At Emerald Coast Restaurant Brokers and Consultants, we see a lot of restaurants fail.
Follow us here – we also see a lot of restaurants succeed.
When you first start getting into a restaurant’s books, you can often see that there simply wasn’t sufficient planning involved. For reasons that many experts will never understand. Reasons can be as diverse as family dynamics, mental health issues, or just overall overconfidence. People going to the restaurant business ‘winging it’ and emerge either seriously stressed, or bankrupt.
Planning is key in many industries, but it’s particularly important in the restaurant business. Many owners and chefs understand the stress of dealing with food price margins and more. Then there’s workforce management and facilities work. All combined, it puts a tremendous amount of stress on a business leader’s head.
Here’s some of what we offer to help restaurants to succeed.
Restaurant Business Plans
A restaurant should have a practical business plan with sufficient market analysis and a business overview that includes a mission statement.
The business plan should describe products and services, as well as the restaurant operating model – a plan for how it will practically run. It should identify management and an organizational structure that will actually be followed – which is often something that’s left out when restaurants are failing. Key oversight is important, as is funding structure and other financial details.
We help with all of these items and put together a comprehensive restaurant business plan that will serve your business well. When you have one of these comprehensive documents in place, you’ll see just how vital it is!
Food Costing and Menu Costing Services
Another thing that failing restaurants often hear complaints about from their staff is food costs.
It’s easy to just simply complain about food costs and push the burden on to someone else, but when you grab the bull by the horns, specific kinds of workflow practices help to identify problems and put the brakes on excessive food costs.
Think about creating recipe cards and inventory sheets that show proper plating and portioning, and how to allocate all of those assets in the kitchen or the walk-in freezer. Food tracking and identification are key to a comprehensive plan. Vendor order sheets and other documentation have to be kept on hand. Orienting resources for visiting chefs or cooks or people filling in is another key resource for making sure that there’s a universal and consistent process to optimize menu costing.
This is just some of the consulting that we provide to restaurants. Often, makes the difference between a healthy functioning business that’s viable and returns a profit, and one that seems like a chaotic nightmare.