Are you an aspiring restaurant entrepreneur? If yes, you’re on the path to financial success and freedom. The restaurant business is lucrative and promising. In fact, according to Gitnux, in 2020 alone, the global food services market revenue was around $3.53 trillion. That’s huge!
Even so, starting a restaurant isn’t a walk in the park, and you’re doomed to fail terribly if you lack the proper information. But don’t fret! This article is a gold mine of insightful information that will guarantee success as a restaurant entrepreneur. Keep reading to mine essential golden tips and hacks to succeed in the food service market. Let’s start!
Find a Good Location
As a restaurant entrepreneur, your first step to a successful food service business is to find a good location for your restaurant. An ideal address will help you to gain and retain customers easily. When settling on the location, ensure that it is near potential customers, has easy access to surrounding amenities such as shopping centers or parking, and is convenient for transportation.
Whether you’re planning to set up a casual burger joint or a destination fine dining establishment, your goal is to make it easy for your target customer to get there without a hassle. As a budding restaurant entrepreneur, you must know that if you build it and your target customers can’t get to it seamlessly, they won’t come. Also, your restaurant’s accessibility must extend past your customers to your future employees. Primarily, your employees will have to honor early mornings and late evenings for the business to be successful, and having quick access to public transportation is a huge bonus.
Without a doubt, out of site is out of mind. For this reason, you must also invest in your restaurant’s visual appeal. Your potential customers should be able to see and admire your restaurant from the street. Supposing you settle for an indoor location, for example, within a food court, focus on intensive marketing to ensure that your customers will view your restaurant as a destination. Also, work with your local kitchen remodelers in an open-plan kitchen to achieve an eye-popping finish.
Design the Interior
According to Modern Restaurant Management (MRM) magazine, the ideal design of a restaurant can quickly increase sales by a whopping 300%! That’s more reason to invest in kitchen design services for the appropriate design for your restaurant. As a new restaurant entrepreneur, you must understand that every element of your restaurant has a particular psychological impact on your customers. Colors, sounds, or scents will either draw customers into the restaurant or away.
Satisfied and happy customers like sharing their experiences on the internet, and in this digital era, their reviews, shares, comments, and likes are critical for the success of your restaurant. Therefore, it’s essential to wow your clients with the design of your restaurant. For instance, consider making the inside of your restaurant social media friendly with elegant lighting, comfortable seats, and luxurious plating for eye-catching pictures. Such social media postings and photos will help you with free advertising.
Your restaurant interior design is also essential in communicating your brand. The appearance of your restaurant will impact how your customers perceive its concept when judging whether it’s a good enough space to enjoy their meals. For instance, extremely bright or shabby colors may create a negative impression on your customers and make them leave before viewing the menu. On the other hand, natural light will make your restaurant more serene and Instagrammable.
Add a Bathroom and Plumbing
Without a doubt, bathroom remodeling is a critical design element you must include in your restaurant design program. In fact, as a restaurant entrepreneur, you must understand that building codes typically highlight the number of toilets, urinals, and sinks you must provide for your customers – both men and women. The number of such facilities primarily depends on your restaurant’s occupancy type and overall seating capacity. In most cases, you may need to add a bathroom and plumbing facilities.
Moreover, you must comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which dictates particular access and specific circulation in your restaurant, work areas, and bathrooms. It’s essential to ensure that your restaurant is highly accessible and comfortable. It’s a federal law that’s typically enforced at the local level. The building authority that usually has building jurisdiction over your address may approve your restaurant building but can not protect you from lawsuits when your restaurant fails to follow such guidelines.
Your restaurant bathroom must be clean every time for hygiene purposes. For this reason, when adding or renovating your restaurant bathroom, consider investing in materials that achieve sanitary finishing. The materials you choose for your walls, floor, and ceiling, the style of installing your plumbing fixtures, and the selection of your lighting significantly impact keeping your bathroom hygienic. Therefore, working with a professional who understands what will work best when adding a bathroom or renovating the plumbing system is essential.
Pick an Aesthetic or Theme
A restaurant entrepreneur must pick an aesthetically pleasing theme to create a relaxing, inviting, and enjoyable customer experience. To keep your restaurant’s bottom line healthy, creating foot traffic must be your top priority. A restaurant’s décor, ambiance, and lighting primarily make customers feel comfy and welcome. When they appreciate the restaurant’s aesthetics and feel good about its atmosphere, they’re more likely to leave you a positive review, return for future visits, or recommend your restaurant to their friends.
An aesthetically pleasing restaurant will enhance your customer’s dining experience. It plays a significant role in creating a positive impression on your new customers, enticing them to try everything on your menu. Top-notch restaurant design creates a sense of luxury and warmth, ensuring customers feel special through an elevated dining experience. Also, your décor will reflect your brand identity. For instance, an elegant sushi restaurant will have modern décor, slick furniture, and minimalist décor, while an Italian restaurant typically has red and white checkered tablecloths and rustic décor.
