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

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.

Now that invoices for services, materials and equipment are beginning to roll in, there is an important step to remember when paying contractors. It is a notarized form called a “lien waiver“.

The format may vary from state to state, but the effect is the same. The form is protection from liens for owners/tenants of commercial space who pay a contractor for work and when there is a dispute, the contractor has a right to file a contractors/mechanics lien on the property. The name and type of lien may also vary in different states, but the protection is as follows:

• For the owner or lessee the signed lien waiver makes certain a contractor doesn’t claim they have not been paid for work performed.
• For the contactor, of course, the protection is the right to file the lien if he is not paid.
• Most construction lien laws allows the contractor to file the lien that becomes effective the date he started the work. This is what makes them dangerous. You could have the contractor start the work in January with an agreement that he would be paid upon completion of the work. If you have a dispute, even if you have paid the contractor 90% of his fees, he can file a lien that is effective the date he started. Six months later when there is a dispute, the contractor files a lien that is superior to all other liens going back to the original date in January, six months earlier. Lien waivers eliminate this probability.

The effect of a lien waiver is to confirm the contractor has been paid for all work through the date of the payment. This precludes him from going back to the start date of the project and eliminates trying to invoice for work completed and paid for.

On any construction work, demand a lien waiver every time you pay a contractor.