Bill Henthorn asked:

From the start, it will be a well-researched restaurant business plan that will be your single greatest asset. It is the greatest key to convince anyone to make a loan, invest capital, lease, or do any type of business with you. Think of the restaurant business plan as an extremely valuable road map for your restaurant business. Long before you open the doors of your new restaurant, having privy to the best restaurant business ideas and restaurant business information will serve to enlighten you on both the possible pitfalls and various opportunities of the new venture.

Restaurant start ups should incorporate in their business plan such elements as company description, industry analysis, products and related services, the target market, information on the competition, sales and strategy operations, planned management and organizational structure, a long term development plan that includes an exit strategy, and financial data projections.

Many restaurateurs omit these crucial stages when buying a restaurant. They are focused on getting the financing to open the restaurant doors to create cash flow as quickly as possible. Doing the hard work, creating a winning image, great food, and the burning will to succeed are not enough. Proper training will be perennial among the restaurant resources that must be in place. The restaurant business plan must also include well-established operating procedures that will be followed on a religious basis. At any point in time, the winners of any venture are the ones that have the best tools to work with.

Knowledge alone is not power! Power is knowledge applied effectively! You will need to be exposed to up-to-date restaurant business ideas, restaurant business information, complete sample plans and more to stay abreast and competitive in the market. And for both parties, it makes the transactions of buying restaurant and selling a restaurant a lot easier.

Many of the challenges that will face the restaurant owner will be in the area of menu and recipes costs, hiring, illness and complaints, foodborne illnesses, sales breakeven points, operations, employee corrective actions, restaurant maintenance, employee and manager reviews, food cost yields, labor scheduling planning, running inventories, employee time-off requests, scheduled restaurant evaluations, and customer service surveys.

An excellent source of information for your overall restaurant business plan can come from business software. Planning experts, consultants, executives, and CPAs use the Business Plan Pro 2004 PREMIER. The package allows the user to combine several businesses plans to see the big picture and track results more efficiently. You will be able to see advanced financials, sales forecasting, and profit and loss statements far more clear. Another great software tool is the “Restaurant Business Plan Software” that incorporates all the tools necessary for the small business owner to succeed.

Perhaps for the restaurant owner, the best software package available might be the QuickPlan 2003 Restaurant Business Plan software package. This is a complete package that is industry-specific, and covers full service, limited service, fast food, bakeries, caterers, nightclubs, franchises, and expansions with that incorporate a definite them.

These software packages can be great tools for setting up a fantastic business plan that will help you to get funded. All of this may at first seem difficult, but you can rest assured that your competition is privy to such information. The sooner you are on board, the sooner your success will be insured. Knowing your business, your market, and your strengths and weaknesses is just smart business. Remember, it is a sound business plan that will make your dreams of restaurant ownership a reality. And, should you decide to sell a restaurant business in the future, you can serve as a valuable font of information for a potential buyer.

The National Restaurant Association is an excellent industry tool that has the latest information on industry trends and research results. Being part of such an organization encourages networking with others to share information and discover new strategies that will make member’s operations more effective. Some of the group studies include internal auditing, human resources, risk & safety issues, marketing, quality assurance, and nutrition. It is a privilege to have access to leaders in the industry that can offer timely insight on the things that matter the most—as well as help you continually fine tune your restaurant business plan.

In fact, any support group that offers assistance and networking is worth looking into. The immediate gain is access to a constantly expanding array of insights, tools, and resources from fellow independent restaurant operators. You are embarking on a time-honored endeavor of business ownership. How you mentally approach the task will weigh heavily on your chances of success. Right actions only have one consequence: Right results.

Bill Henthorn asked:

If you are looking to become a restaurant owner, you will no doubt spend a lot of waking hours contemplating the mysteries of how to buy a restaurant. You can rest assured there are a lot of great opportunities these days to buy a restaurant. However, with franchises, start-ups, and existing restaurants to choose from, it can be a bit overwhelming to say the least. After reviewing all the possibilities, you may have some tough choices to make. There are going to be challenges with any new business venture, and buying a restaurant will tax all of your business skills. The two most pressing concerns will be growing your restaurant and enticing people to continue to eat there. Your best chances of success may be realized if you buy an existing restaurant business or franchise that is up for resale.

If you decide to buy an existing restaurant business, one of the benefits you will immediately realize is the privilege of examining its historical performance. This will allow you to make some very important business decisions. Your strengths can be of great use even if the restaurant was not profitable in the past, and your greatest hope can be to evolve a winning operation.

