Starting, Owning and Marketing A Restaurant Blog|Starting and Owning a Restaurant - Construction, Planning, Marketing, Opening and Managing a New Restaurant

When building or remodeling a restaurant, selecting the right contractors and tradesmen is a process we outlined in previous posts. In the last post (Nov. 24), we noted how critical the week of Thanksgiving was to our goal of opening yet this year. We thought we had everyone scheduled to get over a big hurdle on Wednesday. This was the day we scheduled the roof penetration for the hood ventilation. This task required the general contractor, electrician, roofer and hood builder to coordinate the project. The goal was to get the hood in and inspected on Monday.

Everything went fine until the hood builder was a no-show at noon on Wednesday to install. He had confirmed he would be there on Tuesday. During the contractor selection process, the hood supplier was my biggest question mark. I had heard about some bad experiences with them from a couple of other sources. Despite my reluctance, the architect pushed to use this particular contractor and I relented. I am paying the price.

While the obvious response is to get someone else, that is a little difficult to do when it takes days to plan, build and get approval for a hood system. In addition, the hood designer got $6000 in advance to start the project for materials.

Just another lesson - if you have doubts, be absolutely confident of the people you choose to do the work. It could cost you days and weeks in the building process.

So far this week we have:

• gotten the electric circuits all run.
• made the floor penetration for the hood to the space above.
• made the penetration for the hood ventilation in the roof.
• finished all the rough in plumbing and had inspected.
• got our final slab inspection and can pour the last small remaining area of concrete where plumbing was run for drains, grease trap and vents in the floor.
• made the wall penetration for the make-up air to the hood system.
• put up drywall for the area around the hood where we will no longer have access around the hood.

Today we hope to find out what happened to the hood contractor and get the hood system installed.

In just a short week after getting the permits, the restaurant has begun to take shape. The walls may only be metal studs, but the layout is defined. This is the point where you begin to wonder if you planned enough space in various areas. Everything looks smaller as the walls go up.

The kitchen looked very large. Now I am wondering if we may be cramming in too much equipment in the space we allowed. The restrooms look very small and the front of the house begins to close in. We must make the space more open by using decorative techniques.

Here is what has been completed to various degrees:

• All the rough plumbing for fixtures has been done. The water lines have been run through walls and ceiling structure.
• Main electric circuits have been run. Now it is a matter of running the various outlets and boxes to walls, equipment and lighting.
• Metal studs denote the walls, doorways and each separate area of the restaurant.

This week is critical to getting some major work done in order to open up before the end of the year. The hood and fireproofed ventilation requires all the trades. Electrician to run electric, hood contractor to place the hood, roofer to cut hole in the roof, fire protection company to run lines for Ansul system and plumber to run lies for automatic gas shutoff valves for gas supply.

The trick to getting all the work done is getting all the tradesmen scheduled in the proper order. That is the function of the general contractor. After each aspect has been completed, an inspection by the county is required before going to the next step. With the Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday, we hope to accomplish all the necessary parts in the right order.

Some structure is beginning to be noticeable. At the time of this photo, the rough plumbing had been done in the floor for drains. Some framing is apparent. Notice the paralell metal grids running lengthwise along the ceiling. This is one of the major issues that delayed the permits. There must be fire separation between tenant occupied spaces. In this case the ceiling has to be 2 hour burn time rated. Even though the floor above us is cement, we must install two layers of 1/2 inch plasterboard throughout the location.

In addition to the plasterboard, any puncture must be sealed in a particular way. Electrical conduit is sealed one way, the hood penetrations ahve to be sealed another and so on. Each department in the plan review section has to sign off on each detail. Costly and time consuming.

By this date, the restaurant should have been open. After negotiating an acceptable lease in July, no one could anticipate the delays we have experienced along the way. Each delay moved our opening date and now we are on a fast track to cram 60 days of work into five weeks. We will see if that works.

In order to get open before the end of the year, here is the plan and actions necessary:

• The contractor must overlap tradesmen to the point they may be in each other’s way. It’s rare to have plumbers, electricians and HVAC people working on the same days. They will complain, but they aren’t paying the bills.
• The contractor must think thirty days in advance. What materials may have a lead time that need to be ordered now?

