Small Business Tips – Starting & Marketing a Restaurant

Filed Under (Food-Beverages) by admin on 01-04-2010

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Even in tough economic times, the restaurant business keeps on booming, maybe because people tend to dine out with friends, spouse or family on special occasions (and sometimes for no specific reasons). There’s an ever increasing number of restaurants in all major cities of the world, with approximately 1 million in US alone. You are well aware of the phenomenal success that’s achieved by food chains. There are numerous types of restaurants, for instance Chinese restaurants, continental restaurants, breakfast restaurants, quick service restaurants, fast food restaurants or full meal restaurants, Indian food restaurants, Japanese, Mexican, Pizza restaurants, coffee house, seafood restaurants, Thai restaurants, and so on. Not that you need to chose one from this list, you are free to come up with your own unique restaurant.

After the initial planning, you should set out searching for the perfect location. Location is just so important in the success of any restaurant; it is easily the second most important factor after the quality of food. It’s not easy to find an ideal location for restaurant because it must have the visibility and accessibility, at the same time, having a restaurant at a very crowded place is not a good idea either. That makes it a kind of catch-22 situation. Nevertheless, if you can’t get a location with all of these features, just go for a location that gives your restaurant the desired visibility, or otherwise you’ll be required to do extensive advertising in the start.

Next step is to write, design and price a menu. Always design and create menus while keeping in mind your targeted customers, the menu design should compliant with the interior. Spend ample time on pricing, because you need to offer quality food at lower rates as compared to your competitors (if there’s any in nearby locations). There are many pricing techniques (e.g. Price Cost method, competitive pricing or Gross margin method) and you must read into the pros and cons of each method before choosing one of them. Don’t try to put too much variety on menu and effectively highlight the best dishes. Ideally, you must be having one or more specialty, however that’s not compulsory. Chose your chefs carefully and always ask for references. Apart from the chefs, you’ll need to hire an experienced manager and some waiters. Spend some time and resources on training your staff and remember, people prefer one restaurant over others sometimes just because the waiter and staff is more friendly and generous at that place.

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