How to open a restaurant: 10 business councils hostess "Simple things"
IN THE "BUSINESS" RUBRICWe introduce readers to women who have managed to launch unexpected, well-known or innovative commercial projects and successfully develop them. In this issue, our heroine was Irina Khodzinskaya - the founder of the network of gastropubs "Simple Things" and the restaurant CHEESE Connection.
1
Decide if you need a restaurant
A person who had nothing to do with the restaurant business before is worth considering how much he really needs it. This industry has a frivolous flair: it seems that it can be easier, because I cook at home, I like to gather friends, I understand everything about food, about how an excellent restaurant should look, how everything should be arranged in it. This is absolutely not the case, and the restaurant business is built on many details.
If at the start there is no huge budget, you need to understand the food yourself, understand what gastronomy is and what it is made of. Know what the source product should be, where to look for a good chef, what the dish should look like. Have knowledge about managing people, about service. Have an idea of what the technological chain is, how it is built, how the kitchen is equipped, and why it is so and not otherwise. Understand what a bar is, what wine is, what soft drinks are and why one is better than the other. To be a great manager and a good lawyer. And this is not counting the daily communication - with visitors, staff, suppliers, chefs. As soon as you stop doing any of this, everything can crumble like a house of cards.
2
Learn all about restaurants
Doing the restaurant business is only in two cases. Either you are really in love with this business, or you perceive it as a business that is no different from any other: you have a serious management team and a person who deals with staff, a person who is in charge of the kitchen, a person who is in charge of finance, a lawyer and etc. But then we are talking about an investment project, which may be a restaurant, or maybe, for example, a network of dry cleaners.
At the initial stage, everything was difficult. I was twenty-eight years old, I was the financial director. I did not know anything at all about restaurants, so I began to study everything I said above. I met with an infinite number of people, tried to understand the business, went to some exhibitions. Each of the points you must study thoroughly. If you really see the goal and believe in yourself, then do not stop - you need to take and do.
3
Learn the laws
Even if you understand gastronomy, you need to remember that the restaurant business, like any business, is very tightly regulated. Before you engage in a restaurant, you must study in detail the legal framework. It happens that one check comes and says: “There should be a wall in this place”, - and then another check comes and says that everything is very cool and healthy, but there should never be a wall in this place under any circumstances. When you plan and design a restaurant, possessing the whole set of necessary knowledge, you can do it in such a way that no one of the inspecting services has a question about stenochku. First of all, I would advise not to forget that there are laws.
4
Do not save on important
We opened the restaurant with our own money, so we saved, tried to do everything ourselves and bought only second-hand equipment. It seemed to us that this is a rational investment: it works great and costs two to four times less than the new directly from the supplier. It seemed like it was with a car: you buy a car, drive it out of the cabin, drive five kilometers, and it starts to cost twenty percent less simply because it’s used.
Unfortunately, in a professional kitchen, everything is a little different: here is an aggressive environment, and if you are not an engineer, you will not be able to thoroughly check what is inside the equipment. As a result, at first we paid for the used equipment, and then in the first year of operation ninety percent changed it - she was dying before our eyes. On Friday, at the time of full landing, we flew a plate. Blenders crumbled. In the summer of refrigerators, the compressor stopped working. Of the equipment for which we paid then, there was only one refrigerator for many years.
5
Learn to delegate authority
Now in the network "Simple things" five restaurants. They employ about three hundred people. I select only key employees and participate in the decision making process to select people only for key positions. In my opinion, I adhere to the only possible principle of management: you cannot speak to a leader in any position what he should do. As soon as you do this, the person ceases to be a leader. If you think that a person can be a manager, a chef, take any key position, you initially trust him completely. And he makes all the decisions independently.
6
Write the standard of the restaurant
You can keep everything at your fingertips, as long as you have one restaurant. As soon as there are two of them, you can no longer control absolutely all processes. Exactly from this point on, you have to create a system of standards, so that any process works without you, so that you are sure that it works exactly as it should, so that you can check at any time how effective everything is.
Therefore, we, of course, have standards - starting with the fact that we have created our own school of waiters and prefer to take people without work experience (retraining is much harder than teaching from scratch) and ending with the fact that we have standards for each position work, and duties. There is a concept (it should be on paper, because you can’t tell the same people to three hundred people endlessly), there are textbooks that we have compiled, there are a lot of things.
7
Open the second and third restaurant
I made the decision to expand the network easily. You want something for many years, while doing something completely different, and then you take it, you completely invest in the idea, and you succeed. And it does not just work out, but it turns out almost perfectly - this is a project about which the whole city speaks, you are doing something that nobody in this city has done before. It seems to me that you need to be a completely non-ambitious person, so that after this you don’t want to continue this story. A completely non-ambitious person, probably, the first restaurant will not open, because the creation of something new is in any case a reflection of your own “me”.
8
Find something that was not before you
When I think over the concept of a new institution, I am guided by a very simple idea: all the time we are doing something that was either not in the city at all or was not enough. Eleven years ago, there was probably only one restaurant that did not fall into my favorite definition of “expensive and maybe tasty, or cheap and impossible to eat,” Correa's, but it was not enough for Moscow alone for many millions.
We opened the first Moscow gastropub, a restaurant in which there can be tasty seasonal, gastronomically adjusted food for very little money. Then we opened the first wine cellar in Moscow - we wanted to make the story of wine less taboo. After all, wine is a drink for every day: there is wine for lunch on Monday, and there is for Friday evening - it's just different wines. When we opened “Simple Things New Vintage”, we made the first bar in Moscow, where all the cocktails are made on the basis of sparkling wine. Then we made the first restaurant in Moscow, where the kitchen is built around cheese. It is much easier to clone something that you have already invented - but this is not interesting. It is interesting to do something new.
9
Open school
Nine years ago, when we first opened a wine collection, wine in Moscow was a very elite story. When we first opened the wine cellar, people came to us, they said: "Is there vodka?" - "Not". - "Beer there?" - "Not". - "Well, we then went." You start talking to people and in the process you find out that a person does not really like wine - he is afraid to order it because he cannot explain what he wants. You understand that you just have to give people a user guide, how to technology.
For five years at the wine school, we did not earn at all. This was her business goal. The only task we set for ourselves: it should work to zero. There are only six classes, after studying, you can come to any restaurant and, with a very high degree of probability, by ordering wine, get what you really wanted. In the summer, the school goes on vacation, but from September to May we have six courses that go at the same time — for example, courses in countries, on individual wines.
10
Remember that it will get easier over time.
With the expansion of business, quantity goes into quality. Everything I used to do with my own hands, control, check and do it myself, now is a streamlined system, a large, effectively managed organism. He does not require my constant presence in each of the five restaurants. Most of the time you spend on the project that was opened last - simply because it is new, because it is currently the most beloved. It's like a child that you have to grow up, and then, when he reaches a certain level, you can let go into an independent life.
Probably seventy percent of my time I always spend on the restaurant that opened last, and thirty percent on restaurants that already feel great. Of course, I am engaged in the operational management of all five restaurants and I am aware of everything that happens in each of them, almost to the smallest details. But at the same time, I began to work in total even a little less than eleven years ago.
Photo: press office
