Your Restaurant Business Plan vs Your Restaurant Reality

When it comes to the development of your restaurant business plan vs your restaurant reality today, can you think back to the passion you had when you developed that plan? Can you remember the excitement of making your dream a reality? You had a good restaurant business plan. It might have been a long detailed plan or just an outline on a cocktail napkin. Either way you could see your vision and had a plan. The challenge was understanding the difference between your restaurant business plan and your restaurant reality. In this video I’ll take you through the difference and how you can more closely align the two, no matter how long you’ve been in business.

It started with a dream, an idea, a calling. You wanted to open a restaurant and not just any restaurant. Your restaurant was going to be the best restaurant ever. You knew what you wanted to do and had the drive and determination to make it happen.

You developed the plan from a cocktail napkin to the business plan you needed for funding. Whether you designed your restaurant with your own blood, sweat and tears, or you hired a big-name architect, or somewhere in between, the restaurant is your plan, your dream. You had a hand in everything from the fabric on the chairs to the details of the flooring, the menu, the products you use in your recipes all the way through to hiring and training your team.

You had big dreams and big ideas about how it all would go.

Then reality set in. Your team makes mistakes, the POS system takes a crap, servers don't provide the customer service to the level you expect, cooks don't show up, dishes stack up and ticket times are too high. Your sales aren't what you expected. Maybe they were at one time and now they aren't, or maybe they never were, or maybe you know they should be better. 

Somewhere along the way, all the dreams you had for your restaurant never materialized and the daily grind gets harder and harder to slog through. There are the ups and downs with:

• Employees
• Vendors
• Customers
• Family conflicts
• Increasing prices
• Software investments/expenses
• Ever-evolving options for POS systems
• Disappointment in people overall

It’s not unusual for a restaurant owner to be pitching in on any number of the jobs in the restaurant, working in it day in and day out. Maybe you've even spent all your savings, or your family's savings. Maybe you had to borrow more money. Either way, you did what you felt you needed to do to stick it out.

And here's the deal. Sometimes your dream restaurant doesn't go as planned. It doesn't mean you had a bad idea. It doesn't mean it won't work. What it means is you have to learn what I've learned in my 30 plus years in this wonderful restaurant industry: three principles that can change your life.

1. Do less. Lead more.
2. Delegate and trust.
3. Let systems lead you.

Learning, adopting and following these three principles can put you back on track to that restaurant business plan that you had, that original dream you had, so that it is your reality.

These are the three principles the most successful restaurant owners follow - without fail. This is how their restaurant business plan matches their restaurant reality. 

If you want to make these three principles a part of your daily life, if you want to learn what they are and how you can implement them in your life and your business, click here.