How to Build a Successful and Sustainable Restaurant
Running your own restaurant can be a dream job for those with a passion for cooking, or even just eating, delectable dishes. From choosing the right fixtures and fittings for the kitchen (you can find out more here about one vital fixture), to decorating where customers will be sitting, to developing the perfect menu, there is a lot of work required before you are even able to open the doors to the restaurant. However, once you are open, you will find that managing any business entails a lot of hard work and keeping track of numerous factors in real time and behind the scenes. This can be stressful, and that stress can make it even harder to small time restaurateurs to build a successful business. Here are the tips you’ll need to make your restaurant a lasting success.
Finances
Every business depends on maintaining a delicate balance within their finances, and restaurants have an even greater challenge in this department. The struggle for any business is that you’ll need to subtract your expenses from your revenue before you get your final take, the profit that is the goal of any company. Restaurants have the unique challenge of depending heavily on a supply chain to keep products moving in and moving out, much like a retailer. Unlike retail, however, the vast majority of a restaurant’s goods are perishable, and that complicates matters further, because perishable food items can and will expire. To better manage these challenges, conducting a business credit check can provide insight into the financial stability of your suppliers, ensuring they are reliable and minimizing risks within your supply chain. This proactive step can help you avoid unexpected disruptions, maintain consistent operations, and make more informed financial decisions that directly impact your bottom line. In order to conquer this core financial struggle, you’ll need to master budgeting, supply chain management, and food waste.
Budgeting
Maintaining cash flow is a crucial part of your business, and doing so will require an understanding of your finances. Accurate bookkeeping is the first step in this process, and that’s something that can ideally be tackled by a professional account to ensure the best results. With that information in hand, you can use business budget template software to work up a functional budget that can guide your spending. In order to cover your expenses, you’ll need plenty of revenue. However, improving your profit margins can be done by lowering the costs of those expenses, as well. You’ll also want to boost your revenue in order to cover operational costs more easily and create a larger profit. As mentioned above, the supply chain accounts for a disproportionate amount of a restaurant’s expenses, so managing it effectively is crucial.
Supply Chain Management
The supply chain of your restaurant, as with any company, is a B2B arrangement that supplies your business with the goods it needs. This typically entails a manufacturer, a distributor or wholesaler, and a retailer, although there is no end all be all structure for the supply chain of a given business, and different industries must necessarily follow different rules in order to meet different criteria. For a restaurant, the supply chain will predominantly be required for the influx of food items that will then be prepared on site and sold to diners. This implies you should choose fresh food suppliers, that provide products from manufacturers such as farms and slaughterhouses, for example, that can provide the raw materials you’ll need to prepare your dishes. However, your supply chain will also need to account for things like silverware, as well as paper products that can be used to package takeout orders and plastic straws, for example. The best supply chain is one that can provide the specific products your company needs at an affordable cost without sacrificing reliability.
Food Waste
One of the perils of running a restaurant is that of losing money by wasting food items. Every food item is perishable, some more than others. While canned goods can be lost for a much longer time period than the alternative, canned items are not widely used in restaurant settings outside of a few key exceptions such as ingredients like tomato sauce. For everything else, you’ll have to be sure to prioritize never keeping too much of a given item on hand, or you’ll run the risk of letting it go to waste, costing you money instead of making you a profit. This also means that you’ll have to take great care to make sure that your customers are getting the food they ordered, or else that food will go to waste, because you can’t uncook it in order to put it back into cold storage.
