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

Opening a new restaurant cannot successfully happen without a plan. It can be elaborate or on the back of an old envelope, but you must keep your goals in perspective. There are many ways to open. You can do an advertising blitz and open after long testing and confidence that you have the major issues in meeting your guests expectations procedurally complete.

In the case of Maggie Mae’s on the Bluffs, we chose a very soft approach. Even after we selected a target opening date, it was kept very quiet. We didn’t even tell servers and staff until the day before. The process was:

1. Upon getting our license to operate, we ordered food and supplies. Training for kitchen staff and servers began about four days prior to opening.
2. Two days prior to opening we asked about 15 friends and relatives to come in between 9 AM and 11 AM to order from our menu. The menu was a paper format in a draft form. We wanted the flexibility to change before the official opening. The pre-opening seating pointed out additional needs in inventory, smallwares and training.
3. One day before opening we again invited friends and relatives for a pre-opening run through. The complimentary meals required them to give us honest feedback on every aspect of their experience. This time we told the approximately 25 guests they could come between 9 AM and 11 AM for breakfast or 11 AM and 1 PM for lunch. Experience from the previous day allowed us to have a smooth service at both breakfast and lunch. A meeting at the end of each day allowed staff to discuss weak areas and make corrections. The next day we would flip on the sign and serve during our normal hours of 6:30 AM to 2:30 PM. There was no publicity, advance advertising or anything but word of mouth.
4. On Friday, January 9th, we flipped the sign on and served whoever came in. By the end of the day we discovered many people had been following our construction progress and were waiting to test our new restaurant. The soft opening approach lead to $550 in sales. Enough to gain more confidence in the planning, training and changes we had made to open.

Until today, which will be our fifth day of operations, we have done no advertising, no news releases, announcements or other form of marketing except word of mouth as it spread through the community.

Confident of our growing customer service strength, the second phase of our plan will go into effect. We will:

• Send an email out to 1300 contacts from our email database from the other two restaurants.
• Take flyers to local businesses we have used and encouraged us throughout the construction (seen in the graphic on this post). Hopefully they will place on their counters.
• Start the process of visiting five businesses per day with take out menus and a sample of some item from our menu.
• An ad will be place in two local community papers for publication next week.
• Above all, ask satisfied customers to tell other people about us. Word of mouth is still the strongest form of marketing.

All of the events above will be strung out over the next week. We still don’t want a blast of business that would detract from the food, service or guest experience until staff is fully prepared to handle a volume of business. We may think we are ready for anything now, but we must know we are!