There is something so soul-warming about cooking great food for the people you love. Dishing up brand new recipes that you have learned, or old family favorites. Watching the faces of happy eaters enjoying the flavors and care that you put into the food.
Over time there might be a creeping feeling that actually this is what you should be doing for life. This should be your business. Watching Chef and then Burnt to get an idea of the stress, and some of the other aspects of running a kitchen.
When you think about it, the local eateries have been in business for years, and there are family establishments around the world that have been open for hundreds of years.
So maybe it is your turn. But what does it take to get a restaurant running?
There are very few if any businesses that don’t do better with a solid plan in place. When it comes to the food industry, there will be a lot more detail about things like the safety of your customers, kitchen staff and restaurant permits and licenses that you’ll need to be able to trade.
There isn’t just one style of restaurant either. Concept restaurants, fusions, modern, a premium all need a different pricing structure and a different plan to match it.
Think about why people will come to eat your food, and what they will pay for it.
Equipment
While we can get by in the home kitchen with some basic things, the equipment you are going to need in a restaurant is somewhat amplified. In order to cater for potentially hundreds of people a day, you have to think bigger. And bigger usually means more costly. Here are some basics that you need to factor in:
Glassware and barware
Cold storage to keep all of your produce fresh
Silverware – the front of house ones, tablecloths, napkins, placements
Utensils in the kitchen – industrial kitchen ones – steel most often for durability
Pots and pans – ones to suit your intended menu
Table, chairs, interior decor
Ovens, grills, fryers, sous vide, vacuum packing, microwaves and more
Signage
And that only covers the very basics of what you are going to need. Not only that, but they will need to suit the style of place you are trying to create. You can get a better idea by actually sitting in a restaurant for a meal and paying attention to what is going on around you.
Team
The team you have in place will need to be skilled and ready for the hectic nature of the service industry. While it doesn’t hurt to have some people who don’t have any experience at all, you’ll need to provide training and guidance. Typically kitchen staff is passionate, and they put everything into their work. The service staff is quick and efficient too. Take your time to build a team, and make sure they have met numerous times ahead of the opening, and had plenty of practice. A soft opening for all of the friends and family is usually a great idea.
The restaurant business is alive and vibrant with so much to explore, and having the right team, and the most comfortable space for your customers will see your way to success.
When we build a machine for a select purpose, careful engineering application is essential. Engineers are commonly focused on two things, first the ability to allow the machine to conduct said purpose, and secondly to achieve that in the easiest and most efficient manner possible. Yet when it comes to structuring the machine of our business enterprise, it can often be that leaders with integrity feel that conveniences are a shortcut and a waste of time, despite how effective they can make that firm.
Of course, to some extent doing things ‘the right way, not the quick way’ is essential. For instance, those calling into your firm will expect a human response rather than just a continual auto-generated set of answers. We do need to structure our enterprise with a little soul, after all.
That being said, some business conveniences you can put in place both help you save time, increase productivity, and actually help you grant your audience more value. These conveniences are that which we fondly apply the label of being ‘worth their weight in gold’.
But what are these conveniences? Let’s explore that together:
IT Managed Services
IT managed services, especially provided by services such as Fidelis, Inc. can be worth its weight in gold. From structuring your business phone systems to software to network cabling, ensuring that you’re completely on top of your digital infrastructure equips you for the informational highway and maintenance accessibility and protection you need to take care of. This allows you to become a strong player in 2020, a firm with confidence and potential helping it every step of the way.
Reputational Repair
When your business suffers a reputational knock, it’s important to try and restore that reputation, or if not, at least stabilize it. For instance, an incompetent chef in a restaurant may find that one mistake leads to someone suffering food poisoning, and word of that can spread through a community for long after said chef is fired, even if you have consistently gained perfect hygiene marks since then and have tightened your practice and vetting of employees. Reputational repair and PR services that help you schedule your relaunch with compassion and the might of social media can help you gain another chance in this direction, and that works for any business.