Existing Restaurants Are Easier to Investigate

You should always do a thorough investigation of any piece of real estate—and especially if you plan to buy a restaurant. This will require taking an up close and personal look at its past activities, current operations, nearby competition, and its future business potential. Restaurant traffic speaks volumes about what you can expect in the future. It is also important to monitor health trends and how they fit into the current status of the restaurant as well as your ownership goals.

An Infrastructure Already In Place

An infrastructure can best be described as the location, equipment, employees, operating systems, and existing supplies. This removes the challenges of starting out at ground zero when buying a restaurant, and will allow you to focus on building the business—which is where your attention should be. A solid infrastructure already in place also allows you to implement new changes more rapidly. With an existing restaurant, there is quicker opening time versus the time needed if it were a new development. The existing customer base of an existing restaurant can carry the business until you are firmly established, and once firmly established, you can then work on bringing in new customers.

The Benefit of Pricing Differences

There may be the perception that to buy an existing restaurant business, it will cost more. This is not usually the case. The odds are actually in your favor of saving money in the long run when buying a restaurant where all the amenities are firmly in place. Even if purchasing the restaurant requires a premium down payment—you at least know up front what you are getting. Usually with a new franchise, there are demographic studies done on drive by traffic, demographics, and potential customer bases. These are all studies that try to determine the restaurant’s potential for success. In reality, this is a near impossible task. It is also good to note that a new location can take up to a year or more to build. All of these challenges are avoided for the most part when buying a resale location.

Negotiating Flexibility

It is not hard to understand why buying a new restaurant will give you a greater margin to negotiate. Owners are usually selling for a specific reason, and if the price is right, chances are you will have few obstacles standing in your way. Remember, everything from the purchase price to the financing package can be negotiable when buying a restaurant.

Seek the Help Professionals

Regardless of the size of the restaurant business, you should consider using the services of both an accountant and lawyer. The first mistake is to think that with a small restaurant business, you can forego the support of professionals. Accountants and lawyers can be a great defense mechanism in ensuring that you are well aware of any risks involved. Remember though, that the role of the lawyer in purchasing a new restaurant is simply to write the legal terms of what you and the seller agreed upon. Ask the right questions if you plan to buy a restaurant that is for resale. Your goal is to find professionals that will assist—and not simply take your money for drawing up the contracts.

Rudy Vener asked:


Welcome to the third and final article of this series. I had a tough time deciding which of the many free advertising options to cover. In the end I went to the search engines and ran a series of searches for pizza and restaurants. From these, I selected two items which typically showed up in the top ten search results.

The Open Public Directory Project

The Open Public Directory project is a group of volunteers who strive mightily, without compensation or reward, to find the best websites and include them in their directory. These volunteers have high standards. They ruthlessly discard websites with redundant or questionable content. Only the highest quality sites, those with original content or which are the primary source of information on a topic get into the OPD.

As part of the OPD, the volunteers maintain a separate space just for restaurants. This restaurant directory is located at www.chefmoz.org. It contains restaurant names, addresses, phone numbers, style of cooking, web addresses and truly exhaustive descriptions of the restaurants amenities.

Every single restaurant owner in the world should visit www.chefmoz.org and add their information. You can even include reviews and links to other websites on the Internet which contain reviews of your restaurant.

Since every listing is reviewed by an editor, search engines, such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN use the Chefmoz directory as one of the highest quality resources. The directory is logically organized by country, state and cities. In many cases, when someone searches for restaurants in a particular city, the Chefmoz.org directory listing for that city is among the top 10 search items returned. So it is a good idea to have your restaurant represented, have your web site available and your menu online.

To add your restaurant, navigate to the correct www.chefmoz.com local directory, and click on “Add Restaurant.” You will be guided through a series of pages where you can provide all your information and submit the information to be reviewed by an editor. If your town is not already included, you can click “Add Restaurant” at the state level and your listing, if accepted, will create the new directory for your town.

Online Yellow Pages

One of the most popular places where consumers search for local businesses is the online yellow pages sites. There are several, such as www.superpages.com and www.switchboard.com. They all attempt to have at least the minimal information for every business in a particular town. Some will even let businesses list their website for free. The www.superpages.com site will let a business create a free business profile which includes a link to their website. Take advantage of this and create your free business profile on superpages.com. The superpages.com listings are frequently among the top 10 items returned for local searches for restaurants or pizza. You want to be there when people go looking for you.

Offline Online Marketing

Unless you are located on a rest stop for a major interstate highway, all of your customers are going to live within a few miles of your store.

Fact: 80% of your customers use computers. And that percentage is growing.

Fact: most people find websites outside of the internet. They hear them on radios, read them in magazines and newspapers, see them on business cards, flyers and circulars and read them on window, vehicle and sidewalk signs.

