How to turn a good restaurant into a great business

How to Turn Your Good Restaurant into a Great Business
by Jim Laube, RestaurantOwner.com

People who open their own restaurant typically possess an abundance of highly desirable traits and skills. Almost without exception, they're very capable individuals who are naturally optimistic, creative, dedicated, highly motivated, action-oriented, and are not afraid of hard work and long hours toachieve their goals.
Although restaurant owners consistently display these positive characteristics, it's no secret that many new restaurateurs find themselves faced with moderate and even severe challenges in turning their restaurants into successful businesses. There's a lot of truth in the statement, "opening a restaurant is the easy part, the real challenge is making money at it."
One of themain occupational hazards of owning a restaurant is getting buried in the minutiae of daily operations. As we'll explain, when owners get caught up in the details of running their restaurant, they can easily lose sight of what they, as an owner, should be doing to turn their restaurant into a profitable business.
In this article, you'll learn how to "promote" yourself to becoming more of a CEO(chief executive officer) type of owner. In short, you'll see how to keep your eye on the big picture and create a system that will ensure your restaurant operates the way you want it to, without your constant involvement in attending to each and every detail. You'll also learn what type of activities you, as an owner, must be focused on to achieve any degree of sustainable success.
The potentialbenefits of becoming a CEO type of owner are significant and will have a profound impact not only on the financial performance of your restaurant but on the quality of your lifestyle as well.
As more of a chief executive owner, your restaurant won't be totally dependent on you being there all the time, so unlike many restaurant operators, you'll be able to have a life outside of running yourrestaurant too. In addition, you'll be better positioned to grow your restaurant through new marketing initiatives, setting up additional lines of business, developing multiple locations or even franchising your concept, if that's what you want to do.
|[pic]. . . The more any restaurant depends on|
|the owner's day in, day out involvement in |
|the operational details of the restaurant, |
|thegreater the risk of failure.[pic] |
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|-- Jim Laube |
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Knowing How to 'Run a Restaurant' Isn't Enough
Many people who open a restaurant don't fully understand therole they should play as an owner. They're convinced that managing or focusing on the operational functions in their restaurant is all that's really needed from them to create a profitable foodservice enterprise.
Take the chef who opens a bistro or the restaurant manager who raises some capital and creates his own concept. They're confident that because they know how to "run a restaurant" they,by default, also know how to build a successful business. This couldn't be farther from the truth and is the fatal assumption behind the failure or lack of success in many, if not most, independent restaurant ventures.
One of the problems of being a restaurant owner and knowing how to run a restaurant is that many end up to only that, constantly "running the restaurant." And if the owner spendsall his time running the restaurant, he often overlooks or doesn't pay adequate time and attention to those things necessary to manage other equally important aspects of any business.
The more dependent a restaurant is on the owner's day in, day out involvement in the operational details of the restaurant, the greater the risk of failure. When the owner is unable to detach himself from the daily...