Branding Specialists
Sometimes it’s not what you offer, but how you offer it that draws people in. Of course, it’s important to curate subtance in the life of your business, but it can also be tremendously important to use branding specialists that offer you a chance of understanding just what value you hope to promote as a firm, and from that point on what direction you should lead in. If you can approximate that in the best sense, you have quite a strong chance of success going forward.
With this advice, we hope you can build the business conveniences that are routinely worth their weight in gold. In this light, you’ll structure an ever-improving approach curating and promoting your value.
Starting your own business is regarded as an expensive career move, with countless articles all discussing how important it is to have strong financing when you begin. Although having ample finances is definitely a benefit, you can start your new business without it, all it takes is some clever planning.
After all, for most people having a pile of disposable income just laying around isn’t all that common, and while we can borrow and/or take out loans, some people prefer not to. Fortunately, there’s many ways to pursue your dreams of being your own boss while on a tight budget, regardless of what industry you’re going into.
Take it Slow
For a lot of people, the temptation to go all-in straight away is great, to the point that you start paying for lavish extras rather than essentials. Often this leads to failure. Instead of charging in, take your time and plan, look to see where it’s best to spend money (if you need to) early on — if it won’t help gain interest, then it isn’t worth the expense. That being said, even if it can help generate interest, make sure to do it in the most cost effective way possible. For example, instead of paying hundreds for a new website, simply create a free website using Wix or WordPress; it’ll still look professional, but it’ll come without the steep price tag. Then, once you’re comfortable with financing, you can pay for the design, url, etc.
Pre-owned is Okay
A lot of new business owners also fall into the trap of believing that any equipment they need has to be brand new. Even though it’s a nice idea, some industries have hefty fees attached to equipment, like the construction industry, and so brand new isn’t attainable. To ensure you can get set up and remain safe, you need to utilise the services of companies that specialise in second hand inventory. You need a pallet rack? Get a second hand pallet racking solution. Most of the time, you’ll be able to purchase items second hand, but if you can’t, then make sure to use the slow approach we previously mentioned to find the lowest prices available for what you need.
Be Hands-on
In an ideal world, new startups would hit the ground running, with various employees and departments helping to keep the machine well oiled. Sadly, real life doesn’t work out that way. This is why it pays for you to be as hands-on as possible and dip into the different components of your business. If you’re not good at marketing, educate yourself on the latest trends and start getting involved, if you don’t understand legal regulations, seek outside help, and so on. Being uneducated and lacking experience isn’t a valid enough excuse when you have a tight budget to stick to. There’s plenty of sites out there that can walk you through those first steps, so you should be able to tide yourself over until you can afford employees to balance out your workload.
Data breaches are becoming increasingly common – and damaging – as the need for companies to store data where it’s accessible online conflicts with the need to keep that same data safe from prying eyes. Here are some of the biggest breaches in the past couple of years.
Facebook
Facebook’s March data breach was one of the most infamous of 2018. A company known as Cambridge Analytica was discovered using an app that scraped user data from the social media platform. Initially, Cambridge Analytica claimed that only 30 million users were affected but Facebook was later able to confirm the number as at least 87 million. Even this number may be too low.
As if the Cambridge Analytica scandal wasn’t bad enough, other apps were also found to be scavenging data from the site. Facebook suffered an even more embarrassing breach later in the year when it was revealed that a glitch in the site’s own software was leaving user data exposed. This was hastily corrected but it’s not known how many Facebook users may have had their data compromised.
Lord & Taylor and Saks
Lord & Taylor came under fire a couple of years ago after a major data breach. A raft of credit card details and names was discovered up for sale on a hacker platform by a security firm. The information was traced back to two high-end department stores: Lord & Taylor and Saks. Both stores had suffered a total system compromise and anyone who’d used a payment card at either store was apt to have had their data stolen. Over five million customers were affected and one person initiated a class action lawsuit against Lord & Taylor on behalf of those whose financial details had been compromised.
MyHeritage
Online geneology sites are all the rage – but handing over so much personal data should give users pause, especially following the data breach at MyHeritage. In June of 2018, a file was found on a private server outside the company containing the emails and hashed passwords of every user who’d registered since the previous October.
