Make your new hot pot restaurant popular
A few days ago, a friend came to the author and talked about his idea of ??opening a hot pot restaurant, and asked the author to provide him with some consultation. The author has been engaged in the catering industry in Chengdu for more than 10 years. I have witnessed the rise and fall of many catering companies and learned more about the inside operations of the industry. Therefore, many friends who are eager to open a store come to me for consultation on opening a store, recommending chefs and even overall planning. In their minds, although the catering industry is harder, it is relatively easier to make money. However, according to the author's many years of observation, the catering industry loses more money and makes less money. It is even more difficult to build a good brand. The ups and downs in it are only The operators themselves know.
Not long ago, the author talked to a person in charge of Weiji Jianghu, a nationally renowned brand hot pot restaurant in Chengdu, about the reasons for its successful opening of the store, so I combined some of Weiji Jianghu’s store opening tips. I explained some of my own experiences to my friends. At the same time, I have sorted out these things and dedicated them to my friends who are preparing to open a hot pot restaurant. I hope it can be helpful to you.
Chengdu is a city of gourmet food. Sichuan cuisine and hot pot have long been famous all over the world. It has created a large number of catering elites and a large number of brand catering here. Taste? Jianghu is one of them. In 2000, Now, they started with 50,000 yuan, and have grown from a small street shop with less than 10 employees, less than 10 dining tables, and an area of ??less than 100 square meters to a business with 50 million yuan in capital, 42 stores across the country, and more than 5,000 employees. scale, there are 7 hotpot restaurants with nearly 1,000 tables in Chengdu headquarters, making it a large-scale group catering enterprise. Each of their stores has been very successful, and their successful experience is worth learning from.
Psychological preparation before opening a store
Taste? Jianghu believes that many people who want to open a store only see the benefits of the catering industry: good cash flow and ideal returns, but ignore it The tough side of this industry. He said that in summary, before engaging in catering, one must be mentally prepared to endure hardship for a long time, get out of a "relationship misunderstanding", and beware of two "ticking time bombs".
Catering is a very hard industry. Before entering the industry, you must be prepared to endure hardship for a long time. He gave an example: In 2004, after the opening of Taste. Jianghu Shanxi Taiyuan store, when a banquet was held for the employees sent from Chengdu to support, a young man made sure to offer Mr. Liu a glass of wine. He said that he had been going to Taste. Jianghu for three years. That day I felt that Mr. Liu was much older than he had been 3 years ago - the hard work of catering was evident.
There are no small things in catering. If small things are not handled well, they will become big problems over time. For example, the catering industry has two "ticking time bombs" hanging over its head at all times that must be guarded against: fire safety and food hygiene. Firefighting work must not be sloppy, and you must be careful when using fire, electricity, and oil in the kitchen. Once an accident occurs, you will not only suffer economic losses, but also bear criminal liability; if you do not pay attention to hygiene, it will lead to mass incidents in terms of food safety. , enterprises will also be destroyed.
In addition, there are also investors who open stores with the idea of ??"I have good connections and many friends", "My friends and I eat out as much as we can throughout the year", and fall into misunderstandings. The catering industry is a real market industry, and relationships can only be the icing on the cake, but cannot provide help in times of need. For example, when they opened the Miao Village Bamboo Chicken with 10 tables, they could still sell it one table at a time. Once they reached a large scale, they could only rely on management and marketing to find ways to sell it within 4 or 5 hours at noon and evening. , make full use of the effective operating time, and increase the attendance rate and table turnover rate within the limited operating area.
Financial preparation for opening a store
The competition in the hot pot industry is becoming more and more fierce, the scale of single stores is getting larger and larger, and the survival space of small stores is becoming more and more limited. If you open a new store, it is best to have a certain scale to facilitate market competition. Taste? A new Jianghu hotpot restaurant will generally not be less than 600 square meters and have 60 tables.
At this stage, to open a hot pot restaurant similar to Wei Jianghu with an area of ??600-800 square meters and 60-80 tables, it is necessary to prepare about 600,000 yuan of funds, including at least 7 months' rent (one month's rent is a deposit ), decoration, purchase of facilities and equipment, staff recruitment and training, early advertising and other expenses, and at the same time, some funds for turnover must be prepared.
