Restaurant Startup Information

I am looking for work in Taiwan. I am possibly moving with my wife to Taiwan (near Hsinchu city) and I am looking for employment. She will be teaching English. I have not finished my degree so I can not legally teach english while over there. Since I am in the states it is kinda hard to find a job in Taiwan for someone with no degree. My experience is managing restaurants, and working with people (I currently work with youth in a church). The thing is I need to know ASAP as we need to make our decision in the next few days. She will only be making 600 ntd an hour and working 21 hrs a week. Plus substitute teaching on the side…. I dont think that will be enough.

Not sure but you might be able to work on a spousal visa

My wife and our friends are trying to buy this resturant that I am currently working at. Its a turn key operation with the facility and two three bdrm apartments on top as well. Its in an extreamly prominante shore town about three blocks from the beach. The opportunity is golden. I have years of resturant expierence and all the energy in the world. We are in the prosess of writing our business plan as well. Heres the problem – we have no money. Myself and my friend both own the homes we live in but sadly we both just moved in and dont have much equity to draw from. The building and the business is being sold for $850,000 including all the kitchen equiptment. I called my bank and was told that I need 15 – 20% down to do this. I cant let this opportunity slip by but the lack of funds seems to be getting in the way. There must be a way to do this I just dont know how. Help. Thanks in advance

Sell your house and move into one of the apartments! Then you will have lots of cash for upgrading the restaurant.
If you go into business with no working capital, the stress will be so high that the business will suffer.
By living on the premises, you will have far more control, and the business will benefit.

I have to write an eight-sentence paragraph that fully develops the topic. My topic is A HIGH SCHOOL DIPLOMA IS IMPORTANT TO MY FUTURE.

As a student currently enrolled in Penn Foster High School, I can see how a diploma will be vital to my success in the future. With my diploma in hand I will be able to pursue the career of my dreams. Soon I will become a talented chef and open a restaurant in my hometown. This would eventually lead me to a career that would allow me to earn a salary much larger than most high school dropouts. I am going to set a good example for other members of my family. Life will be so much better. As a successful restaurant owner, I will be able to provide for my own family someday. They will always remember mama’s home-cooked meals. Receiving my Penn Foster diploma will be the first step in my plan to become a successful restaurateur.

I think for the most part you have a good paragraph here. The only two sentences I really have a problem with are "I am going to set a good example for other members of my family," and "Life will be so much better." The first sentence just doesn’t seem to flow with the rest of the paragraph–I can understand how it fits, but it doesn’t fit into the idea of your success in the future. The second one just seems like a filler sentence to meet the eight sentence requirement.
You’re focusing on having a career as a restauranteur (great ambition, by the way); could you include a couple sentences about the training you’ll need for that goal. Will you have to go to a chef’s academy or some similar school? You would probably have to have a diploma to enroll in such a school.
Good luck!

I want to know all steps to open my own bussines.

Go to http://www.score.org/ to find the nearest SCORE chapter. Contact them to arrange for a free one on one meeting with a SCORE counselor about starting a restaurant.

SCORE is a nonprofit organization. They provide a public service by offering small business advice and training. .

SCORE’s 10,500 volunteers have more than 600 business skills. Volunteers share their wisdom and lessons learned in business. The volunteers are working/retired business owners, executives and corporate leaders.

Once you create a website for your business, you quickly figure out that people are not flocking to it. When you assess the different ways of driving traffic, your options include advertising your website address, promoting your website address through Public Relations and gaining media coverage, encouraging other sites to link to you and getting placed in online directories.

However, these marketing activities will deliver small and sporadic volumes of traffic. The single biggest thing you can do to drive traffic is search engine marketing. Here is why: it is estimated that 80% of traffic to most websites comes from search engines. There are roughly 500 million searches performed everyday and 88% of that traffic comes from the top 4-5 search engines, Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN. Of these, Google is by far the largest. Approximately 90% of people searching do not go past the third page of results and few go beyond the first page.

Therefore, if you want to drive traffic to your site it is imperative that you get onto the first three pages of Google and the other top search engines. Surprisingly, the majority of small businesses have not figured this out yet and for those who have, the majority are asking the question, How can I get my site to appear on the first page of Google search results?

