How to open a restaurant?

What is the aim of this course?

Opening restaurants is very demanding in terms of time and cash. I will show you in this course how to research the market and plan your business to make sure that you open the right concept, in the right place for the right people. Most restaurants fail because they got it wrong in one of the 3 main factors: location, concept, your target segment of customers. Here I will show you how to find out with little money in advance whether your business idea makes sense or not.

We will show number of techniques that will help you check:

• Whether the location is good for your business?
• Who is your customer and whether you will have enough of them in your selected location?
• What are the good and bad things about certain concept and whether is a good fit for you and the location?
• How much money you get from your restaurant business?

I will also show you how to translate it to Excel and create your business plan in this universal tool. It will be useful not only for opening your business but also afterwards managing your business.

I will teach you also how to test your concept in real life without actually building the restaurant.

Why I decided to create this course?

I have worked in retail and restaurants chains for 4 years. It always surprised me that even the chains had problems with the proper selection of location and the concept that would be optimal. 3 years ago my friends started opening their own concepts or taking over existing ones. Due to my previous experience they started asking me for some help.  In this course you will find the practical tricks that we used to make sure that the businesses they were running were making money in the selected locations. This framework was proven both with small restaurants as well as with chains. We have applied it extensively also in retail projects. You will find here little theory and mainly a lot of practical how-to tips that will help you perform the research on your own.

In what way will you benefit from this course?

The course is a practical, step by step guide loaded with tones of, tricks, hints, examples that will significantly change the way you perceive your business and will drastically increase your chances of success. There is little theory – mainly examples, a lot of tips from my own experience as well as other notable examples worth mentioning. Our intention is that thanks to the course you will know:

1. How to find the right spot to build profitable restaurant
2. How to analyze restaurant concept that you think about with little money
3. How to select the right location for your business
4. How to analyze your target segment and how to adapt the concept to them
5. How to get the concept-location-customer fit
6. How to  test the restaurant concept with little money
7. How to estimate in Excel what can be the sales and margin of your restaurant?

You can also ask me any question either through the discussion mode or by messaging me directly.

I will produce the necessary content and

How the course is organized?

The course is divided currently in 6 sections and will be adding new section to address other important issues. Currently you will find the following sections:

• Introduction. We begin with little intro into the course
• What concept should you choose? In the second section we go through ways you can use to learn everything about specific concept and decide whether it is good for you or not?    
• How good certain location is? In the third section I will show you how to analyze locations you are considering to make sure that is a good match with your concept. This section will have a lot of hacks that you can apply to make sure that the location you are choosing will generate you expected profits
• How to analyze your target group? Only by knowing well your customer and applying this knowledge in management, as well as the selection of the concept, you can build a sustainable business. Here, I will show you methods that you can use on-line and off-line to spy on your customers and understand them properly
• Testing your restaurant concept with MVP. Fifth section is devoted to testing your concept without building the full blown restaurants. We will talk about an interesting concept called MVP (Minimum Viable Product) that is also applied to restaurants to make sure that what you build is what the customer wants and needs. It helps you for a fraction of your initial budget
• Restaurant model in Excel. In this section I will show you how to calculate in Excel, on the basis of previous sections, whether your business idea for new restaurant makes sense or not. You will get ready made tool in Excel that you can adapt to your needs.

You will be able also to download many additional resources

1. Examples in Excel, Word, Power Point
2. Presentation of slides shown in the course
3. Links to additional presentations and movies
4. Links to books worth reading