As the restaurant owner, here is the list of things that need to be scheduled based on the contractors estimated times;

• Schedule installation and programming for POS equipment in three weeks.
• Schedule beverage installation in four weeks. They need up to 30 days to have equipment necessary.
• Booths are built. We plan to have the front of the house completed sooner than the back of the house. Booths delivered in three weeks.
• Since we are leasing the dish machine, we are scheduling their installation in three weeks.
• Most of the restaurant equipment is available locally. Much of it has been purchased. Equipment dealers are holding the equipment for immediate delivery. However, there are certain smallwares that we will order in quantity that must be ordered now to make certain there are no backorders. That includes things like plates, special pattern silverware, tablewares and any printed materials.
• Shirts, logo imprinted attire and promotional materials need to be ordered. Some have 30 day lead times.
• Our marketing plan begins thirty days from the restaurant opening date. That means next week we need to finalize the plan and start the promotions. We will post the entire marketing plan on the blog at that time.
• Beginning the week after Thanksgiving, we will begin accepting employment applications. A sign will go up. While we already have many applications, we will need to over staff to cull out the people who can’t do the job or don’t have the skills we thought they had.
• By the end of next week, we will begin draft menu’s to create inventory lists, recipe books and prep sheets for staff. Our primary food supplier(s) must be notified and confirm inventory for particular needs are in stock,
• Cleaning and sanitation equipment and supplies must be in place at least a week before scheduled opening. The restaurant will require a lot of daily maintenance due to the construction process as the opening date approaches.
• In two weeks cable, phone, security and Internet access lines must be installed in the areas we need them. Cabling is a prelude to POS, wi-fi and computer equipment being installed.

As a financial note, our accountant has notified us that it is imperative we get the restaurant open prior to the end of the year. There are about $30,000 of investment tax credits available this year that most likely won’t be in place next year. We can only hope we are ready to bake cookies for Santa Claus!

If you have followed the blog, you know we have been slowed to a creeping halt by the county while waiting on the restaurant construction permits to be issued. Our last hang-up was with a plan reviewer who was relatively new on the job, but had undertaken his bureaucratic responsibilities a little too seriously when he started to “interpret” the codes rather than just enforce the codes. This has been a five and a half week battle.

In any event, there was a meeting scheculed with the architect and general contractor with the mechanical plan reviewer for yesterday morning. The reviewer didn’t show up. Both the architect and contractor were livid and apparently expressed themselves loud enough for the Director of the department to overhear. The Director took it upon himself to disappear with the plans for about twenty minutes and reappear with them fully approved! All the items that the architect and contracter were there to argue were OK’d!

Luck or perseverance won the battle - we are not sure which. Construction in earnest started yesterday afternoon. In the next post pictures will be posted to show progress as we go along.

This morning the contractor and I will be developing a schedule to make sure all the sub-contractors, suppliers and tradesmen know we must make up time on this project. It will be a seven day a week plan.

As a restaurant owner, author and entrepreneur, I get dozens of questions about various aspects of owning a restaurant. Invariably, the questions that come from people who have never been in the hospitality business revolve around food. They want to know about competitive pricing, menu ideas, food suppliers, inventories and how to get guests in the door to taste their creations. Sadly, most of these well intentioned entrepreneurs are asking the wrong questions.

When you start a restaurant, no one expects you to serve “bad” food. Few new restaurants ever do. Customers assume you know what you are doing in the kitchen. They may not like your type of food, your concept or your interpretation of a particular menu item, but it is rare when a new restaurant misses the mark on the food itself.

The questions a new restaurant owner should be asking are about structure, service and cash flow. These are the subjects that will put you out of business - not bad food.

Structure creates consistency, which brings people back. Service is part of marketing. If you can’t deliver your product (food) properly, it makes no difference how good the food is or is not - the guest won’t be back. Cash flow is the life blood of your operation. More restaurants fail because of the owner’s lack of understanding their cash needs to keep the doors open. Profitable restaurants can, and do, fail because they didn’t understand cash flow.

