Today, I want to share with you the six biggest mistakes
that restaurant owners make in their business,
and why that is costing you money, freedom, and joy in your life.
Hey, everybody. My name is Ryan Gromfin. I'm an author, speaker, chef, restaurateur,
and I'm the founder of TheRestaurantBoss.com,
as well as RestaurantProfitAndPerformance.com
Today, I want to share with you those six biggest mistakes
that restaurant owners make in their business
and why it's costing them more money,
more freedom, and more joy in their lives.
So, let's get right into these today.
So, the first mistake that I see restaurant owners make is that they create
a job instead of building a business.
And I call these self-employees
instead of being self-employed like we all want,
and what does that really mean?
Well, sometimes this is a result of a poor plan at the beginning.
That just means that maybe the restaurant wasn't built big enough
or maybe there wasn't enough space or enough thought put into the plan,
so that way the owner could make enough money to hire a sufficient staff.
So that way they could have that freedom and work on the things that they want to do,
so that way they're not a self-employee, but a business owner.
Sometimes it's the ways in which owners execute on a daily basis.
They're just spending too much time doing the things that aren't important in their business,
and one thing that I want to make sure that we're aware of is that true business
owners owned a system that is not dependent on them.
Meaning a system is duplicatable, its replicatable.
It can be managed, owned,
and operated by anyone, not just someone with the experience in that
particular business.
When you go to sell a restaurant,
you have a very limited number
of buyers because only restaurant operators can operate a restaurant,
but when you sell a restaurant business,
you could sell to a doctor, to a lawyer,
to a group of investors,
you know most of those big corporate chains that we know
are not owned by restaurant people,
they're owned by investment groups because it's a business and it's set up
in a way that it runs themselves, so people who understand money
can buy the business, and then set it up in a way that the operators
can operate it.
So, let's look at that next big mistake that restaurant owners make, which is,
they work on everything except on their passion.
I'm sure you've fallen victim to this.
Like the first question, I like to ask is,
why did you get into the business in the first place?
Why did you decide to leave your job and open up
your restaurant?
Chances are, it probably wasn't so you could do accounting and marketing
and deal with the IRS and collectors and vendors.
You probably got into the restaurant business for some other reason, for some passion.
Maybe it was wine or food or customers or whatever it was,
but are you doing those things? Are you doing the passion projects,
the things that fuel you, or the things that take away energy from you?
Which I think is our next point here… oh, no. Our next point is, it's normal to wear many hats,
which is kind of what I just said here,
but you know as a restaurant owner, you're going to have to do marketing,
you're going to have to do bookkeeping, you're going to have to track expenses,
you're going to have to do some of the things that we don't necessarily love to do,
it's normal to wear those hats but don't
spend all of your time on that stuff.
Spend your time on your passion projects
which now is that point that I thought
do more of what you're good at and love,
instead of what you're bad at and don't love.
You know, many of us are probably familiar with a quadrant,
you know in X or a plus sign that looks like this, and in one portion of it,
it's things we're good at, things we love, and then the other section
is things we're good at but we don't love,
and then it's things were bad at that we don't love,
and things we are bad at that we do love.
And the idea is to move from the quadrant,
you know, you list everything out into those different categories and then you move
from the quadrant.
You start outsourcing the things that you're bad at and you don't love,
and then you move to the other quadrants until you're only doing the things that you're good at
and you love.
Now the third mistake that I see a lot of restaurant owners
make or the third biggest mistake I see restaurant owners make
is they think they're delegating,
but they're not really delegating. Let me explain what I mean by that here.
So, delegating is not pawning off ownership and responsibility.
A lot of times I see restaurant owners who take the most
important tasks in their business and they pawn them off to a manager
and then three months later when that part of the business isn't doing well,
they say, well, my managers in an idiot, my manager couldn't handle that.
Don't pawn off responsibility and don't
pawn off the most important tasks.
Just because you're delegating, doesn't mean that you're ignoring.
You still have to check up on things and make sure they're getting done right.
A lot of times owners give up on delegating too soon
and because they end up doing it themselves anyways,
they delegate out a task, it doesn't get done properly,
they end up doing it themselves and they've wasted twice the time energy and resources
because that person had to do it.
They did it wrong and then now they have to do it again, so then they just say,
my staff saw are all idiots,
they don't know what they're doing, I'm giving up on delegating.
I'm just going to do everything myself and they martyr
themselves into not delegating.
So, I want to quickly tell you what delegating is
and you should be delegating. True delegating means you don't do
the tasks and you don't worry about the task,
but you don't ignore the tasks.
Now, the most important part here is notice the word task shows up a lot
because we don't delegate entire projects, we delegate tasks.
Now it may be 8 or 9 tasks into a project,
but we delegate out the little pieces because those little pieces can have deadlines,
measurable results, they can be checked up on,
they're not ignored.
Even if you hire a marketing company to do your marketing
and you've quote-unquote “delegated” out your marketing,
that doesn't mean you ignore it and just assume they're doing a good job,
you should be meeting with your marketing company on a weekly basis if not more
to make sure that they're meeting your deadlines, to make sure that they're prepared,
to make sure they're on top of things,to make sure they're getting the results that you want.
You don't actually have to do the task,
but you can't ignore the task or the project.
Now, we only went through the first three of the six mistakes,
the six biggest mistakes that restaurant owners make.
In the next video in part 2 of this video series, I'm going to share with you four,
five, and six.
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here to help each other.
My name is Ryan Gromfin. I'm with the as TheRestaurantBoss.com,
as well as RestaurantProfitAndPerformance.com,
and I want to thank you for taking the time to watch this video.
I hope you avoid making these first three mistakes and come back next week
to see what those other three mistakes are,
and how I can help you have more money, more freedom, and more joy
in your business.
Have a wonderful day.