Selection of ports and stores
Taste? Jianghu believes that if a good port is chosen, the success rate of this hot pot restaurant will exceed 50%. Site selection takes a lot of time and energy, because generally mature ports have been occupied, and new real estate projects are relatively immature and require time to "grow". How to weigh the options is very labor-intensive: it is best to balance the permanent population and the floating population. In areas where there are many restaurants and densely packed restaurants, it is necessary to investigate clearly the distribution, income and consumption habits of customers within 2 kilometers around the store; parking spaces must be fully considered. A hot pot restaurant of 600-800 square meters must have at least 40 parking spaces. Resolutely give up ideals; advertising space and door image are also very important; the internal structure of the house must be reasonable, the floor height cannot be too low, and the pillars cannot be too many, otherwise it will cause obstacles to decoration and layout, and affect the effective business area.
After intentionally selecting a port, Taste? Jianghu will spend at least a month investigating the flow of people and vehicles at noon and evening, to see how many lights are on in the surrounding buildings at night, whether there is air conditioning, and to observe daily life Whether there is a lot of garbage, and then comprehensively analyze these factors to determine whether the port is feasible or not.
In addition, all surrounding competitors must be analyzed: brand catering scale, decoration style, dish quality, per capita consumption, management and service levels, and business conditions. In order to find out the details, Jianghu will eat its opponents for several rounds: careful inspection at noon and evening on Mondays and weekends.
For this reason, the five people from Jianghu Planning Department are running outside every day. However, finding a good port still requires a certain amount of luck. For example, they spent more than three months carefully inspecting and analyzing the surrounding situation of the 2,000-square-meter Taste? Jianghu Hotpot Jinsha store that will be opened on August 8.
Considerations of hot pot restaurant decoration
Taste? Jianghu believes that the environment will affect people's mood, thereby subtly affecting the taste of hot pot, but decoration is a "bottomless pit" that can be deep or shallow. , a popular hot pot restaurant, how to make a highlight with limited investment and make people feel different when they come in is a painstaking task; in the past, popular hot pot restaurants with an average per capita of less than 30 yuan often only focused on the taste and ignored it. The environment, with earthen stoves, earthen pots and earthen benches, and cookie-cutter shops, is dull and even depressing.
A well-decorated hot pot restaurant has rich themes and connotations. Customers can feel the unique cultural influence and sentiment, combine eating and entertainment, have strong participation, and have a relaxed and harmonious atmosphere. For example, the Taste Hotpot restaurant eliminates people's stereotypes that popular hotpot is more generous than delicate, and allows people to experience the fashionable changes of hotpot: the stylish and jumping appearance incorporates new elements into the internal environment and details. Made of metal, glass and other materials, it is spacious and bright, creating a stylish dining atmosphere; the stools are all selected from IKEA supermarkets, costing 70 yuan a piece, which are not expensive but comfortable to sit on; the custom-made colorful sofas create a fashionable and casual atmosphere. It feels like a hot pot bar; bright colors, bright space, and relaxed tone brighten the mood.
Taste. Jianghu particularly emphasizes that it usually takes 2-3 months to install a hot pot restaurant with an area of ??600-800 square meters. When renting a house, be sure to negotiate with the landlord for free rent during the 3-month renovation period; The clothing of hot pot restaurant staff must be consistent with the decoration style.
Employee recruitment and training
Catering is a labor-intensive industry. The recruitment work is relatively busy and the employees are not very skilled. As mentioned just now, a 600-square-meter store requires Prepare for about 70 people. In order to save time, the hot pot restaurant needs to recruit and train employees while decorating.
The first thing to be recruited is management personnel, including store managers, finance, warehouse management, purchasing, front office managers, supervisors, back kitchen chefs, supervisors, etc.
Examine their work experience and experience, and try to investigate the places where they have worked. Because some people are good at talking but not good at practical work, and some people are not good at expressing but are very capable, so it takes many exchanges to understand their work. Competence and professionalism.
