Independent Restaurants

It is, of course, beneficial for a restaurant to serve good food, project a pleasant ambience, and be skillfully marketed. Marketing gets people in the door, and good fare and atmosphere are the two key components in an enjoyable dining experience, which brings customers back in the door. Independent restaurateurs have accomplished such often, and yet, all too often a full house isn't enough. Restaurateurs find red ink staring them in the face after a month of lines around the block. Why?

It's because the greatest chef and the greatest decorator in the world are not alone enough for a successful restaurant. It is the nature of a restaurant, with it's so many intricate logistical elements, to leak money from an assortment of places that only can be found by one who knows where to look. The one menu item, incorrectly priced, wildly popular and costing the owner each time it is ordered. The servers pocketing money because there's a hole in the accounting system. The bartender giving away free drinks unnoticed, or honestly selling drinks at a price so low that it would be more cost effective for the owner to pay his patrons to drink elsewhere. The landlord unbeknownst to you getting too much rent, or maybe a cost of debt service far higher than it needs to be.

Some, when confronted with such a conundrum as a full house with no profit, unable to find the waste, think everything must simply be too cheap, and either raise prices or cut too many corners. But raise them enough to make a reasonable living without first eliminating the waste, or cut away too much of what your customers love, and all of a sudden the house is full no longer, as in the intensely competitive restaurant industry people know too well when they do not get the dinner they deserve for the money they pay.

In the restaurant industry, profit margins are simply too slim to make mistakes. With high revenues inevitably come high costs, and the difference between the two is small and temperamental. A small logistical mistake or inefficiency in a shoe store, costing 2% of revenues, might hardly dent its owner’s pocket, but such a mistake in a restaurant might mean the restaurateur’s livelihood. Try enlarging the profit margins, and customers disappear faster than David Copperfield in a dry ice factory.

Harris Eckstut can find these mistakes. He knows what they look like and where to look, be it in the budget, on the lease, in the kitchen, on the menu, or under the bar. And if you intend to start a new restaurant, he can stop them before they start.