This incident shows why making an effort to get the best IT support for your business should not be ignored. You really cannot afford to cut corners. It also highlights the importance of storing only encrypted passwords and keeping user data separate from login information. Because MyHeritage stored hashed passwords, the attackers could not log into the users’ accounts. They also lacked access to the geneological data — in fact, it appears that all they had was the email addresses. Any data breach for a company like MyHeritage is bad news, however.
Sacramento Bee
In one of the most dramatic data breaches of recent times, attackers seized control of two databases owned by the Sacramento Bee newspaper. One contained the personal details of the paper’s subscribers. Perhaps even more disturbingly, the other database consisted of voter registration data provided by the Government. The hackers demanded a huge ransom for the data, which the paper refused to pay. Instead, they took the step of deleting both databases from their servers so that a similar attack could not occur in the future. This was bolting the stable door after the horse was gone, however, as the attackers promptly publicised the information online.
Ticketfly
The Ticketfly attack is another example of a data breach where the initial motivation was blackmail rather than simple data theft. Ticketfly is an online ticketing service engaged in selling tickets for concerts and sporting events. Their website was hacked and taken down for over a week, disrupting their operation and making sales impossible. Things went from bad to worse when the attackers demanded a ransom and Ticketfly refused. The attackers responded by uploading the personal details of Ticketfly staff and users to the hacked website where they were publicly visible.
Avoiding data breaches is a matter of good security. Ensure that you and your staff are up to date on the latest social engineering tactics and that all your computer systems are properly updated, patched and protected by security software. There is no excuse for poor security in the current day and age and the impact of a data breach could be very grave indeed. In fact, a lot of businesses underestimate the consequences. However, just think about the reputational damage and the money lost because of fraud losses, fines, and the cost of fixing the vulnerability and repairing your reputation. So, no matter whether your business is big or small, prioritizing security is of huge importance.
There’s no doubt that growth is an essential part of any business. After all, a business that always stays in one place is always going to be limited in what it can achieve. The last thing you want is for your business to stagnate and the only way to avoid this is to keep pushing forward. This raises one incredibly important question. The question is: how? How can you actually go about growing and expanding your business? Well, it turns out that there are a whole lot of different ways to do this, it’s just a matter of finding the right ways to go about it. With that in mind, here are just a few that you might want to consider.
New products
The most obvious way that you can go about expanding your business is by moving into new products and demographics. After all, while narrowing your perspective can be incredibly valuable when your business is first starting out, it can also be somewhat limiting in terms of the kind of scope that your business can achieve. The key is to look carefully at what kinds of new products fit with your business as it exists. It’s far easier to fit products into your business that already relate to it than it is to try and morph the entire business around completely new markets.
Logistics
Logistics are at the heart of pretty much any successful business whether you realize it or not. The difference between a small startup and a larger business is whether or not the logistics are in your hands. Sure, logistics come with a whole lot of added challenges from fleet management to the required maintenance of a lot of heavy-duty equipment but bringing that stuff in-house can massively increase the efficiency of your business as a whole. Just remember to consider the ways that things like your staffing needs are going to grow alongside the adoption of this element to your business.
A marketing department
When you’re running a tiny startup from home it’s often pretty easy to take care of a lot of the marketing stuff in your business on your own. Even if you don’t decide to handle it yourself, you can always outsource it to external agencies. However, as your business grows, your marketing tends to become a much more resource-heavy affair. Because of that, it’s often worth having an in-house marketing department. That way you don’t have to worry about explaining your business to external professionals or spending huge amounts of your time trying to take care of it yourself.
When you’re trying to grow your business, one of the most important words that you should keep in the forefront of your mind at all times is “sustainable.” Growing your business is great but if you’re trying to do it too quickly without a focus on sustainability then the added pressure it creates can cause serious issues and can even result in your business completely collapsing under its own weight. Ambition is great, just don’t let it get the better of you.
Recent Comments