After these people are identified, the service staff and chef team will be recruited: greeters, bar staff, waiters, food waiters, parking attendants, cashiers and cleaning staff, etc.
After recruiting employees, the immediate solution is food and housing. We need to rent several houses for 70 employees near the hot pot restaurant, using bunk beds. Each house can accommodate 10-15 people, and there is enough food. Depending on the actual situation, you can make staff meals or buy lunch boxes. In addition, the monthly salary promised to the front office waiter, excluding bonuses and commissions, must be more than 600 yuan.
At the beginning of the training, the front office and the back kitchen usually receive unified training. The first is corporate culture education. In addition to talking about the company's brand building, development history, rules and regulations, etc., it is also necessary to emphasize the company's attitude towards the company. Employee career planning allows everyone to understand their future development in the company. Then there are group assessments, everyone passes the test, and those with outstanding performance are selected as team leaders and foremen.
During the training process, Wei.Jianghu conducted military-style management on its employees. Every morning, they dressed in uniform and lined up for exercise to strengthen their physical fitness and discipline. At the same time, it was free advertising.
It is understood that the initial waiters in Taste? Jianghu generally have low quality, limited education, and no understanding of catering. However, after receiving 2-3 months of training, they can gradually enter the role.
Marketing planning before opening
When decoration and training are in the later stages, preparations for opening should be made about half a month in advance. First choose an auspicious day, preferably on the weekend. , and then formulate a marketing plan.
In order to create an atmosphere and attract popularity, it is generally necessary to set up inflatable arches, air pillars, colored balls, and place congratulatory flower baskets outside the store door. If possible, it is best to set up a stage to perform some singing and dancing performances. Taste? Jianghu reminds you: If you want to occupy roads, you must go to the urban management department to go through the formalities and register.
It is also important to formulate preferential measures during the opening period. Most hot pot restaurants will offer discounts when they open, but discounts are a double-edged sword. They bring a lot of popularity in a short period of time. Once the discount period is over, the popularity will recede like a tide. Therefore, the intensity of the discounts must be grasped. The important thing is to attract customers and maintain good popularity. How to win more repeat customers is a story for another day.
In addition, before opening, you need to prepare about 50,000 yuan of funds and choose to do some publicity in newspapers, TV or radio. This kind of publicity must have highlights and new ideas, and it is best to have a series of plans.
Grasp the taste of hot pot
In addition to the factors of the dish itself, the taste of hot pot is mainly determined by the base, soup and dipping dishes. The preparation of hot pot stock determines the flavor of hot pot and is also the most critical part of making hot pot. Red soup is a typical basic soup popular in Sichuan hot pot. This soup is widely used and is used in most varieties of Sichuan hot pot.
At present, there is still a debate between Chengdu hot pot and Chongqing hot pot in the industry. It is generally believed that Chongqing hot pot is spicier. Some people say that it is "as spicy as a knife", while Chengdu hot pot is relatively mild, and the spiciness is also "moistening". hot". Taste? Jianghu believes that whether it is Chengdu hot pot or Chongqing hot pot, as long as consumers like it, the hot pot is good. The key is to ensure that the quality is always stable and consistent on the basis of standardization and unification: red and bright color, not muddy soup, not expensive. It will not turn black after being soaked for a long time; it has rich taste, strong flavor, spicy taste, fresh fragrance and sweet aftertaste.
Taste? Jianghu often puts out five red pots with slightly different ratios of raw materials. After the towers of meat and vegetable dishes such as tripe, yellow throat, goose intestines, duck intestines, luncheon meat, potatoes, and enoki mushrooms are prepared, , and then invited more than 20 people to taste and score together, select the most recognized pot base, quantify the clear oil, butter, base ingredients, pepper, sea pepper, chicken essence, monosodium glutamate and bone broth used one by one, and then recommend it. Guangzhi; and collects customers' feedback on the taste of the pot every day, and strives to prevent the same customer from having a different taste this time and next time.
Purchasing of hot pot raw materials
Purchasing is an important part of catering management. There is a saying in the industry: "Money is everywhere, and there are holes all over."
