How to open a restaurant?

In this lecture I will make and introduction explaining you what are the 4 most important elements and how you should approach them. The main issues are:

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 execute the business model

Running a restaurant is a very demanding tasks and before you open your restaurant it is highly advisable that you work for some time in a restaurant to get experience on many different level. Start from lowest position in the kitchen, work as a waitress and if possible deputy manager of a restaurant. In this lecture I will explain you want you can learn, what you should pay attention to get the most out of it.

Concept is the type of restaurant you are running with all the implications in terms of the business mode. The concept includes: service level, type of cuisine you are serving, pricing, look &feels, purchasing reasons and habits of customers, capacity and size. We discuss in general why it is important to choose the right concept what I actually means

Store Check come in handy whenever you are talking about B2C physical products, services and retail. This methods gives you solid facts on which you can build your business

Using the store-check you can learn a lot about specific business: who is coming to the restaurant, what they are ordering, how long they are staying, etc. You can also estimate whether the restaurant is profitable or not. I will show you step by step how to perform store check and how to interpret the data you have gathered from it

Here I will show you how to use the franchising concept database to research the concept you are interested in

Here I will show you how to use recommendation marketplace like Yelp to research the customer

Social media are valuable source of intel on your competitors and existing restaurants. By analyzing them you will know how they communicate with their target group, what is the focus of the both the restaurant owner / manager and customers. I will show you how to draw conclusions from the data on the fanpage of one pizza restaurant

Google is so nice to tell you through search results where is the market. Use the Keyword Planner to see whether you are able to make money on your ideas and how much you have to spend to get the trafffic

Here I will show you how to use the Keyword Planner to research specific concept and make sure that it makes sense in your city. This method also helps you estimate what they are looking for (type of food, requirements) and also gives you some hints on how much you have to spend to get the traffic from on-line

Google Trends is an excellent tool to check whether certain keyword is on a rise or not. Thanks to this tool you can check what are the trends by countries and media.

Quite often there are interesting reports already available on the market. I will show you here some examples

You have to find the right location, spot for your concept. It is not easy yet it has huge impact on your success. Without the proper location even the best concept will have at best mediocre results. The perfect location is the one that brings you a lot of potential customers from your target group. There are plenty of nice techniques that you can apply to make sure that the location is good. I will show you in this section step by step how you can pick the right selection and check what kind of profits it can bring you

Storechecks are very useful also for checking specific locations. You can check whether specific district is good for specific type of cuisine or type of restaurant. I will show you here on some examples how it can be done

Google Maps is another great tool for checking whether specific location is good. I will show you here on the basis of an example how you should define the so called catchment area and how to measure the level of competition using Google Maps

Keyword Planner can be also used with great success to check whether certain restaurant concept makes sense in a specific district. It provides you estimation of number of searches (people interested) and also estimation of your marketing budget

Review sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor are powerful tools that can be used to check specific location espiecially when it comes to number of specific restaurants as well as their strength measured via reviews (number of reviews and their average score)

Your restaurants will be visited by different segments of customers yet you should have 1 favorite that you will concentrate on – the target group. I will show you how to define it and analyze their behavior to make sure that you build attractive from their point of view restaurant concept in the right place

Here we present an exmaple from USA of segmentation with real data

In this lecture we show you how to conduct the off-line interviews, how to draw conclusions out of it and where to find respondents

In this lecture we show you how to conduct the off-line interviews, how to draw conclusions out of it and where to find respondents. Here we will talk about new, unkown restaurant concepts where it is much more difficult to find out what the customer really wants

Facebook Audience Insight is the perfect tool to check different segments without the necessity to do any interviews. For first estimation it is the perfect tool

On review marketplaces like Yelp, TripAdvisor you have plenty of reach reviews that can be used to draw conclusions on what the customer group likes and dislikes in current concepts. This will help you to learn from other’s mistakes and improve your concept. You can analyze what is important to the customer, what do they pay attention to and how to communicate with them.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is an important concept from lean startup that can be also used to check your restaurant concept without spending a small fortune on building the full blown restaurant. Here I explain what is MVP and why it makes sense to start with it before going madly into building a restaurant

We start with showing you how you can test the restaurant concept. We provide you 6 different MVPs, show you how much it would cost to build and how much time it would take you. We show you also what hypotheses / features you can test with them and when to choose which MVP

Excel gives you great opportunities to calculate whether your idea makes sense or not. For this you will use the knowledge you have gathered in the previous lectures on your concept, location and your customers. Excel is obviously less emotion than you and the model you will create here can be used as a cornerstone of your business plans. It shows also to banks and potential investors what is your cash flow. We start with a simple model so you can understand it and learn how to use it.

In this lecture we make more advanced model. We introduce the traffic parameter and show how it is converted first into people that are engaged (stop and enter your restaurant) and later into customers (they buy something from you). Here we will be operating on 2 customer groups: first one eats at the restaurant; second one comes for take-aways. For both customer groups we calculate separate conversion rates and Average ticket (ATV). We still here show you a business model for a 1 restaurant

Finally we show you how to model in Excel a restaurant chain.