You have to pursue living the restaurant dream

The restaurant dream is the stage where a restaurant owner reaches success, earning good profits consistently and having enough time to do what they enjoy with their family. You have to reach it!

A few days ago someone interviewed me about the creation of this website. The fact that I started this project counts as news among the people who know me, because they know I have spent years devoting myself exclusively to my restaurants.

And that is exactly where the term "restaurant dream" comes up with the most force. I had mentioned that term before, but I had never given it much importance.

According to the interviewer, I am right now at precisely this stage of life. After so many years of hard work trying to move my restaurants forward, it really moves me to realize that the interviewer is right, because I now have a lot of free time that I enjoy doing what I like to do, and I no longer live the daily shifts of stress I used to go through.

I would like the same to happen to you, and if you feel frustrated or overwhelmed, keep in mind that things can change for the better.

When I think back on the first years of work with my own restaurant, I can tell you that reaching this stage seemed quite hard for me to believe.

There were moments when, because of my inexperience and the way things worked at the time, I believed my first restaurant could not run without me.

It never even crossed my mind that it was possible to open another branch or open a new restaurant. It seemed totally impossible to me.

Then, over time, as I picked up new skills and new knowledge with the intention of improving the restaurant's results, I made a large number of changes, which you can see reflected little by little in each of the articles we have published here. I kept discarding the things that simply did not work and I kept specializing in those that gave good results.

After following that approach, things improved, profits grew, and what seemed impossible now did seem possible.

Today many people who have known me only recently, when they see my lifestyle, find it hard to believe that our large profits came only from our restaurants. There were those who thought I had inherited money or was involved in other businesses, but that is not true. The profits and the fortune have come entirely from the restaurants.

I want to be very precise about something, and if you have read several of my articles you may have noticed that I like to publish directly the profits or benefits we have had from a given action. In most cases these are quite high profits, and I want to be honest with you: I do not publish them so that people know things have gone well for me or to earn some kind of admiration, since, as you will clearly notice, it costs me nothing to avoid the subject and not mention it, but I publish them because I want you to be clear that you too can reach high profits and can have the lifestyle of your dreams thanks to your restaurant.

As a colleague, I want you not to lose your motivation and to pursue your dream of seeing your restaurant be very successful. You just have to start by doing the same thing I did: make changes, run tests, be innovative, and if something does not work you simply discard it, and whatever does work, you keep doing it but with more force.

A small action that delivered big results

This reminds me of a small action I carried out a few years ago purely as a test. At that time I was quite clear about how much advertising budget I had to invest per day to reach a certain number of sales that would allow me to have certain profits per month.

By simple inspection and pure logic, one month I decided to double the advertising budget I invested per day. It was only a test; I could lose the money, but deep down I needed to take the risk.

What happened was phenomenal, because by doubling the advertising budget I managed to increase sales by almost 40%, I think it stayed between 35% and 37%.

Put into numbers, at that time, thanks to deciding to invest $800 more per month, the business was generating about $3,500 additional per month. Not bad for something that came only from my heart as a simple test I had to run.

I invite you to lose the fear and to run every test you can think of with the intention of improving your restaurant's results. It may be that not all of them work as in my case, but some will work and you will feel very happy.

I am sure that small actions like this will also lead you to live the restaurant dream 🙂