"Money everywhere means that the water, waste cardboard, wine bottles, bottle caps, etc. after a hot pot restaurant is open for business can be converted into money. "There are holes all over the place" means that there is a little waste and a little theft in all aspects of the kitchen. , if you make some mistakes in the purchasing process, you will have the phenomenon of "seeing that the business is doing well, but the boss is not making any money."
The purchasing personnel of catering are usually the boss's relatives or close associates. Taste? Jianghu believes that the most important thing is to have a management system and method, otherwise, over time, any trustworthy person will also have problems. In the early stage of opening, it is best for the boss to do the purchasing work himself: understand the product, visit the market, and do it. Check prices and learn to identify product quality. Taste? Jianghu’s vegetables are purchased at Chengdu South Railway Station Market at 3 or 4 o’clock every morning, meat is purchased at Huaguo Mountain, seafood is purchased at Qingshiqiao, and frozen goods are purchased at Fuqing Road. From the commodity market to the Wukuai Shi Wholesale Market, due to the alarming increase in raw material prices in the past year, operators must go to the market at any time to understand the price changes.
Purchasers also need to pay attention to the production of raw materials. For example, enoki mushrooms with the same price and weight will be served in different quantities depending on the manufacturer, and the same product has different production rates in different hot pot restaurants.
Hot pot's flagship product
Most hot pot restaurants have similar tastes and dishes. As long as the taste is guaranteed, almost every brand of hot pot has its own flagship product. Whether this fist is strong or not will directly affect the reputation of the hot pot. It is worth Spending time cultivating and polishing. For example, the crispy, tender and fresh "Shisanli Jiji Goose Sausage" has won unanimous praise for the taste of Jianghu Hot Pot.
It turns out that the taste of "Jianghu Special Car" is great. Raw goose intestines were transported from Jiuchi Town, Pengzhou. In order to ensure the freshness and tenderness of the goose intestines, it took a journey of thirteen miles from Jiuchi. In addition to being chilled, the goose intestines had to be transported quickly. They looked both red and moist. Thick and elastic, it is definitely not like those thin, hard water-haired or alkali-haired goose intestines that turn red and white as soon as they are rinsed. Fresh goose intestines are scalded slightly in the boiling red soup and are immediately delicious. It has become a mouth-watering delicacy, crisp but not chewy, ripe but not old, tender and crispy, and the mouthful is full of fragrance after a few chews. It is unforgettable. It can be called "Thirteen Miles Express Goose Sausage"
It was revealed that with the support of the relevant departments of Jiuchi Town, Pengzhou, Weijianghu signed an exclusive agreement with the Jiuchi Town Poultry Consortium. It is a standardized breeding farm that raises tens of thousands of geese, with good hygiene and epidemic prevention. The slaughtering line for inspection is exclusively for Jianghu, so such tender goose intestines are only found in Jianghu!
So, when the lights are on, almost every table in Weijianghu hot pot is served! There is a red bowl filled with "Thirteen Miles Express Goose Sausage". Some stations even have two or three servings. Unfortunately, due to the limited quantity of goose intestines, the taste? All stores in Jianghu are usually sold out before 8:30 pm. Many customers had no choice but to come early the next day and order more dishes.
Although there are hundreds of dishes on the menu, only a dozen of them have high click-through rates. For this reason, Jianghu specializes. A goose intestines group, a duck intestines group, an eel group, a pig throat group and an enoki mushroom group were set up. Each group was responsible for the acceptance, processing and storage of the raw materials. They were required to sell out before 8:30 every night, but they were not sold out. The dishes are made into employee meals, and the inventory is never allowed to be left for sale the next day.
Pricing of hot pot
Taste? Jianghu believes that the catering industry has long bid farewell to the era of huge profits and has become a low-profit industry. In the past year, in Chengdu, not only the cost of hot pot dishes has increased by 30%, but the raw materials have also increased significantly. In particular, the raw materials for hot pot base have increased significantly. The price of dried chili peppers has doubled, and the price of dried Sichuan peppercorns has also increased by 30%. In addition to the increase in oil prices, it used to cost only 7 or 8 yuan to fry a pot of hot pot base, but now the price of a pot of hot pot base has exceeded 10 yuan; since most consumers in Chengdu have become accustomed to the prices of 8632 and 5321 According to the model (meat dishes are 8 yuan or 6 yuan a piece, vegetarian dishes are 3 yuan or 2 yuan a piece), no hot pot restaurant dares to take the lead in raising prices at the risk of losing customers. The gross profit of hot pot companies has dropped significantly; in addition, in recent years, rents have increased. Rising housing prices, rising wages for service industry employees, and rising water and electricity prices have further compressed the profit margins of hot pot companies.
