I’m pretty excited. I’ve been working on a how-to book series, and my first book will be released at the end of December! 

Future ones will all be restaurant-oriented and will cover: writing a business plan, writing a marketing plan, how to do competition research, dining and kitchen flow, writing an operations plan, menu development, dealing with difficult customers both online and offline, reputation management, the art of the upsell, managing and dealing with employee theft and managing and keeping your employees.

My first book, Finding a Location for Your Restaurant will cover:

• Community Assessments
• Who Is Your Market?
• Competition
• Parking including Limited Parking, Shared Parking, Street Parking, Motorcycle and ADA Parking, Parking Fees, Employee Parking and Delivery and Pickup Parking
• Lot and Road Conditions
• Flooding and Flood Zones and Other Natural Disasters
• Foot Traffic
• Traffic Counts
• Vendor Access and Who Delivers?
• Noise Considerations
• Crime and Safety
• Catering In-House or Off-site Considerations
• Landscaping
• Zoning
• Outdoor Dining
• Signage
• Taxes and Tax Assessment History
• Business Turnover
• Employee Housing
• In-person Research

Most of the how-to books I’ve come across on opening a restaurant don’t go into depth about everything you should be really looking at when you assess a restaurant location.

I’m also almost finished with a quiz with scoring that I think will help guide people who want to open a restaurant. Inspired by Steve Strauss’ Entrepreneurship Readiness Quiz, which we use in SCORE (with Steve’s permission), I am working on a “Do you REALLY think you are ready to own your own restaurant?” Instead of 20 questions, it is going on about 100 questions+ so that someone, whether they have had restaurant experience or not, can drill down on not just whether they are ready or not but if they do want to start the business; this is where they will find the holes and knowledge that they either lacking and need to learn about or make sure they hire key people with those skill sets.