Different Options

There are two main methods of appearing on the first page of search results.

Paid for results or Pay Per click (PPC)
This is where you pay to appear in the sponsored links section of the results page. In Google, this is at the top of the page and the right hand side. You decide which search keywords e.g. London restaurant, you would like to appear in. You appear in the search results and you pay for every user who clicks through to your site. The cost will vary by keyword and can range from 10p to several pounds or dollars per click, depending on how many other companies are bidding for that keyword.

Natural results achieved through SEO
Natural results are when you appear in the main list of results. You do not pay to appear or when a user clicks on your link. However, to appear on the first three pages of results, you need to implement a number of design and content changes to your website, which are termed Search Engine Optimisation or SEO.

Which is best?
Both have their merits, but natural results are by far the most preferable because once you have invested in SEO, you do not have to pay for the traffic that is generated.

PPC is a great solution if you:
Have just launched your website and you need immediate presence on the first page of result or if you have not yet successfully optimised your site to appear on the first page. Remember, there are thousands of websites all looking to appear on the first page of search results for certain keywords.

Spiders and Links: The Basics of How Search Engines Work

Without getting bogged down in the technical details of how search engines work, here are a few basics that you should be aware of.

Search engines want to ensure that the most relevant sites are displayed to customers who are searching for keywords e.g. London restaurants.

Each page is ranked by the search engine on different criteria.

Each search engine uses different criteria when calculating the ranking of the site, but there are some commonalities such as:
Automated Spiders are sent by the search engine to index each page on your site. These spiders log the content of your site. This allows the search engine to know whether the key words that a user is searching for appear within your site and on specific web pages. However, in addition, the search engines have decided that it is not sufficient to simply have the keywords appear in the site. They believe that the most useful and relevant sites for the person who is searching are those which have a lot of other relevant sites linking to it.

The important points you should take out are:
You want to make it as easy as possible for the spiders to visit and index your site.
You need to have relevant keywords on your site that are easily found by the spiders.
You need to have many other sites linking to your site.

Four Components of SEO

In order to optimise your website to appear in natural search results, there are four components that you will need to address.

1. Design: What to do when designing your website

Many small businesses make the mistake of designing their website and then start thinking about driving traffic to it. The problem is that the way you design your site can result in your site being ignored by the search engine spiders, which means you will receive very little traffic. When designing your site, ensure you avoid the following pitfalls and ask your marketing agency to confirm that they have been avoided.

Avoid flash sites
Sites are designed in HTML or flash codes. The spiders that are sent to your site by the search engines cannot read flash.

No frames
Some agencies design sites within frames. For example, the menu on the left might be within a frame and the main body of the page within another frame. It makes designing the site easier as the only thing that changes from page to page is the content within the frame. However, spiders cannot read what is inside a frame so you will not get indexed and noticed by search engines.

No dynamic pages
Some sites are developed with a database which generates dynamic pages. You can tell if there are dynamic pages on your site if there is a ? within the page URL. Again, most but not all of the search engines can read dynamic pages.

Text within graphics
To ensure text is read uniformly by different browsers, design agencies often put text within a graphic. It looks great, however, a spider cannot read what text is in a graphic and simply moves on.

Keywords
At design stage, think about the keywords you want to be found by on search engines and incorporate that into your design. For example, if you were to design your site so that a page was allocated to the most popular keywords, it would be easier to include more keywords on the page which would be found by the spiders.

2. Content: What to do when developing your content

Keywords

Choosing the keywords that you want to appear in search results for is one of the most important things you can do. Think of it as planning the location for a physical shop. Choosing keywords that people search for a lot (i.e. generates a lot of potential traffic) and then ensuring that those keyword are peppered around your site (i.e. more chance that the spiders will index them giving you a good chance of appearing high in search results) could result in your being positioned on Oxford street as opposed to a back alley.

Invest time in choosing the keywords. Think about how you would search for your product or service. If you are running a restaurant, you should immediately think beyond the generic search keyword of restaurant and consider descriptive keywords such as seafood restaurant or family restaurant. You also need to think of target keywords, so consider London restaurant or London seafood restaurant.

Once you have decided on your keywords, you need to place them throughout your site. The main areas are:

Web page title
This is what you see written in the title bar of the browser. It is also what you see when you bookmark a page. This should explain what the purpose of your site or your page is and include keywords, but always in such a way that makes sense to a user who reads it.