Currently, the gross profit margin of popular hot pot restaurants in Chengdu is not high, so the pricing of dishes has become a very sensitive issue. If the price is too high, most customers will not speak up, but if they are dissatisfied, they will generally not Will visit again. Taste? The Jianghu method is that the dish evaluation team decides whether to promote each new dish and sets the price. It is amateur and changes at any time. It is composed of taxi drivers, factory workers, housewives, company white-collar workers, private enterprise bosses, and government officials. , famous gourmets, etc., who have full right to make suggestions on the portions and prices of dishes.
Taste? Jianghu once again emphasized that friends entering this industry must be reminded to be cautious, especially when opening a single store. He said that if Taste? Jianghu did not have so many stores in Chengdu, it would be possible to We reduce purchase prices and costs through bulk purchases and large-scale purchases, and we dare not insist on the price of 8632 or even 5321. For example, Jianghu's clear oil is purchased at 20 tons each time.
The expenses of a hot pot restaurant include rent, water and electricity, employee wages, taxes, miscellaneous expenses and advertising expenses. Every method must be used to reduce some controllable expenses. For example, after guests in an area leave, On the premise of not affecting other customers, turn off the lights, air conditioners, and exhaust fans; miscellaneous expenses include office, purchasing, transportation, transportation, maintenance, etc., and try to save them; Taste? Every store in Jianghu must copy it every day The water and electricity meter calculates how much water and electricity are consumed for every 10,000 yuan of turnover, plus the labor wages for every 10,000 yuan of turnover, and compares each store, praises and rewards those who do well, criticizes those who do poorly, and reduce consumption within a time limit; Before making publicity, it is necessary to discuss repeatedly with senior food journalists to determine the publicity plan, media and price. While ensuring the effect, ensure that every penny is spent wisely.
Management of hot pot restaurants
Taste? Jianghu believes that the greatest management is the management of people. In addition to formulating strict rules and regulations, there must also be a humanized incentive mechanism.
They strive to make employees feel at home in the store: the water heaters in the dormitories must be in good condition and equipped with TV sets and electric fans; when meeting employees, what is the smell? The first thing every boss in the world asks is " How is the food lately? "The store manager must talk to 3-5 employees every day; each branch has set up a general manager's mailbox to reward employees who make reasonable suggestions; employees can play table tennis, chess, Go, etc. in their spare time. We play military chess and often organize chess competitions; hold employee cultural evenings during the Mid-Autumn Festival and Spring Festival, with a large number of prizes for drawing; and celebrate the collective birthdays of employees born in that month on the 18th of each month, etc., hoping that employees "will leave even if they leave" It will leave wonderful and precious memories!” In order to retain talents, they even sold part of their equity that was rapidly increasing in value.
Taste? Jianghu has formulated a "9-year development plan" for its employees: strive to become a front office or kitchen manager in the first three years, become a store manager in the second three years, and strive to become a store manager in the third three years. Became a partner of Weiji Jianghu in 2008. The so-called "partners" are those who own shares in Weijianghu. If the store manager has no money, Weijianghu will lend them the money to buy shares and then deduct it from the year-end dividends.
Postscript
"Five years are not enough to bring joy, but ten years will take shape." After 7 or 8 years, it has grown from a "fly restaurant" to its current scale. Is it a taste that the Jianghu brothers never thought of? They have a lot of feelings, and after careful consideration, they are willing to "feel and climb" these years. The experience I have summed up after many "detours" and many "detours" can be shared with friends who are interested in catering. I hope that while it is helpful to everyone, it can also inspire more catering practitioners to share some of their good ideas. Experience, dedicate together, and together we will contribute to the development of the catering industry.
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