Plan for Restaurant Consultancy Project

Environment Factors in Starting a Small Restaurant:

A small restaurant is a small venture of an entrepreneur of the neighborhood. A small restaurant banks heavily on the patronage of the residents of its locality – a radius of 3 km at the most. There would also be a number of other small restaurants, supposing the area identified for the start up is lucrative enough to support another store. All these eateries target the same customer base and hence the competition is bound to be intense and often could lead to price driven strategies and price under cutting.

The business will depend heavily on the customers it is able to physically attract to its facility, to start with. Later on, multiple channels of touching customers will be needed, like home delivery and internet ordering. In the initial stage, customer footfalls will make or break the business. To ensure footfalls, the initial stage will involve a slew of promotional offers, oriented towards creating customer loyalty and repeat visits and orders.

The business plan for such a venture must be developed based on management principles and the same must be backed by market research centered on the geography in question. When the research is happening, much of the ideas of management expose themselves as market opportunities. It is up to the entrepreneur to grab the most lucrative opportunity and work on the same to start a successful venture.

Management Ideas and how they can shape up the Restaurant Business Plan:

The following marketing concepts will have to be considered and many of them imbibed into the business plan for the small restaurant (Kotler & Armstrong, 2002):

1. Mission Statement – as the broad objective for which the business is started. This must be the long term purpose of existence and not just an aim to start a small restaurant in a particular locality.
2. Store Brand – Brand development, identity creation
3. 4P’s – Product, Price, Promotion & Place – development of the attributes of each P with detailed market research
4. SWOT Analysis – with the outcomes of the SWOT analysis and Store identity, a SWOT analysis has to done to understand the business potential and nature of business
5. Market Segmentation – Segmenting the market of the neighborhood or any other target market according to consumer tastes and preferences, according to price positioning of competitors, according to different buying patterns.
6. Target Market – based on the most suitable market segmentation, a target market and target customer profile must be developed.
7. Positioning – based on the target market and consumer profile, the restaurant has to be positioned either to be premium, value or economy, or in any other fashion according to the results of the previous understanding.

Small Restaurants & More:

            Small restaurants in the neighborhood can be pure blood restaurants that serve food or can be small bars, karaoke bars, internet cafes, etc. Such establishments can earn money out of food and drinks served, but can offer value additions like karaoke singing for patrons for free or at a nominal cost or internet browsing facilities at a nominal cost. Such value additions help in bringing in customers with a specific need to do something or be entertained, and the food and the drinks and other peripherals become additions to this basic need, like the need to sing in front of an audience or browsing the internet.

            Such secondary restaurants, if karaoke bars and internet cafes can be termed so, also need to imbibe the management ideas listed above since these should have business plans.

            An internet café can bring in customers with a need high speed connectivity, and people who spend a lot of time online, using high bandwidth applications like Skype, video chat. Again, there can be different segments of such cafes. There could be premium cafes which offer specialized menus and value giving cafes. So segmentation study, 4P understanding, positioning, target customer profiling are required in this business also.

Karaoke bars are a global phenomenon in that they bring in a wide cross section of people. There are private karaoke boxes which cater to premium customers (Zhou & Tarocco 2007). These can form a part of the small bar or the whole bar can be a public karaoke eat out and bar, depending on the interpretations from the segmentation, positioning and target customer profiling.

References

Xun Zhou & Francesca Tarocco, 2007. Karaoke: the Global Phenomenon. London: Reaktion.

Philip Kotler & Louis Armstrong, 2002. Principles of Marketing. 9^th Ed. India: Prentice-Hall.