Thoughts on the Future of Restaurant Business Development

Today's podcast centers around restaurant development and technology. Now I want to tell you about our guest today, Anthony Amunategui, founder of CDO Group, an industry leader in providing a full range of outstanding construction, development and project management services. Anthony and CDO bring an incredible amount of experience and expertise when it comes to restaurant development. Listen in as Anthony and I talk about the future of the restaurant industry, technology and restaurant development insights.

Anthony comes from a development side, a development background, first with retail stores and then restaurant locations, where he’s focused a lot of his career. He started with Boston Market locations and the first ever Einstein Bros Bagels, which started as The Bagel Shop. Specifically with Einstein’s, he learned how to manage development with the market analysis and trade area analysis to find the best route to penetrate a marketplace. Eventually he was building Panera Bread locations.

For the last 24 years his company has been building thousands of restaurants around the country. Anthony says his focus as a construction provider is to manage the process successfully so the restaurant operator can concentrate on setting up the inner workings and finding the best managers to open it.

“If restaurants open with a line out the door, I'm successful. That means that they stopped worrying about construction and they started focusing on pre-opening opportunities,” he said. “Our goal is to turn over on time all the time and then really give them [restaurant operators] a place where they can train and be ready for those customers.”

Listen to this discussion to hear Anthony’s take on:

• What’s important when building a new restaurant
• What to look for in a construction partner
• The financial impact of finding the right construction partner
• Why data is so important to restaurant location and what kind is most helpful
• How location and reach impact delivery and vice versa
• A discussion on how things are different since the shutdown of 2020
• The importance of embracing new trends, especially in technology
• What Anthony is seeing in newly built restaurants
• The flexibility of food trucks and off-premise cooking
• Anthony’s experience with getting out of the day-to-day construction operations to lead his business, just like David coaches restaurant owners to do
• How budgets make decisions about purchasing equipment for new restaurants so much easier
• How coaches can challenge you to think bigger and more strategically in your business
• Why it’s important to get one done right before growing

You can learn more about CDO Group here.

Click the podcast player above to listen in, or you can watch the video on YouTube, click here to download the latest episode.