THE CHALLENGE
A lot of people want to open their own restaurant. They like to eat out and talk about how they could do it better.
It all looks fun – and so easy. But restaurants have a high failure rate: research indicates that roughly 60 per cent of them fail in the first three years.
What does it take to do it well? Tim Pater, the founder of three restaurants in Kingston, Ont., has a deep understanding of this difficult industry.
THE BACKGROUND
Mr. Pater got the food bug in France, where he attended his final year of high school. When he returned home to Canada, he studied urban planning at university, worked in restaurants to pay the bills, and cooked memorable meals for his roommates and friends. “Everyone said I should open a restaurant,” he recalls.
After graduation, he started a catering business and continued to work in restaurants while it got off the ground. On the side, Mr. Pater also invested in a friend’s business: when it took off, the investment gave him a nest egg which, combined with support from his family, enabled him to open his first restaurant.
Mr. Pater launched a classic French bistro called Le Chien Noir, in 2000. Rather than follow a traditional approach to restaurant growth –opening clones in different locations – he grew his business by opening very different restaurants in close proximity to each other. In 2003, he opened a second restaurant, an Italian pizza and wine bar called Atomica, and last year he opened gourmet burger joint Harper’s Burger Bar.
What has he learned from the experience?
THE WISDOM
Mr. Pater has five pieces of advice for would-be restaurateurs.
1. Know the industry. Make sure you work in a restaurant before you start one, so you know what’s involved. As Mr. Pater says:” It’s not that glamorous. You can’t prance around the place giving free drinks to your friends. It’s a difficult industry and there is a challenge every day.”
The years he spent working in restaurants gave him a depth of experience in all aspects of operations, such as designing the facility, pricing menus, managing staff, selecting suppliers, and dealing with the complex regulatory environment that surrounds food and beverage service.
2. Love the industry. If you can’t stand the thought of waiting tables or dealing with the public or working evenings and weekends, this is not the business for you. Your spouse or partner also has to be on board given the brutal working hours and frequent chaos.
It helps to be tuned into the trends. For example, Mr. Pater saw the growing gourmet burger craze in the United States, and he figured it would resonate with native Kingstonians and the Queen’s students who spend most of the year in the city.
3. Work on your business, not in your business. “If you’re cooking, bussing tables and bartending every night, you won’t have the time and energy to pay attention to the business part of your business,” Mr. Pater explains.
The margins are thin in the restaurant industry, and someone has to focus on the money and on keeping costs down. In doing so, you also have to deal with constant turnover in staff. Although Mr. Pater has instituted managerial positions and profit-sharing to provide career paths for valued employees, he recognizes that for most people, “working in a restaurant is something you do until you figure out what you want to do with your life.”
