Before starting any restaurant business, one should be aware of all the advantages and disadvantages of each and every situation that comes your way and know how to tackle these problems. When you decide to set up a food business by yourself, many of these problems occur. Let’s deep dive more into the problems restaurateurs face while setting up any food business without any professional help.
1. 100 ideas from 100 friends
While setting up a restaurant business by oneself, guidance is often taken from friends and family who have business set ups sometimes in the same industry, and sometimes not related to the food industry at all. Taking advice from 100 different people before starting up can also lead to a 100 different problems that you will not know the solution to. This is what causes a chaos while starting up without any professional help.
On the other hand, when you start up and set up your food business with a reliable consultant, you are assured ideas and concepts that work and prove to be a functional model. Consultants not only give you the freedom of decision, but also guide you through the entire process and advise you on things you should and should not do. This takes your food business to the next level without any hassle
2. Pricing as per competitors
When you set up a food business by yourself, you are unaware as to how your items are to be priced as per the costing. This is where one turns to the competitors and prices them as per the competitor’s prices. This is where restaurateurs go wrong. Your competitor may be serving a same cuisine as you but may have a cloud kitchen while you run a dine in restaurant. This would mean less overheads and expenses for the cloud kitchen while you have much more expenses to deal with but now you have a lower selling price based off your competitor’s rates.
However, approaching a consultant would give you the right guidance in this area. A consultants work is to price your menu items as per the cost of sales along with the packaging, staff salaries and even accounts for fixed costs such as rent. Setting up by yourself would not enable you to account for everything as there is a chance you will miss a very important parameter when it comes to pricing your products. Here is where your profit directly gets affected.
3. Misguided SOP’s
System Operating Procedures (SOP’s) are very important for any restaurant business. SOP’s are a systematic process of the work that needs to be done, how it is to be done and the objective achieved by following the particular procedure. Starting up by yourself, you fall short of the professionalism that is to be maintained behind the scene, and this is where your brand gets affected with negative ratings.
Consultants help with well-structured SOP’s for kitchen as well as operations which leaves no room for any mishaps or mistakes during day to day functionality of the food business.
4. Staff work at their comfort
When recruiting by yourself, you are unaware about the knowledge and skills required by the staff for a smooth sailing of your food business. This sometimes makes you recruit known people or sometimes makes you recruit an unskilled work force. This is where the staff takes advantage of the owner and makes do with whatever they feel like.
While seeking guidance from a consultant, you are given hiring guidelines that need to be followed which include experience, knowledge and test of skills before you hire the right candidate.
5. Inconsistency in quality
Recipes and service quality often seem to fall short of well documented manuals which directly impact the operations. When you set up by yourself without any professional help, recipes are always altered and the service is never perfect.
With the help of your consultant, you can have professionally curated recipe manuals and service manuals that need to be followed word for word which includes the proper grammage of a dish to the minimization of wastage. This ensures consistency in quality whether it is related to the food or service.
Hence we always advise restaurateurs to opt for a reliable consultant before starting up to get your base right. Just like an Indian gravy, if you do not get the base right, you do not get the taste right! The only downfall here is consultants usually charge a heavy fee for these services. And that is why we at Consulture have come up with the world’s first online food business consultation model which is feasible for any restaurant business in comparison to a restaurant consultant.
