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Restaurant BusinessExpansion Guide

How to Successfully OpenYour Second (or 22nd) Location

Picture this: Your restaurant is thriving. Your staff is happy, your customers are coming back, and your wallet is bursting.

Things are going so wellthat it might be time toopen another location.

Is your dream to grow the community and ethos behind your restaurant to other cities? Then it might be time to consider opening an additional restaurant location. The decision to open a second, third, or twentieth restaurant isn’t an easy one. It takes a lot of thought and planning to ensure a painless execution.

Over the past five years, the number of restaurants that have expanded beyond a single location has grown by 3.5%. The revenue is predicted to reach $144 billion in 2019.

If you want to grow and expand your business, but don’t know where to start, have no fear. From the first thought about opening a new restaurant to opening day and beyond, we’ve compiled everything you need to know to successfully operate multiple restaurant locations.

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How to Know You’re Ready for Business ExpansionHere are some important questions to ask yourself before you start planning:

• Are you so busy you can’t handle the crowds?• Do your customers travel from distant cities to visit your restaurant?• Do you have funding?• Will opening another restaurant increase your capital?• Are you willing to put in the hours?

If you answered yes to all of these questions, congratulations! You’re ready to open an additional restaurant.

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Why a Solid Support System is Key to a Successful Expansion For some restaurant owners, checking the boxes above isn’t enough to take the leap into opening a new restaurant. Having a reliable team behind you is necessary to give the push you need.

Nick Varano, the owner of The Varano Group in Boston, MA, and an Upserve customer knows that the people he surrounded himself with early in his career propelled him into business expansion.

“I think the moment that I realized that we can grow and open up more locations is when I saw who I had behind me. I know it sounds cliché, but when you have good people behind you that believe in you and want you to do more, even though it means maybe working a little bit harder, that gives me the strength to say, let me go out there and try it.”

With nine restaurants and cafes now operating throughout Boston, he credits a staff that goes above and beyond the call of action.

“I think that was the moment when I realized, when I started my first restaurant, that I was fortunate enough to have a good group of guys behind me that will get up every morning and go get the best produce, get the best product, and make everybody feel good when they come in here,” he says. “That’s a winning formula. That’s a recipe for success, so why not duplicate it? Then it’s almost like a snowball effect.”

“ I was fortunate enough to surround myself with an amazing staff that really cared.”Nick Varano, The Varano Group

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Before you dive into multi-location restaurant ownership, there are a few to-dos to consider. We compiled a list to help you check every box and successfully expand your business.

1. Finalize Funding

You can’t open a new business without capital. Will you be funding the new business yourself, or will you rely on business loans to get started? Before you dive into your options, you should first and foremost make sure that the restaurant(s) that are currently in operation are in good standing. Once you’re comfortable with your finances in your current business, you can start exploring the best way to fund your new experience.

You may find yourself seeking help for your new endeavor in the form of business loans. Taking out a loan to help cover the cost of the purchase, as well as for working capital, renovations, or expansion is a common maneuver—but it does require thoughtful planning and consideration. If you are comfortable with paying back thousands of dollars in interest in order to get started sooner, business loans could be the right option for you.

The best thing about opening a second or twenty-second location is that you already know how much money it takes to successfully open and operate a new business. Use this knowledge as guidance through your decision-making process. Whether you’re using the glorious profits from your first business or seeking a loan to make your new dream come true, it will be helpful to take a look at how much money you put into your first restaurant that helped make it what it is today.

Be wary of utilizing funds from your current restaurant to break ground on a new one. You could risk your current profits and negatively impact your first restaurant.

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The Ultimate Restaurant

Expansion Checklist

Do you think you’re ready to grow

your restaurant family? Whether

your current business just opened

and you’re thinking into the future,

or you’ve had a few successful years

under your belt, starting your new

adventure with a well-thought-out

plan is key to flawless execution.

How to Prepare Your

New Restaurant

Opening

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2. Find the Right Location

You know the saying: location, location, location. Chances are you’ve already nailed it with your first location if you’re considering opening a new restaurant. The pressure of finding the perfect spot to break ground and build your new business is high, but with careful consideration, you can find the perfect location.

