Who Will Design Your Restaurant

To design and set up your restaurant you will require an interior designer, an architect, a contractor and access to good suppliers of restaurant furniture and kitchen equipment. You may explore giving it to somebody to do on a turnkey basis, but it pays to be involved for all major decisions.

Walk through your restaurant space with the designer. Let him know your vision and budget and review all proposed designs through sketches. Today, 3D visualisation software can help you get a good idea of how a proposed design would look like.

I would be to your benefit if you were to work with experts who have prior experience of designing successful restaurants. Design Atelier is a national architecture and design form that, among other things, specialises in creating distinctive spaces in the hospitality sector. They are known for designing the Barista Coffee Bars (nationally), TGI Friday’s Restaurant (Bangalore, Gurgaon), McDonald’s (Northern India), etc. The experience firm like Atelier will help ensure that you do not go wrong on functionality issues while interpreting your design concept faithfully through a participatory visioning process. Today, restaurant design has become a sub-discipline and you explore a number of firms to find out if these meet your budget and fit your mindset.

While today architects lead most of the design firms, strictly speaking, they deal with the major structural issues. He works with carpenters, electricians and plumbers (subcontractors) and keeps them on schedule and monitors their work. A range of suppliers will be needed to provide furniture, fixtures and equipment. The designer and you should work through all aspects to ensure that the integrity of the design concept is maintained throughout.

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Promoting Your Restaurant.

In a franchise situation, the brand owner will take a lot of the responsibility of the promotion, including the creating of marketing collaterals, general advertising and a degree of local advertising specific to your location. However, as a business owner it is always important to ensure that promotion for your restaurant is being done adequately.

Promotion can start anytime, but it should begin in earnest and in a planned manner with scheduled activities from the date the final launch has been planned.

Your promotion strategy depends on the type of restaurant you will be running and the catchment area for your customers. As mentioned earlier, QSR and cafes have more of a local clientele – customers who are already in the area. Casual and fine dining restaurants attract customers from further afield. Naturally, the promotion efforts for the first two formats need to be more locally focused and the promotion efforts for the other two formats should have a wider spread.

Localised efforts are cheaper to promote and restaurants that have a wider appeal would attract the lifestyle writers of city-based and national publications and hence, knowing your targeted clientele and choosing the right promotion strategy is very important.

A web presence is extremely important too. You need to have a dedicated website, and presence in all popular social networking sites. The Internet is the best way that customers can easily find all the important information regarding your restaurant, including operating hours, exact location and the menu. In the era of smart mobiles, access to people on the move is equally important.

Getting yourself talked about is the most important objective. The appeal of the concept and the experience of your restaurant is the only way you can ensure that you are talked about in pleasant terms. That is the challenge of word-of-mouth marketing.

It would be best to work out your promotion campaign through a thorough marketing plan. The following points need to be kept in mind while preparing it:

1. Design Fresh and Consistent Communication
2. Build a Public Relations Strategy
3. Do Effective Advertising
4. Drive Social Media Conversations

You can add to the list by writing in to us.

Launching Your Restaurant.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle in his classic book Politics quoted a proverb – “Well begun is half done.” The launch of operations in the restaurant business epitomises this saying. Reputation matters more than anything else in the restaurant business. Reputation is built on how past performance is perceived by people. The success of your restaurant greatly depends on how the experience of your early customers makes them into your strong supporters and advocates. Today, the power of word of mouth has been multiplied many times through social media networks – be it restaurant review sites, blogs, Facebook, Twitter.

A useful analogy is to look at your restaurant launch as the staging of a theatre performance that is scheduled to run for years. Staging a theatrical performance calls for intensive preparation so that the opening day performance is perfect. Think of the Republic Day Parade held every year since 1950 on 26^th January. Has there ever been a less-than-perfect performance? Your launch has to be well planned and well prepared.

In terms of a broad checklist your launch plans should not be finalised until you have the big three elements of your restaurant in place – great concept, great location and great food. To this add sufficient financial resources to run operations till break-even point is met. Finally, it is recommended that the main team should be in place at least 4 to 6 weeks before the launch date so that the team can be trained in all operations. All menu items should be tested out. Systems and processes for all customer-dealing situations need to be worked out and drilled. Think of this in terms of conducting rehearsals before the opening day.

It would be useful to think of launching your restaurant operations as a project. The final objective of the project is to create stable operations generating enough revenues, which will help you meet the break-even point on schedule.

The first project task would be to start promotions as soon as you can lock onto a final launch date. Training schedules need to culminate into a soft launch that can be viewed like a final dress rehearsal. Invited non-paying guests should be welcomed to your restaurant for a full service meal.

The launch project should look beyond the launch date and design a process of getting the house in order by ironing out the minor issues that will emerge in the early days of operations. Finally, you should target on ways to increase revenues to ensure you meet your financial targets.

After operations and revenue flows stabilise at acceptable levels, you can explore how to maintain the excitement in your restaurant by building novelty, innovation and improvement.

What do you think about the launch of the restaurants? Write in to Quitters and share your views.