How did I open a noodle shop —- program ape a sideline experience

In early 2019, I came across a great side project: opening a noodle restaurant.

There are quite a few programmers I know in Chengdu who at some point would like to open a restaurant. Everyone seems to think that there is no threshold for opening this kind of restaurant. Just put up a sign and count the money.

I’m a little smarter than they are because I did a summer job in a restaurant in college, and I know there are certain thresholds: 1. The profit of catering industry is not high unless there are special jobs. 2. Catering industry is very hard, which is reflected in the mind, triviality 3. Catering requires certain social skills, but THIS project is different for me. It has many differences: 1. It is the new fast food, and the side dish is semi-prepared, which only needs to be heated. Serve with fresh scalded vegetables and fresh noodles/rice. 2. Because 1, it doesn’t need a skilled cook, just someone who can be trained to be a good cook. 3. The store adopts customer-like cloud management, so there is no need to worry about financial problems. 5. The boss of this project is a friend of my leader. He is an IT professional who has been working in the catering industry for ten years and his experience is trustworthy. The head office is just below our company. Business is really good and the profit is objective.

Everything looks very good. My friends and I made a lot of investigation and thought about it. Finally, in May 2019, we decided the location of the store, which is located downstairs of Meituan R&D Center in Tianfu First Street. Because the positioning is for office workers to eat, mainly fast, taste about 80 points can be.

After the store opened, there were problems

Gross profit is too low

The cost of a shop would look something like this:

The total support of the above items will reach 45,000 yuan. According to the 50% gross profit, the sales in January will be equal to 90,000 yuan. Add in some extra support and it adds up to thousands a month. In other words, if you buy $100,000 in January, you don’t lose money. With constant traffic, the only way to make money is to increase gross margins. There are many ways to improve gross margin, such as adjusting the structure of dishes. Remove some goods with low gross margin and promote some new goods with high gross margin. Chongqing noodle has the lowest gross profit unit price, but the highest gross profit. Or in the summer to sell some of the higher margin of the pot pot chicken (pot pot chicken is a cold dish mixed with red oil, both meat and vegetable) and so on.

But after we took such measures, gross profit still did not increase. After I checked the inventory myself, I was surprised to find that we used more than twice as much material as the flagship store downstairs for the same sales volume. But this problem, the company’s management did not find. A reasonable guess is, someone stole the bag from the store. We changed the management very quickly. I also saw feng Jicai’s “Common World Strange People”, in which the cook steals the kitchen so cleverly that the boss can’t even see it standing in front of him. I think I also suffered such a shock

Personnel management

The store hires mostly older aunts, and the managers are usually high school graduates. The problem with these people is that it’s hard to communicate, it’s hard to execute. Only by listening to them. A good store manager saves a lot of work. But unfortunately, we didn’t find such a manager. As a result, the management of the store is very loose. Loose store management, the most direct result is poor production, high waste. Especially waste, the cost of waste, is counted in the net profit. Like summer bowl chicken this kind of meat, waste a few catties, directly ruined today bowl chicken this all profits. Why say small food and beverage shop, it is often mom-and-pop business to make money. Because mom-and-pop stores keep an eye on their stores, they can do everything they can to eliminate waste and cut costs. Mom-and-pop stores often have gross margins of 80 percent or more. Ours is less than 60%. In addition, the turnover of shop staff is very high, but it is not so easy to recruit people. Especially since we’re not in the restaurant business, we don’t have the resources we need. We have to rely on platforms like 58, which are inefficient and expensive.

Loss of control of the franchise company

When I was willing to do this project, an important point was that the company promised to assist in management. But as we quickly discovered, the company simply didn’t have that capability. 1. Their store management rules are a sham. 2. They also have no qualified store manager and other management personnel, the only one that is acceptable is placed in the main store downstairs. 3. The management of the company can neither discover the problems of the store in time nor supervise and correct them. It’s almost free-range. This caused a lot of management to fall on me and my partner, and we had main jobs, so it was very difficult to manage. This is one of our childish, before signing the contract with the other party’s boss to talk a lot, and is an acquaintance, so a lot of behaviors are subject to oral negotiation. No contract was signed. When things went wrong, we couldn’t restrain each other.

Under various reasons, the running water of the shop soon slipped to 100 thousand. That’s when you start losing money. But the loss is not much, because there is cash flow, so can continue to do. But the Spring Festival of 2020 caught up with the epidemic. It didn’t open until nearly March, and sales were low. I thought it over with my partner and finally decided to close the store. However, during the epidemic, goods are not easy to sell. Finally, it was sold in July 2020. I lost money for a few months.

Accumulative come down, transfer fee and decoration fee only, lost more than 200 thousand.

This is a failure of the sideline, can only comfort themselves that bought experience. 1. The human factor is the most complex, especially for people with low cognition. If you’re going to have a side business, try not to have one that relies heavily on low-cognition people. 2. Don’t underestimate the threshold of any industry. The threshold may not be technical, but other aspects of the threshold. 3. Catering is just like buying stocks. The winners are always my friends, colleagues, relatives… 4. Business is business, and you pay the bill. So for the partner, there should be constraints.

Another experience is that I learned how to do accounting. Every time I go to dinner with my colleagues, when they say XX store must be very profitable, I will probably give them an account to see if they make money in the end, whether it is more profitable than being a programmer. Like some common milk tea shops, small restaurants, hot pot restaurants, basically is not profitable. In business districts where rents are sky-high, only chains such as Village Base and Rice Sheng may be left. It is characterized by high turnover rate, standardized management, low cost reduction due to scale effect, strong financial resources and strong risk resistance. Tianfu four street Yintai under the small restaurant, close to ant Tencent and other large enterprises, huge flow of people, but basically two years to change a stubb, is also the same reason.

A while ago, I saw an article that the homogenization of the catering industry is becoming more and more serious, and eating may be the same, just change the name. In fact, there is no way, because everyone began to buy material bag, save trouble and money, do not rely on the chef. It may just be the difference in ingredients that gets to consumers. There’s no way to avoid it.