Here are a few things to consider when choosing the new location for your restaurant:

• Choose a location far enough away from your current restaurant in order to reduce the risk of cannibalizing your current clientele.

• Check out what types of restaurants are in the surrounding area and make sure your concept has a chance at succeeding in this new location.

• Dive into demographics and spend some time in a potential new area to learn about the people in the community.

David Knighton is the VP of Operations and a Franchise Owner at Rodizio Grill, a 23-location Brazilian Steakhouse with locations spanning from Nevada to New Jersey (and an Upserve customer). He warns against getting too attached to a new location to quickly.

“Getting excited about a new unit in a particular market is an emotional response, but working through the particulars of what will make the new unit successful is the most important analytical response,” he says. “New franchise systems love to grow, but that excitement should be tempered with analytical research and probing questions to make the unit as successful as possible.”

“Working through the particulars of what will make the new unit successful is the most important analytical response.”

David Knighton,Rodizio Grill

3. Build a New Business Plan

Unless you started your restaurant with the goal to expand in the future, you’ll need to work on a new restaurant business plan for your family of restaurants. If you’re keeping the same concept as your original location, you’ll be able to simply repeat the process and scale your business plan to include an additional location. Since your first business was so successful, duplicating systems is the best way to ensure success in the future.

Oak & Embers in Cleveland, OH is a two-location BBQ restaurant that offers authentic smokehouse recipes served alongside quality bourbon and craft beer. When owner and Upserve Customer Gretchen Garofoli decided to open a third restaurant, she strayed from the concept at Oak & Embers to do something completely different.

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“We’re opening a new restaurant concept a mile from our Hudson Oak & Embers called Revival Social Club—we want to ‘revive’ what it means to share a meal,” she says. “We’re going to do small, shareable plates. Put your cell phone away, sample a bunch of different plates, and talk about it. We’re going to do craft, classic cocktails, and classic dishes like the stuff my dad served when he was a bartender. We want to ‘revive’ socializing around good food and drinks.”

Even if your concept isn’t a duplication, like Garofoli’s new venture, you’ll want to make sure that you structure your operations to match your original location. Providing a change in vibe or food doesn’t mean that the overall experience in hospitality and commitment to customers has to change. Crafting a solid business plan that can be altered for future expansion is the best way to scale your operations and continue growing.

We’re going to do craft, classic cocktails, and classic dishes like the stuff my dad served when he was a bartender. We want to ‘revive’ socializing around good food and drinks.”

Gretchen Garofoli, OwnerOak & Embers

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4. Write a New Marketing Plan

Effectively marketing one business is hard enough, but what about marketing multiple locations?

The most important thing to consider when developing a new marketing plan for your new restaurant is the target audience. When you were doing demographics research while searching for the right location, you probably learned a lot about how to market to that community. Using this information is crucial to getting your message across in the most effective way.

Take some time to think about how you will position your new location on social media, what types of information you will share to generate excitement, and what you will do long-term to retain customers.

5. Scale Your Staff & Operations

You’ve already assembled a badass team that helped your business thrive. Now it’s time to figure out a strategy to ensure your new staff is just as awesome. Take a look at your current staff and assess who is ready to step up. Promoting from within is key to helping your staff members grow, and to bring in new employees that will learn from the best.

Leveraging your current staff’s expertise to train your new staff is a great way to ensure that your guest experience will be consistent from location to location. If you haven’t already developed a training guide or an employee handbook for your first business, now is the time to put those together. This will help set the standard for how employees should behave at work, and hold them accountable for their actions while they’re on the clock.

With nearly two dozen locations in different markets across the United States, Knighton cites the ability to duplicate the integrity of operations as key to business expansion.

“The operational procedures have to be nailed down, with written details for others to easily execute—plus structures in place to ensure the best quality in expanded units,” he says.

The success of your new location is reliant on the passion of the people and the clarity of the procedures that you put in place.

“First, clearly know and document your processes, procedures, rules and structures that make your brand successful. Make those documents so clear that someone new to the organization can follow them,” says Knighton.

