Opening a restaurant is not a get-rich-quick scheme.
Most restaurant owners open a restaurant because they love to cook and/or enjoy making people happy.
The money? Not usually one of the perks.
Restaurant owners take home an estimated $65,000 per year after covering all of their expenses.
It’s true that some restaurants make more money than others. A small corner cafe could gross $500,000 per year while a much larger establishment could net millions.
Don’t get too excited. The more money a restaurant makes, the higher the cost of food, labor, rent, etc.
I recently completed an article covering the Top 100 independent restaurants in America, and one was grossing $41 million per year!
Still, the average profit margin of a full-service restaurant usually falls somewhere between 3% and 5%. Calculated by the following: (Gross Sales − Cost of Goods Sold)/Gross Sales.
Can marketing raise restaurant profit margins?
So, can more marketing help raise a restaurants profit margin?
Inventory, labor, and rent are the largest operating costs to address first when trying to raise profit margins in a restaurant.
Beyond that, increasing a restaurant’s marketing efforts is a great way to increase repeat business, upsells, catering, referrals, reviews, and more.
Which brings me back to the book series and website redesign.
See what I did there?
When the new website is complete, it will have a section of content focused on new restaurant marketing.
It’s there that I’ll create focused content that may end up in the book series.
The idea is to provide valuable information while monitoring which topics resonate most with readers.
Finding answers to important questions
Most of all, I want to provide readers with useful, actionable information that they actually want and appreciate.
Author Brian Tracy has a great blog addressing the key questions you should be able to answer before writing or publishing a book. He provides 10 questions in all, but the ones that resonated most with me included:
Why should people read your book?
What are the 3 core ideas of your book?
How will you get their attention?
Is your book unique?
What will your reader learn?
If you’re an author, how do you find answers to your important questions?
If you’re a restaurant operator, how can my website/book answer the above questions for you?
Have a great weekend; I’ll check back in with you next Friday!
—Liz