Starting My Own Restaurant

When I was nearly hitting the age of 30 something inside me changed I noticed I was starting to question my worth and why am I doing this job. As a manager for a big pub chain I had enough of dealing with complaint after complaint and serving rubbish products. That is when I thought long and hard about what I wanted to do with my future.

I then came up with the idea that I wanted to run my own restaurant. This restaurant had to be started from scratch as I wanted to build it from nothing to a busy restaurant and have no wise cracks from people saying "they did not used to do it that way" or "so and so used to do it this way".

I then made a list of things that I believe make a successful restaurant, these were:

• Location
• Business Partners involved
• Skills of employees
• Size of premises

I knew the location had to be in a busy area which would have a good influx of summer trade but still busy during the winters quiet months. I needed a business partner who had good experience in business and could help coach me along the way and also a business partner who was a skilled chef who could provide consistency in the product.

The skills involved would be important as I had always been a restaurant manager and was looking for a replacement so I could concentrate on the back end of the business with marketing and coming up with the ideas and putting them in place to grow the business.

Believe it or not working in many pubs and restaurants I learnt from the accounts that running the property (fixed costs) were never that much different so I had to make sure the property was big enough to cash in during the summer months.