While construction slows to a snail’s pace as we wait on permits and inspections, we are working on some of the mundane and admittedly boring parts of starting a new restaurant such as:

• forms and procedures like server guidelines, inventory sheets, server sidework, work flow and employee packets when they start employment.
• a marketing plan that will encompass the first six months of operations.
• new products for cleaning and sanitation.
• producing our kitchen recipe book.
• cash flow needs in the best case and worst case scenarios.
• procedures for the most efficient method to get food to the table and be able to turn tables.

The projects listed above are not fun. They are repetitive, common sense and in some cases, I have to almost be strapped to a chair to keep focused long enough to complete the task. However, each of these areas will impact the success or failure chances of any new restaurant.

If you are following this blog to learn about starting a restaurant or keeping your operation alive, pay close attention to the details of structure, service and cash flow. Collectively, they are more important than the food you will serve. There are a lot of restaurants who get away with mediocre food because they have all the other details perfected with consistency, good service and cash flow to meet their needs.

Those of you dreaming of your own restaurant or trying to find ways to improve the one you have, learn as much as you can about each of the subjects above. If you want some help buy the comprehensive guide to operating and marketing a restaurant The Restaurant Ebook. Yes, this is a blatant advertisement for one of my books, but it is a very small investment in your future. If you don’t get this book, buy a few others on the subjects discussed here. The knowledge will save you thousands of dollars and increase your chances of success.

While waiting for the ups and downs of construction, you start to toss around ideas for decor. Our theme is southern home cooking. That is pretty wide open to interpretation and allows a lot of latitude. Our existing restaurant features cooking antiques, funky signs and relatively bright colors. We intend to stay relative true to the concept, but you can easily go astray.

We tossed around new ideas like a wall mural of surrounding attractions, before and after pictures of a bridge being built nearby and even 3 dimensional objects that protrude from the wall as part of a painting or mural. While all of these were fun and somewhat related, we lost our focus. A second location of a successful restaurant concept needs to remain true to the theme. There are many reasons to develop some sameness to the brand. They include:

• Why change a model that has worked?
• What does the customer expect when walking in the door? Some of those customers will have visited the original restaurant and others have expectations based on the southern cooking theme. Neon and chrome, common in a New York deli, won’t work here.
• There is also a psychological aspect of keeping the customer engaged with the surroundings. Guests who enjoy and peruse the decor tend to believe the wait for food or service is shorter than a customer who is bored.

While we had fun for a week or two trading ideas, the focus returned and we are goiing back to the cooking antiques, funky old signs and cheerful colors. The new 15 pane French doors look very much like the entrance to an old southern mansion.

Lose focus and have some fun, but go back to your concept to make sure the customer doesn’t wind up with something less than expected.

As i mentioned in a previous post, the most frustrating part of building a restaurant is waiting on permits and regulators to do their job. Even though we are in a terrible economic slump for building, the time frames for the issuance of permits has remained the same (4 to 5 weeks). It is sad, costly and common.

We have kept busy with projects since the completion of demolition and the filing of the restaurant plans.  In some cases, we have done some construction that was not permitted, but we took the chance of not getting caught. We have now laid tile in the front half of the building, leaving only the kitchen and bathrooms when we get started. Double french doors replaced the old glass commercial door. The plumber has even made cement floor cuts, ready to begin underground drainage as soon as the permits are issued.

Tomorrow will be the beginning of the week. On Friday we were told the “trades” reviewers should be done with the revised plans. It didn’t happen. Hopefully Monday will be the day.

We have also;

• Drafted our restaurant opening marketing plan and will finalize (and post) as soon as we can plug in dates.
• Ordered many of our small equipment when found on sale or a bargain.
• Booths are being built and awaiting an installation date.
• The kitchen hood is ready to be placed when the permit is issued.
• Built an outside enclosure around the back door and walk-in refrigerator/freezer.
• Assembled many of the forms we use in the other two restaurants.
• Tested several products for possible inclusion on the menu.
• Picked wall coverings and beginning to buy some cosmetic decorations.

We are ready to build the restaurant!