How to open a restaurant? (Udemy.com)

What is the aim of this course?   

Opening restaurants is very demanding in terms of time and cash. I will show you in this course how to research the market and plan your business to make sure that you open the right concept, in the right place, for the right people. Most restaurants fail because they get it wrong in one of the 3 main factors: location, concept, and target segment of customers. Here I will show you how to find out with little money in advance whether your business idea makes sense or not.   

We will show several techniques that will help you check:   

• Is the location good for your business?

• Who is your customer, and will you have enough of them in your selected location?

• What are the good and bad things about certain concepts, and whether it is a good fit for you and the location?

• How much money can you get from your restaurant business?

I will also show you how to translate it to Excel and create your business plan with this universal tool. It will be useful not only for opening your business but also afterward managing your business.   

I will also teach you how to test your concept in real life without actually building the restaurant.   

Why have I decided to create this course?   

I have worked in retail and restaurant chains for 4 years. It always surprised me that even the chains had problems with the proper selection of location and the concept that would be optimal. 3 years ago, my friends started opening their own concepts or taking over existing ones. Due to my previous experience, they started asking me for some help.  In this course, you will find the practical tricks that we used to make sure that the businesses we were running were making money in the selected locations. This framework was proven both with small restaurants and with chains. We have also applied it extensively in retail projects. You will find here a little theory and mainly a lot of practical how-to tips that will help you perform the research on your own.   

This course is based on my 15 years of experience as a consultant in top consulting firms and as a Board Member responsible for strategy, performance improvement, and turn-arounds in the biggest firms from the Retail, FMCG, SMG, B2B, and services sectors that I worked for. I have carried out or supervised over 90 different performance improvement projects in different industries that generated a total of 2 billion of additional EBITDA. On the basis of what you will find in this course, I have trained in person over 100 consultants, business analysts, and managers who are now Partners in PE and VC funds, Investment Directors and Business Analysts in PE and VC, Operational Directors, COO, CRO, CEO, Directors in Consulting Companies, Board Members, etc. On top of that, my courses on Udemy were already taken by more than 350 000 students, including people working in EY, Walmart, Booz Allen Hamilton, Adidas, Naspers, Alvarez & Marsal, PwC, Dell, Walgreens, Orange, and many others.

I teach through case studies, so you will have a lot of lectures showing examples of analyses and tools that we use. To every lecture, you will find attached (in additional resources) the Excel files as well as additional presentations and materials shown in the lectures, so as part of this course, you will also get a library of ready-made analyses that can, with certain modifications, be applied by you or your team in your work.

In what way will you benefit from this course?   

The course is a practical, step-by-step guide loaded with tons of tricks, hints, and examples that will significantly change the way you perceive your business and will drastically increase your chances of success. There is little theory – mainly examples, a lot of tips from my own experience, as well as other notable examples worth mentioning. Our intention is that, thanks to the course, you will know:   

1. How to find the right spot to build a profitable restaurant

2. How to analyze a restaurant concept that you think about with little money

3. How to select the right location for your business

4. How to analyze your target segment and how to adapt the concept to them

5. How to get the concept-location-customer fit

6. How to  test the restaurant concept with little money

7. How to estimate in Excel the sales and margin of your restaurant?

You can also ask me any questions either through the discussion mode or by messaging me directly.     

How is the course organized?   

The course is currently divided into the following sections:   

• Introduction. We begin with a little intro to the course

• What concept should you choose? In the second section, we go through ways you can use to learn everything about a specific concept and decide whether it is good for you or not.    

• How good is a certain location? In the third section, I will show you how to analyze the locations you are considering to make sure that they are a good match with your concept. This section will have a lot of hacks that you can apply to make sure that the location you are choosing will generate your expected profits

• How to analyze your target group? Only by knowing your customer well and applying this knowledge in management, as well as in the selection of the concept, can you build a sustainable business. Here, I will show you methods that you can use online and offline to spy on your customers and      understand them properly

• Testing your restaurant concept with MVP. The fifth section is devoted to testing your concept without building full-blown restaurants. We will talk about an interesting concept called MVP (Minimum Viable Product) that is also applied to restaurants to make sure that what you build is what the customer wants and needs. It helps you for a fraction of your initial budget

• Restaurant model in Excel. In this section, I will show you how to calculate in Excel, on the basis of previous sections, whether your business idea for a new restaurant makes sense or not. You will get ready-made tools in Excel that you can adapt to your needs.

You will be able also to download many additional resources   

1. Examples in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint

2. Presentation of slides shown in the course

3. Links to additional presentations and movies

4. Links to books worth reading