Article

How to Create a Winning Restaurant Concept

Having been involved in dozens of restaurant openings I can confidently state this as fact: Things rarely go exactly as planned.

Regardless of the reasons, issues such as construction delays, staffing troubles, kitchen efficiency, or unpredictable guest counts will most certainly affect your best-laid plans.

The scramble to overcome these issues during the infancy period of your startup eats up valuable resources in both time and money, oftentimes creating operational and financial hurdles too great to scale.

Restaurant business generalists will tell you that you always need more money than expected, but when it comes to answering the question why, you're more apt to get a response that is exclusive to a particular operator's unique experience. However, by listening to enough voices of experience, one gets a sense that many operators face the same challenges over and over again.

Not surprisingly, unexpected challenges usually lead to financial shortages, which is the common denominator for most failed restaurants. But ultimately, undercapitalization is not the primary cause for most restaurant failures; rather, poor planning and execution are the chief culprits.

In this article, we'll attempt to identify some of the common experiences that restaurant startups face during the opening stages. I won't spend a lot of time addressing the question, "How much money does it take to open a restaurant?" Instead, we'll focus on identifying the obstacles faced by startup restaurants during the months immediately before and after opening. And we'll explore how these obstacles can work to disrupt your business plan and deteriorate your restaurant's level of execution.