1. Ability to read people:
You will use this skill to hire staff, work with staff, serve guests and deal with salespeople. You will absolutely need to use more than your intuition to know when people are genuine, when people are shady, when they are hurting and when they need your help. Every person you encounter through your business has baggage and something weighing on their shoulders and has walked a unique path. Are you ready to deal with 100 personalities, histories and issues every day? What do you do when tragedy, mental illness, disability, anger or a drug abuser walks through your door?
2. Tolerance:
People will try to take advantage of your business, your good nature, your staff and your facilities. People will ALWAYS want something from you and offer very little in return. Staff will make mistakes. You need to know when to pick your battles and when to let things slide. You will need to remind yourself everyday that the world is not a perfect place and not everything will meet your needs or expectations.
3. Foresight:
You will need to have the right amount of stock, the right amount of staff and the right amount of guests to balance your business and keep the "train on the track". You will need to predict weather, market conditions, twists and turns of your local economy, trends and more. Basically, you need to be able to see through the dark tunnel, around the curve and up the hill. Then, you need to plan accordingly.
4. Marketing Savvy:
You need to be well versed in social media. You need to know where, when and how to get the most bang for your advertising dollar. Who is your market? What will they buy and when? How can you most effectively talk to them? Are you prepared to talk to your guests through social media? What about when things go wrong? Or what if, you're a marketing genius and the town is a buzz for your new cookie store.... but then you can't provide or produce the cookies? Then what? #fail
5. Stamina:
I can not emphasize this one enough. Owning a service business of any kind is not 9-5pm or solely Monday through Friday anymore. Restaurants, coffee shops, bakeries etc have to be open when people need the product or service. In the case of a restaurant, it's day and night, 7 days-a-week and including holidays. As the owner/operator you will be on duty around the clock. Whether it's a 3AM security alarm, forfeiting your days off to cover the absences of others, or sourcing equipment at 6AM on a Friday so you can function through a weekend.... it the kind of "normal" activities that go into operating a food service business. A 60 hour work week... well, that's a slow, easy week.
There are of course, several other qualities a successful restaurant owner should embody but these are my 5 non-negotiable traits. If you don't have these qualities in spades, find another dream job/career path. Seriously.
Sure, it's good if you know how to cook or read a recipe.... but trust me, owning a restaurant is not a glamourous 30 minute made-for-tv production of sipping wine and collecting herbs from the garden to stir into a pot of made-from-scratch spaghetti sauce using a recipe that your great-grandmother wrote in her diary during the Great Depression. It's a serious business, requiring a serious, unwavering commitment to success. And in the year 2013... taxes, social media, employees, health regulations, telemarketers, salespeople and mopping the floor will all have more of your daily focus and energy than any recipe ever will.
And if you don't know all of this (AND MORE) going into it, one day you will be sobbing on a couch telling your closest friends that you don't know what on earth happened.... all you ever wanted to do was bake your grandmother's cookies and serve tea and make people happy.
And this is why you need a solid business plan. And a mirror.
Seriously.
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