There are plenty of variations in the "actual" daily business operations. I say experience first because ; most first time eaterie owners don’t realize what’s it essentially like "behind the scenes" in a restaurant…..on a Fri. night when you have a thirty minute wait at the front door and your one of your better cooks and a waitress called in sick for the night……a side note…..on the positive side with your pulse rate up so high…… And always being on your feet….. You do not have to fret about gaining weight……so back to that night……just that one night alone can make your life a living hell dependent on what kind of "service" you offer in your restaurant……. Now say you will probably have this same eventuality plenty more times in your cafe possession career. The picture I would like to paint here is so you will see each side of the business with no punches held back…I will tell you like it is in reality……..the bad and good as we go… You may see it is a sheer difference from the fellow behind the desk in the gas station waiting for someone to pump gas and buy some lager. I have built many cafes from the start from an idea on a tissue at a bar.
I’ll say confidently the potential eaterie owner sometimes see’s him or herself sat at the non-public table in the back of their restaurant entertaining guests and ordering pals drinks at the bar or behind their touch screen cash register…..generally being the loving "owner" of one thousand this nice restaurant. This eventuality might be true if you have unlimited funds or you know precisely what goes on at each turn in your cafe. Owning a cafe is understanding what the dishwasher is doing at 10:45PM while he’s taking out the trash ; its understanding why the cook you employed is as slow as molasses in the day but at the 1st table being sat…. He springs to life ; and lots more complexities that one must understand otherwise you will get RIPPED OFF TO NO END. 2nd is Time- it requires a heap of time, particularly for the 1st six month. Open to shut each day. Yes this is fact, I once did open to close in a HOTEL which is breakfast, lunch, and dinner seven days every week and feasts on top of that for virtually two years straight.
The payoff was excellent but none the less…..time must be given to your baby because it’s a haven for losing money. As an interesting point this is true…..there are far more paths to lose cash in the cafe business than there are to make it, so you better know what they are….we’ll go into more detail later.
3rd is Money – because unless this is your fourth restaurant you may pay money for everything for the first quarter, and many items you may pay money for two years ( generally hard spirits ).
Cafe Business Remember the cafe business has a particularly high failure rate….and the providers that you would use of groceries, meats, soaps etc know this…every one of them has been burned by some cafe going into bankruptcy in the middle of the night and sticking them with the last thirty days of invoices…. That money will go to nutrition cost ; work cost ; taxes, liquor cost ; general overhead etc……Also remember your overhead is bigger in an eaterie than most enterprises. Plan on it being giant and you may do better…..for example I use many visuals when planning an eaterie for somebody and this precise one I had to use as the customer thought for some reason the electrical bill would only be a little higher than their home because they were going to use propane gas to cook on…… OK, think about all of the fridges it takes to keep a cafe running. The average operation will have two walk-in coolers, three reach-ins as their called in the kitchen, and two in the servers area and three in the bar if you’ve got a bar and then there’s the little compressors that run solely to keep the ice makers making and the soda lines flowing and cool etc.
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