Hey everybody my name is Ryan Gromfin – I’m an author, speaker, chef, restaurateur, and I’m the founder of the www.RestaurantBoss.com as well as www.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.

1. Restaurant Owners Create a Job Instead of Building a Business.

I call these “self-employees”, instead of being “self-employed” like we all want.

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 the owner could make enough money to hire a sufficient staff. So that they could have the freedom to 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. Their just spending too much time doing the things that are not important in their business. The one thing that I want to make sure that we are aware of is that True business owners,  own a system that is not dependent on them. A system is duplicable, it’s replicable. 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. Most of those big corporate chains 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.

2. Restaurant Owners Work on Everything Except on Their Passions.

I’m sure you’ve fallen victim to this.

• “Why did you get into the business in the first place?”

• “Why did you decide to leave your job and open up your own restaurant?”

Chances are it probably wasn’t so you can do accounting, 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…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?”

it’s normal to wear many hats, as a restaurant owner you’re going to do marketing; you’re gonna have to do bookkeeping. you’re gonna 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.

Do more of what you’re good at and love, instead of what you’re bad at and don’t love.

Many of you are probably familiar with the quadrant.  You draw a plus sign that looks like this, and then one portion of it is things were good at & things we love.  Then the other section is things were good at but we don’t love. Then things were bad at that we don’t love. And things were bad at that we do love.

You list everything out into those different categories and then you start outsourcing the things that you’re bad at and you don’t love, then you move to the other quadrants until you’re only doing the things that you’re good at and you love.

3. Restaurant Owner Think They are Delegating

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. Then three months later, when that part of the business isn’t doing well, they say well my manager’s an idiot, my manager couldn’t handle that…

“Don’t pawn off responsibility and don’t pawn off the most important task.”

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, because they end up doing it themselves anyways. They delegate a task. It doesn’t get done properly. They end up doing it themselves, and they 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 they just say…”my staff are all idiots, they don’t know what they’re doing” and then give up on delegating. They martyr themselves into not delegating.

True delegating means you don’t do the tasks and you don’t worry about the task, but you don’t ignore the task. The most important part here is notice the word ‘task’ shows up a lot? Because we don’t delegate an entire project. We delegate tasks. There might be eight or nine task in a project, but we delegate out the little pieces. Because those little pieces can have deadlines and 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 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 The 6 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.