A New Restaurant

It’s long been a cliché in business that the three keys to success are location, location, and location. While it may not be the only thing that determines the success of your restaurant, it is a huge factor. I’ve seen a lot of restaurants that didn’t survive because they didn’t have the right location. They were too far away from their target market, or were located on a street that made it hard to get in and out of the parking lot. It could even be that they were in a location where it was hard to get noticed.

Have you noticed that you rarely see a McDonald’s go out of business? Why do you think that is? One reason is that the McDonald’s Corporation spends a lot of money researching a location before they allow one of their restaurants to open there. KFC used to study traffic patterns so they were sure to be located on the “going home” side of the road. They understood that their customers were stopping on their way home from work to buy dinner for the family.

While choosing the right location may not be an exact science, there are some guidelines that will help you decide if the location you have in mind is right for your restaurant. There aren’t necessarily any hard and fast rules; you need to at least consider how each of these areas impact your restaurant.

Visibility

One of the best marketing tools you have is the restaurant itself. The more people see your restaurant, the more likely they are to remember it. You want a location where your restaurant can be seen.

I used to cook for a new restaurant that was struggling to get customers. Part of their problem was that the restaurant was set back from the road, with a row of trees blocking the view of oncoming traffic. By the time people driving down the road realized there was a restaurant there, they were past the entrance.

You should have enough visibility of the restaurant, or at least of a sign, that motorists have a minimum of 8 seconds before they reach the entrance to your parking lot.

Traffic

One way of taking advantage of having good visibility is to make sure the location you have in mind has plenty of traffic driving past it. While it’s a great thing to be a destination of choice, you can’t pass up the opportunity of having people see your restaurant, and deciding at the last minute to stop in.

Sales people talk a lot about sales being a numbers game; the greater the number of people they talk to, the greater the number of sales they make. It’s the same for you and your restaurant. The greater the number of people that see your restaurant, the greater the number of people that stop in to eat.

Parking

If you go through all the effort and expense to draw customers in, you better have enough room for them to park their cars. Not only do you need enough space, it needs to be close to the door.

If it is consistently a problem finding a parking space, your customers will soon become someone else’s customer. People like convenience. They don’t want to have to drive around your restaurant several times looking for a place to park, and they don’t want to have to walk too far get inside, especially if the weather turns bad.

Accessibility

You also want to make sure that people can get into and out of your parking lot easily. The ideal situation would be a parking lot with more than one entrance, and a traffic light that allows people to enter and exit without having to worry about traffic.

Try to avoid locations on a divided highway with no convenient way for your customers to get turned around when they leave your restaurant. Remember, people like convenience.

Size

Think about your customer base, and what you need to do to be profitable. If you are relying on a big take-out and delivery business, you can get away with a smaller restaurant. If you are relying on volume, you need to make sure your dining room has enough seats to accommodate a big crowd.

Besides having enough seating to make sure you reach your earning potential, there are a few other things to consider when figuring out how much space you need. Part of that is the convenience thing we talked about before. While people understand that sometimes there are lines to get into good restaurants on Friday and Saturday evenings, they don’t want to wait in line every time they come to your restaurant, and they don’t want the wait to be too long.

On the other hand, you don’t want your dining room so big that even on a decent night the room feels empty. If people feel like there aren’t many people there, they start wondering what is happening that the people are staying away. If enough doubt starts to creep into their thinking, they start staying away as well. Your guests won’t necessarily look at the number of people that are in the room, they will make their judgments based on the number of empty seats.

Condition of the site

Assuming you’re not starting with nothing and building your restaurant from the ground up, you’ll need to do a thorough inspection of the building. It may be a cute building I an ideal location, but may cost so much to renovate and convert to a restaurant that you can’t afford it.

You also want to do some research on any regulation in that area that restrict or dictate changes to the location. A lot of communities have regulations regarding the size and look of any signs you put out. There may be regulations about the type of lighting you need outside your building and in parking lots. Some even dictate what you can or can’t do in renovating the building itself. Make sure you check with the Chamber of Commerce and local government to find out what is and isn’t allowed.

Crime

Before you make your final decision check out what the crime rate is in the area. You can have the best food, service, and prices in town, but people will not go to an area with a high crime rate, especially late in the day. If you want your customers to come to your location, make them feel safe.

Your Location Can be a Competitive Advantage

If you do your research, you can make your location a competitive advantage. The restaurant industry is extremely competitive. You need to take advantage of any edge you can give yourself over the competition. Choosing the ideal location for your restaurant will make it easier for your customers to remember you when deciding to go for dinner, and it will make it easier for them to come and enjoy themselves.