about the restaurant industry. You know:
1. Open new restaurant
2. ???
3. PROFIT!
It’s necessary to build your restaurant on a solid foundation. “There are two ways to start a restaurant: find a great location and base your concept on that, or find a great concept and find the location to suit it,” said Bill Guilfoyle, associate professor of business management at the Culinary Institute of America.
From the concept comes the marketing, and the restaurant to surround it. If you don’t have a solid concept, you’re building the rest of the restaurant on shaky ground. It wouldn’t matter if you had the best restaurant supplies and best employees, it would still be hard to recover without good planning.
It takes a lot of work, a lot of planning and effort to make the restaurant of your dreams.
For some more tips, tricks, and ideas, check out the article in the Poughkeepsie Journal titled “How to Survive in the Restaurant Business.”