While choosing a skilled painting contractor is essential, décor color also matters. For this reason, depending on your target colors, work with a professional to help choose a color that speaks to your target customers. For instance, the Food Chain Magazine advises that red color is associated with alertness and physical energy and also brings an element of romance, orange encourages openness and an atmosphere of friendliness, yellow stimulates happy hormones, green encourages harmony, and blue promotes rest and calmness.
Install Necessary Equipment
As a novice restaurant entrepreneur, you must understand that the tools and equipment you’ll need highly depend on the service you run and the type of food you serve. In reality, a full restaurant usually has equipment different from a burger joint. That said, an oven is a central equipment in most commercial kitchens. Even so, the kind you’ll install will depend on the type of food on the menu. As a result, choosing an oven may seem like a wild goose chase, but to get the right one, be keen on its size, quality, and function.
After settling on the ideal oven, you must start strategizing on your ranges and ventilation. Your ranges are critical to your ventilation and cooking gear to ensure your restaurant’s airflow is comfortable for your customers and staff. Typically, you can choose either gas or electric ranges depending on your preferences and goals. For instance, gas ranges are perfect for controlling temperature, and electric ones are famous for their efficiency. Also, before settling on ventilation, you should consider factors like the airflow volume flow rate, size, noise, and energy efficiency.
Additionally, your restaurant equipment isn’t complete without kitchen hood installations. Wonder why? Well, as a restaurant entrepreneur, you must stress restaurant safety. Placing the hood over your restaurant oven will help collect grease and heat, avoiding their distribution throughout your kitchen.
Firstly, the kitchen hood will keep your commercial kitchen clean. Also, you’ll no longer have to worry about grease fires; the kitchen hood will keep your kitchen safe from inferno disasters. Also, you’ll need to invest in cabinets to promote kitchen organization and cleanliness.
Partner With Services You May Need
A competent restaurant entrepreneur understands that to be successful in the food business, you must keep up with necessary services, such as knife sharpening. You must realize that a knife isn’t just a random tool in the kitchen. It’s an extension of the chef’s hand, which affects how they work and the quality of food served to your customers. From prepping to serving savory dishes, your chef will need a knife, and most times, the food’s quality and presentation highly depend on the sharpness of the knife edges. So, keeping up with knife sharpening services is critical in your restaurant setting.
When operating a commercial kitchen, fats, oils, and grease will undoubtedly make their way into kitchen pipes. As a result, it’s critical to partner with experts who offer kitchen grease disposal services to help you deal with such a mess. Professional grease removal is essential to complying with health and safety regulations. Even more, such services will help to keep your commercial kitchen spotless, hygienic, and efficient.
Spray for Potential Pests
Did you know that according to QSR Magazine, about 20% of restaurants’ health inspection scores are primarily based on the pest control portion? That said, you can agree that as a restaurant entrepreneur, the last thing you’d want to see is a cockroach or a mouse dining with your customers in the service area. Such a case can get you bad online reviews, negatively affecting your bottom line.
Pests are also a safety hazard. They typically carry foodborne diseases, which can quickly become a pandemic. Therefore, hiring experienced exterminators to spray for potential pests early before it’s too late is necessary.
Picture a humble fly, a common insect in a restaurant setting. As small as it seems, it’s a ticking time bomb for spreading diseases. In fact, according to Penn State University, blowflies and houseflies feed on feces and rotting organic matter, exposing them to plenty of problematic bacteria. Some of these flies carry hundreds of different species of bacteria that could be harmful to humans. So, if you notice a simple fly, treat it as an emergency and hire a professional to spray it for a potential fly infestation.
It’s worse when you examine the health threats pests such as rats and mice pose. For instance, they can carry and spread a nasty type of meningitis and hantavirus. So, in case of a pest infestation in your kitchen or dining area, the most obvious repercussion is business closure. Word of mouth spreads faster than bushfire, and no customer will want to recommend a restaurant with rodent droppings or bussing flies.
Construct an Outdoor Seating Area
Constructing an exterior sun shade for an outdoor dining experience will be good for your restaurant business. In fact, according to the PR Newswire, outdoor dining boasts a nearly 19% boost in sales! That’s huge! In most cases, diners will feel insecure about dining in enclosed restaurants. Even so, most prefer an outdoor space with proper ventilation and spacious for privacy and social distancing.
An outdoor eating area also positively impacts your bottom line. For instance, it increases the customer serving capacity. For this reason, your restaurant will lessen service time and accommodate more customers, heightening efficiency and increasing sales. Also, an outdoor area increases customer satisfaction, enticing them to leave you a positive review.
An outdoor patio is pet-friendly and attracts parents with kids. With a tasty menu, such unique customers will keep turning up to your restaurant. Also, the number of returning diners will increase due to their positive experience and customer service, expanding your customer demographics.
Starting a restaurant can confuse a novice restaurant entrepreneur. However, a few tips are guaranteed to give you success in the food industry. Your first step to owning a successful restaurant is to find an ideal address that your target customers will find easy to access. Also, invest in an eye-catching décor to ensure your customers dine like royalties. Consider installing an outdoor sitting area to attract parents and pet lovers, and always ensure your restaurant is pest-free. Check our website for more tips and hacks for a successful restaurant business.
