Hope you find that this 3-part series on writing business plan for F&B businesses to be useful. If you haven’t read the first part of this blog post, you can find it here, Business Plan For Your New F&B Business. Part 1. In Part 2 of this article, we will cover what you have to take into consideration when you are writing the Operations portion of your business plan. As you read on, if you have been in the F&B industry, you might find that these information are nothing new. We’d still recommend that you put everything down on paper so that you have a better overview and plan ahead or make any adjustments when necessary. If you have already gotten this portion of the business covered, you might want to consider FoodZaps Startup Kit where we provide a hassle-free set up for your restaurant POS and mobile ordering system.

Operations Plan

As part of your Operations Plan, you’d want to consider having an Operations Manual to be created somewhere along the line. In order to do so, you’ll need a baseline of what is daily operations at your F&B outlet is going to be like. As a restaurant owner, it is imperative that you understand the operations of your business inside out, especially during the initial stage of your business. Once you have come up with the Operations Manual, I would advise that you step back and focus on other aspects of the business while fine tuning the operations of the business.

  1. Glossary of Restaurant Management and Operation Terms
  2. Your operations plan should minimally cover the following topics:
    1. Human Resources
      1. Employee training
        1. Waiting staff training
          1. FoodZaps mobile ordering system will help your waiting staff to improve the restaurant’s overall productivity. We have a written a full article related to this topic which you can find here, How To Improve Your Restaurant’s Productivity By More Than 50%.
        2. Barista training
      2. Personnel administration
        1. Hiring
        2. Employee benefits
        3. Insurance coverage
    2. Front-end Management

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  1. Dining room management
    1. Depending on how big your dining room will be, you might want to segment different parts of the restaurant. You can divide them into Alfresco area, booth tables dining area, family friendly area with bigger tables or even the queue management for take aways.
  2. Bar and beverage management
    1. Will you require a bar for your restaurant? Will you need fridges to store drinks to keep them chilled? What are the beverages that you are going to serve, you could probably start with a general list of popular drinks and depending on the popularity of the beverages you will be able to adjust accordingly in the future.
  3. Cleanliness and sanitation
    1. You should ensure that you have a standard operating procedure when it comes to cleanliness, a guideline must be in place on cleanliness and sanitation. Once you come up with the guideline it should be printed out and made visible for everyone. In day to day operations you’ll have to ensure that cleanliness and sanitation is top priority.
  4. Menu and kitchen management
    1. Working together with the chef, you should work out a menu that caters to both sides of the business. You’d want to let the chef have the freedom to express his creativity with more adventurous dishes while also catering to the palate of the majority of your customers. One thing to note is also to have a manageable list of items on your menu. This will help tremendously with the inventory management as well as the preparation work required for each menu item. As with everything on this list, always listen to feedback from everyone and make changes whenever neccessary. At times when you are too involved with the operations of the business, you might lose the ability to view the macro aspects of the business.
  • Back-end Management
    1. Equipment management
      1. What are the equipments that you will require? Fryers, freezers, ovens, griddles or any other equipment that you’ll need to run a efficient kitchen.
    2. Purchasing and inventory
      1. Inventory costs is usually the second highest cost that you will incur after manpower costs. Hence you’d want to control this portion of the restaurant operations closely.
        1. When you first start the business or taking over the business, you’d want to personally count the items that are supposed to be in your inventory. Doing so will give you a rough overview of your inventory. You might not be the one doing the inventory and stock taking in the future, but it will be great if you know the starting point and have a basis to work on.
        2. FoodZaps Full Course subscription plan comes with inventory management features which allow you to stay on top of your inventory tracking up to ingredient level, you can also set an alert for low stock reminders. Click here to find out more about Full Course plan.
        3. Train every one of your staff to understand the stock taking process, also do note that for stock taking and inventory management you should assign 2 persons to do the job. This is to provide a second layer of check so that there won’t be a miscount or to prevent item losses.

 

Also do take note of any licensing requirements that you’ll need to run your business. E.g. food type certifications, Halal, Kosher. You might also need a license to sell alcohol beverages in some countries, if you intend to run a pub with live sports screening, you might need a license specifically for those. It will be best to check with local governing bodies and do your due research when it comes to the licensing and certification requirements. In the next part of this series, we will look into the Marketing portion of the business plan and what you have to consider. Hope you found this series to be useful and also feel free to email us at support@foodzaps.com for a free demo on the FoodZaps system.