The first step on the road to a successful business is to create a business plan for your cafe. Only in the process of creating a business plan, you will determine your target audience, research your competitors, analyze the market, and outline the first plans for the growth of your cafe. Once you lay out all the necessary information, you will see the pros and cons of your strategy, the concept of the cafe and the brand as a whole.
The main part of the business plan will be the calculation of cafe payback – you will understand for how long the business will pay off and start to bring in a net profit.
How to calculate the profit of the cafe and its payback: the amount of investment divided by the average income.
Of course, to calculate the exact amount of income is not possible, so the calculation takes the planned income that will bring the institution. It is also worth paying attention to external factors that affect the payback period: rising food prices, currency exchange rates and other risks. Because of this, the actual payback period may grow.
Writing a business plan, you can turn to professional consultants or find ready-made solutions for your business on the Internet. You may have to adapt ready-made models to suit your interests, but in any case, learning from others’ mistakes is better than learning from your own.
Every type of business has its own risks, opening a new establishment, there is a chance that the business will not pay off in the expected time frame. To avoid this, the entrepreneur who plans to open a cafe or restaurant, prescribes a business plan with cost figures, development strategy and plans for payback. In this article, we will talk about how to properly write a business plan for opening a cafe.
The purpose of creating a business plan
The purpose of a business plan is to describe the idea and concept of the institution. A properly drafted business plan will help to calculate the payback period of the institution, as well as take into account all the costs.
To open an institution it is necessary to calculate not only the expected profit, but also to draw up a marketing strategy, evaluate competitors and write a list of equipment. All this combines a clearly structured business plan.
Checklist for starting a coffee shop
Opening a coffee shop? Download a complete list of tasks before opening an establishment so you don’t miss anything important.
How to write a business plan for a coffee shop
In order for the document to include only important information and help develop a strategy, a general structure of the cafe business plan is used, where each point helps to see the full picture of the institution and really assess the prospects for payback of the institution.
Summary
Briefly describe the information on each section of the business plan (link) : calculations, advertising plans, analytics, development strategy. Summary of the cafe business plan is usually put at the beginning of the document, but written after all the sections are ready. The task of the summary – to interest a partner, investor or credit committee.
It is important to write the summary very carefully, using marketing tools to increase readability and attractiveness of the text. The text itself should be written simply and helpfully.
What a resume consists of:
- The name of the establishment.
- A description of the concept of the cafe or restaurant.
- A brief description of the staff that will be needed.
- Advantages of the institution over competitors.
- Goals in developing the establishment.
- Availability of permits, licenses or certificates.
- Performance indicators of the institution.
- Risks and additional expenses.
Description of the business and relevance of the idea
Here add information about your company: whether it is the first establishment you open, what are the founders, what is the initial capital. Also pay attention to the relevance of the idea and analyze such indicators:
- Location. Pick a good area to open a cafe, it can be central downtown, where space will not be cheap, but there will be a large flow of visitors.
- Competitors nearby. If in the selected area already has a lot of catering outlets, you can not meet the payback period.
- Opening hours. Important role played by the hours of operation of the institution, if you open a cafe in the business district, it is worth paying attention to the schedule in the morning and lunch time. For a cafe in the city center is more suitable evening schedule.
- Target audience (Wikipedia). Analyze the audience that will be interested in your establishment – families with children, students and young people, or employees of neighborhood business centers.
- The analysis will be useful to you, as the owner of the establishment, and to the partners you will want to attract.