“Second, get great people. Although we say we are in the food industry, we are clearly in the people business. It makes all the difference.”

“One great management team does not always equate to three, five or ten great management teams.”David Knighton,Rodizio Grill

Expanding your business can be stressful. Reduce the risk of burnout by relying on your staff to support you during the madness. Delegating responsibilities will be your saving grace while expanding.

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6. Purchase equipment, supplies, and inventory

Take an inventory of the equipment and supplies that you and your team use every day to execute a flawless experience for guests.

• Measure your space to ensure your appliances fit• Measure your space when deciding on tables and chairs• Use the same food suppliers• Make sure your new restaurant meets all codes and zoning regulations and

has the proper licensing

7. Find the Right Restaurant Tech

The systems you implement in your restaurant serve as the backbone of your business. Finding the right tools to help you grow smarter will be key to the success of your new restaurant.

Restaurant management platforms that are scalable from your first location to the fiftieth will be your best friend through the expansion process. Starting with an intuitive, easy-to-use system will make managing multiple locations and new employee training painless.

As Chief Financial Officer of the Varano Group in Boston, Malcolm Wooff believes that technology is the backbone of any great restaurant operation.

“I think the key to it, for me, is you need a central point that you can actually start to adopt different technologies from. And for us, it’s the POS,” he says. “If you had a great, flexible POS system that allows you to marry the technologies, and if you do it right, then the insights that you can gain from all these data points are immense.”

Keeping consistency with the type of equipment you use in your new restaurant will help current employees to train your new staff with ease.

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How Upserve Empowers Owners to Grow and Manage Multiple Locations with EaseAn Inside Look at Real Upserve Customers

Putting the right systems in place is crucial to the success of a business. With a restaurant manage-ment system that can help you grow—instead of slowing you down—you will be able to seamlessly manage each of your restaurants with ease.

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With bustling restaurants all over Boston, the Varano Group doesn’t have time to dive into confusing data reports. According to Wooff, data dashboards must be three things: graphic, quick, and accessible.

Wooff explains that the comprehensive data provided by Upserve is what makes his managers so successful. From guest reports to server insights, the team at Strega Waterfront, Strip by Strega, and the seven other locations in the city has all the information they need in a single location.

“If they want to know what’s happening with a number of guests that they retained versus new guests, they can see it very quickly through the dashboard. If they want to see performance over any given period, they can see that directly,” he says. “If they want to see server performance, to see if we’re falling behind anywhere or to adopt best practices of some of the better servers, in terms of revenue, they can adopt that very quickly and they can see that.”

The speed of the restaurant industry can often cause restaurateurs to make snap decisions that could leave a lasting impact on a business. With Upserve, Wooff knows that every decision can be backed by data, so his team doesn’t make any mistakes.

Data-Driven Decision MakingWhy The Varano Group Values Upserve’s Insights

Instead of running a business off of gut feelings and data that only scratches the surface, Malcolm Wooff the Chief Financial Officer of The Varano Group, is comforted by the depth of information that he gets from Upserve.

“These managers run off their feet, they work incredible hours, and they work extremely hard. They don’t have a lot of time to think about some of the data.”

Malcolm Wooff,The Varano Group

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“The Upserve menu quadrant tells you that you can have a very high menu appeal item, but without Upserve, you wouldn’t know if it was a disaster. So a lot of people can come into your restaurant because they find something very appealing, but maybe that item is not so good, because they don’t return. But you wouldn’t know that because it has high sales,” he says. “If you have an item that maybe isn’t so appealing on the menu, but the people that have it come back, how would a normal restaurant know that? Normally that kind of item would get dropped off the menu because we didn’t sell many, when in fact, it could be a great residual and investment because it’s bringing people back.”

Upserve helps greatly in the accessibility of data and insights that otherwise you would never even have, and for us, that’s been very valuable.”

Malcolm WooffThe Varano Group

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Rodizio Grill knows a thing or two about operational excellence. The 23-location Brazilian grill has no freezers on premises, relying on fresh ingredients for each of the restaurants’ menus.

