So You Want To Own A Restaraunt

First ask yourself these questions:

1. Do I want to work 14 hours a day? 2. Do I want to work 6 days a week? 3. Do I want to be chief cook and bottle washer? 4. Do I have enough money to build my restaurant and run for 6 months with little business?

These are just a few of the questions my wife and myself should have answered before we decided to open our first restaurant.

Let's look at these questions in more detail and see how the correct answers could have made our experience less stressful, more rewarding and more profitable.

1. Do you want to work 14 hours a day? Please realize that the restaurant business is all time consuming.

If you serve breakfast you'll probably start preparing food at 5:30 to 6:00 am for the morning crowd. Food prep is a huge part of the business that the customer rarely sees or understands.

If you stay open for dinner and have an average of two seatings per evening you won't finish cleaning up until late at night.

2. Do you want to work 6 days a week?

A restaurant, being a service business, is expected to be open when the customers want service. They usually want service on the weekends, thus, Saturdays and Sundays will be some of your biggest days in the week. Plan to give up those days with the kids or the gang. In most places restaurants close on Monday which has proven to be one of the slowest days of the week for business. You will have to plan accordingly.

3. Do you want to be the chief "cook and bottle-washer"?

When you're the boss there is never idle time and always more and more surprises.

I remember the time when we thought we had everything ready to go for a Tuesday dinner crowd when we got a call from the head chef informing us that his little boy had broken his arm and he had to take him to the doctor. He was sorry, but, he wouldn't be able to make the dinner crowd that evening. Well, who do you think had to step in and cook? By the way, I'm not that good a chef! To make matters worse the man that washed the dishes showed up drunk, so my wife wound up doing the dishes the whole evening. Before we could close we both wound up washing dishes so that we would be prepared for the next morning.

4. Do you have enough money to build your business and operate it for at least 6 months should your business take longer than expected to get off the ground?

The biggest cause of failure for any type of new business is the lack of start-up and working capital. If you gain nothing else from this article please be sure and have the appropriate funding. Have a good source or sources of money. You're building budget will usually be more than you counted on. You're business will take longer to open and catch on than you expected. If you don't advertise, who will know you have opened? The "might as wells" will eat up your money and there will be expenses you never dreamt of in your wildest imagination.

You will have to meet payroll even though you're sales may not be so good and you must stay fully stocked with inventory even though some of it may pass it's fresh state and have to be thrown out.

Had my wife and myself taken more time to answer these and many more questions important to the success of a new business venture, we could have saved hundreds of hours of frustration and hundreds of thousands of dollars. After 5 weeks of operation we went out of business.

New research from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests that most failures of American startups will occur in the first two years of their existence.

You don't have to be one of them.

Ask the important questions. Seek competent advisors. Create a good business plan (it will force you to do the number crunching). Don't rush. Don't start without all of the questions answered.

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