These medias are excellent ways to get your web address and online ordering message in front of your customers. Your website and online ordering message should be included as a matter of course in every one of your advertising pieces, whether it is your takeout menu, your window sign, your pizza box, your delivery vehicle sign or a newspaper insert ad.

Your web address is easier to remember than your phone number. Take advantage of this by putting it where your local customers can see it.

By providing your web address, you are inviting people to visit you and check you out in a completely comfortable way. The web visitor does not feel awkward about checking out your menu online. They do not have to engage in an uncomfortable phone conversation as they try to decide whether to give your food a try. They are comfortable and relaxed and when they see your online ordering menu, these comfortable and relaxed people may just place their first order with you then and there.

One of my clients built up their online ordering from $100 per month to over $1,000 per month with more than half their online customers identifying flyers, newspaper ads and the window sign as the source where they found the restaurant’s website.

You want everyone within a couple of miles of your store to know your web address. So don’t make the mistake of limiting your Internet advertising only to the Internet.

So how is this free Internet advertising? Because these are marketing strategies you are, or should be using anyway. It costs next to nothing to add the words “Order online at our website – www.yourpizzeria.com” to your next batch of menus and flyers. And don’t forget that window sign.

One of our clients used a window sign to announce their web site and online introductory offer and got a constant stream of new customers registering for online ordering.

Low Cost Internet Advertising

In addition to the free marketing strategies, consider using some low cost paid Internet marketing.

One of the least expensive Internet advertising strategies is called Pay Per Click. As you might expect, it means that the advertiser pays for every person who clicks on their Internet ad.

Search engines such as yahoo! and Google provide this advertising service and display ads to people who enter specific search terms into the browser. The advertiser can choose exactly what search terms he wants entered to make his ad appear.

For example, a restaurant can use search terms such as “pizza delivery Jersey City” or “pizza restaurant Jersey City” and have his Internet ad show up only when someone enters that search term.

If the person doing the search clicks on his ad, the advertiser is charged. The cost per click is usually very low. Typically 25 cents or less, depending on competition. A bidding system is used to let the advertisers set their limits and daily and weekly budgets let the advertiser manage and monitor the ad campaign expenses.

One reason the cost is so low is because competition for highly local keywords is still very small. A restaurant owner in Pittsburgh is not going to select “pizza restaurants Bangor Maine” as his keyword. At the same time it is a mistake to use too general a keyword, for example just using “pizza restaurant” will not only cost much more per click, but will be seen by people who are hundreds and thousands of miles from your store. So using the highly localized keyword not only reduces the cost of the pay per click, it also pre-qualifies the people who see that add.

It is a good bet that someone searching for “pizza delivery Jersey City” lives in Jersey City, wants to order a pizza and would prefer it to be delivered.

Sources of Pay Per Click advertising are Google Adwords, adwords.google.com, Yahoo!, www.overture.com, and City Search, www.citysearch.com.

Final Thoughts

I hope you found this and my previous articles useful. We have barely scratched the surface of Internet marketing. There are many, many other techniques and strategies ranging from local link exchanges to banner ads, search engine optimization (SEO) and many many other strange and wonderful topics which can help bring visitors to your website and customers to your food.

In the end, your online business will prosper because you decide to take advantage of the power of the Internet and let it work for you. Like any other part of your business, it has to be done as part of the whole. Your website and online ordering will bring you revenue only when your customers learn about it and are encouraged to use it.

Spread the word and watch your online takeout and delivery orders grow!

uniqwebmaster asked:

Eager to explore the great restaurants?

If you start asking your friends to share their restaurant reviews, everyone has their own opinions/reviews on what made a great place to eat.

Giving your food reviews on holidaymunch.com is just like suggesting restaurant to your friends, in that way you are helping others to find good restaurants around the globe

Write reviews: Adding your food review is very simple, just add them on the basis of restaurant type, i.e. Fast Food Restaurant, Seafood, Fine Dining, Indian, Thai, Iranian, Italian, Vietnamese, Japanese Restaurant, Korean Restaurant, Vegetarian Restaurant and many more.

Good restaurant is a place where you can get good food and a place to relax and enjoy with your friends and family, Restaurant ranks or restaurant ranking is the most easiest way of searching for a good restaurant,

Upload your menu if you are a restaurant owner on www.holidaymunch.com

Along with restaurant reviews you can get some details on restaurant as well, which can help you to select best restaurant that you were searching for.

About Holiday Munch

Started in 2008, the inspiration for the website came whilst on holiday. It became apparent that it was difficult to find a decent munch without going through recommendations.

One of the most important parts of the holiday experience is the food and without decent food the holiday is never the same.

Now you have recommendations from your fellow travellers so you can pre plan where you are going to munch, whilst avoiding the bad and eating at the good and the tasty!!