Ten BIG Mistakes Startup Restaurateurs Make (and Need to Avoid!)

Most of us are afraid of making mistakes. This fear is not only a drain on your energy, but is also completely impossible to avoid. Humans make mistakes, and we all make them all the time. Mistakes teach you to do things better the next time, to learn and to grow. The creator of the Dyson vacuum cleaner is famous for saying that he made over 5,000 prototypes - that's over 5,000 mistakes! - before he got a design that worked in all the ways he wanted it to. Anyone who has been in the restaurant business for a day can reel off a dozen areas of operations that are prone to errors.

But there are mistakes, and then there are MISTAKES - all caps, bold-face, and underlined. These are the mistakes that are very hard to recover from. They are mistakes that will cause your business to fail, perhaps even before you open your doors. These mistakes are ones that tend to happen early in the development process, when you are determining your concept, securing your space, and getting financed. Happily, you can mitigate the potential effects of these serious errors by knowing ahead of time and taking decisive action to avoid them.

Read on to learn more about the 10 BIG mistakes that a smart restaurateur can avoid through good research, good planning, and a clear head during startup.

MISTAKE #1:
Lack of a Clear, Cohesive Vision

If you are creating a restaurant, you probably have lots of ideas of what you want that restaurant to be. You've considered what you want to serve, how you want to serve it, what you want the restaurant to look like, where you might be located, and perhaps even what your name or logo looks like. That's the fun part of restaurant development.