“A lot of people who want to open a restaurant like the social aspect of it, but they don’t realize there’s a lot of back-office work you don’t see as a customer that needs to get done in order to keep your costs in line,” says Jerry Prendergast, lead consultant of California-based Prendergast & Associates, a restaurant consulting firm that has developed projects from New York City to Tokyo, and several in Honolulu.
“They think, ‘This can’t be hard. You make food, you bring it out, you put it on the table and somebody pays for it.’ But they don’t realize that, in some ways, a restaurant has more moving parts than almost any business you could get into.”
The moving parts include tracking inventory, managing workers, meeting health-department and building codes, balancing books, developing menus and everything else tied to owning a small business. Most people have little experience in these facets of the business, but they can make or break a restaurant.