Dave Knighton and the team at Rodizio Grill rely on Upserve’s analytics to track how the restaurant is impacted by sales trends. “I frequently look at the product mix report to track upsells and item performance. We are an upscale ‘all-you-can-eat’ environment where only our drinks and desserts are sold separately,” he says. “So I look to see how well the staff does on upsell goals.”

With hundreds of employees across the country, Upserve’s labor tools continue to be beneficial to the operation of Rodizio Grill. “I use the labor reports to track labor costs during the pay period,” says Knighton.

Rodizio Grill franchise owner Adam Adams takes advantage of the Upserve Live app to keep an eye on his business when he’s on the go. “I use the app on my phone a lot,” he says. “The page report breakdown of the previous night’s sales is great data. It helps me understand what is happening.”

Like any other restaurant owner, Adams understands that elements out of his control can have an impact on his business.

“I like seeing little weather tid-bits, as it feels like all of our markets are weather-dependent on sales,” he says. “It saves me a text to management wondering what on earth happened to sales. For example, -30 degrees in MKE results in zero sales or only 25 guests.”

Upsells and SalesPerformanceHow Rodizio Grill Relies on Upserve’s Analytics

“ We love the ability to get details and analytics online from each location.” David Knighton,Rodizio Grill

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In the 20 years since he first served a plate of Northern Brazilian cuisine to a customer, the way Dimitri Vlahakis has run his restaurant Esperanto has changed. For one, he is no longer taking orders by hand. Instead, he uses Upserve POS, a full platform solution for restaurateurs looking to run their business more efficiently. Upserve has proven so helpful that it was also chosen to power his newest venture, the forthcoming Greek tapas concept to be called Karvouna.

Esperanto relies on Upserve POS to take orders and communicate with the back of the house about the specifics of each guest’s preferences and dish modifications. “You need to have one part of the operation talking to the other part of the operation. They need to know what everybody’s thinking,” Vlahakis says. He acknowledges that most restaurateurs don’t get into the business because of the technology.

“I’m not afraid of technology so I don’t have this problem, but I can see when you get into this business, you want to cook food, you want to be hospitable, and that’s the core of the business. You’re not thinking, ‘I want to program my menu,’” he says. That’s why Vlahakis recommends Upserve POS to other restaurant owners in his community, a solution whose ease-of-use is key.

“They don’t want to spend a lifetime with technology, but the technology is a part of the game,” Vlahakis says. “They need to be able to learn it in a short period of time so that they can start serving customers and stay focused on the customers. I get a lot of feedback from the managers that Upserve POS is easy to use, much easier than the other POS’s we’ve used in the past. The less intrusive in the operation, in the day-to-day, the better. And it works for us.”

From Pen-and-Paperto Powerful POSHow Upserve Has Helped Esperanto Expand

“ I get a lot of feedback from the managersthat Upserve POS is easy to use. The less intrusive in the operation, in the day-to-day, the better. And it works for us.” Dimitri VlahakisEsperanto

A powerful solution like Upserve gives him the freedom to get back to that aspect of small business ownership.

“It’s been able to help the front-of-house, and back-of-house, execute transactions much more efficiently. They spend less time thinking about what they have to put into the computer or what they have to write down. It’s more organized for them, and the less time that they sit at the POS, the better. Because I want them to spend as much time as possible in front of the customer,” he explains.

“By giving me the information and reports, giving us the information that helps us to tweak our business so that it’s better suited for the customers. It goes into the background, it gives us information efficiently, quickly, and it gets out of the way, which is what we need because our focus is the customers—it has to be.”

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By giving me the information and reports, giving us the information that helps us to tweak our business so that it’s better suited for the customers.” Dimitri VlahakisEsperanto

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Upserve’s Platform is Built to Help Your Restaurant GrowEveryone’s definition of growth is different. Whether you’re opening your second or 22nd restaurant, our platform can help you every step of the way.

From a powerful POS with in-depth analytics, to online ordering and loyalty tools, Upserve is built to make restaurants wildly successful.

Grow your Restaurant today with Upserve.

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