Meta tags
The tags are not visible to users but they explain what the content of the page is. Keywords should be placed in here as they are easily searchable by spiders.

Homepage content
Your homepage is searched by the spiders and you should ensure that your keywords appear near the top header. They should also be sprinkled throughout the homepage. See keyword density for guidance on this.

Keyword density
A question often asked is how many times your keywords should appear on a page. The guidance for SEO is that each page should have a minimum of 250 words; your keywords should account for 2 – 8% of the word on the page. That means they should appear between 4 and 16 times.

Two important points to bear in mind are:
1. You need to balance the need to write your copy for your users, in order to sell your product, and the need to write your copy for search engines, in order to be found.
2. To help you achieve both objectives you should focus on a couple of keywords for each page rather than a large number.

3. Links

Inbound links are key
To combat a lot of sites achieving high page ranking by simply stuffing their sites with keywords, the search engines have placed a higher weighting on the value of the number of sites which link into a site. The rationale is that if a site is linked to by lots of other sites, then it must be offering popular and relevant content.

Therefore, your site might be designed in a way that is easily searchable by spiders and your content might be sprinkled with keywords, but you need to have other sites linking to you in order to achieve success.

Audit your links
Ensure you know how many other websites are linking into your site and set a goal for increasing that figure. You should have at least 100 quality links.

How to get links
There are many creative ways to generate links to your site:
Ask friends, customers or suppliers to link to your site.
Post comments on forums or discussion groups with a link back to our site.
Register your site with sites such as stumbleupon and if users like your site, they will bookmark it, creating a link to your site.
Issue an online press release which should result in online media coverage and links back to your site.
Register your site with multiple directories.

4. Maintenance:

Once you achieve a high ranking in the search engines, it is important to realise that you need to maintain your ranking. The criteria the search engines use in the algorithms constantly change and what works today may not work next week. Your site will need to be tweaked to bring you back up the rankings

Evan Mangan
http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/how-to-appear-on-the-first-page-of-google-search-results-107737.html

In mid October 08, I wrote an article about a first-hand experience I had with a restaurant that took out a business cash advance.

Here is a brief summary of where I left off;

· It is a small privately owned restaurant in California.

· They brought in about $60K a month selling only breakfast and lunch.

· The plan was to start serving dinner.

· In order for them to start serving dinner; they needed to remodel kitchen, fix up the dining room, hire new staff, get a beer and wine license and advertise.

· They received a credit card advance of $30K

In my last article they were just about finished with the kitchen updates, hired a new chef, created the new menu and have already started advertizing the new launch of the restaurant.

Here is where we are two months later;

They have finished all of the remodeling, updated their menu with the new dinner items, got the beer and wine license and expanded their business hours to include dinner.

Monthly sales are now exceeding $100K in just 2 months, and they expect to do much more business in the months to come. During the course of my conversation with the restaurant owners, they had repeated several times how grateful they were for the credit card advance. They said that they could not have been able to make these changes without it.

Because their business has increased so dramatically; they are well on their way to paying back the credit card advance much faster than they had previously thought.

I could go on about the warm fuzzy feeling I get when a business I work with does well, but there are some things you need to understand before you consider getting a business cash advance; this is a restaurant. Serving dinner is much more profitable than selling lunch and dinner, so not all businesses will see this kind of profit increase by simply expanding their business hours. Every business is different and no one can guarantee the success of your investment.

It is also important to note that a business cash advance is more expensive than a traditional business loan from the bank. Many businesses that get a business cash advance do so because they have had credit issues in the past or that the business opportunity is such that they cannot wait the several weeks it takes to get the bank loan.

If you are not sure what a business cash advance is, here is a general definition;

A business cash advance is when a business owner is advanced a cash sum — usually between $5K and $500K — often within a week and without the amount of paperwork required by banks. The merchant agrees to pay back the principal plus a fee. The business cash advance provider collects the money by taking a portion of the business’s credit card sales until the debt is paid off.

Business cash advance providers offer companies with few financing options a quick, easy way to find funds. Some entrepreneurs like the arrangement because it allows them to repay less when sales are slow and more when revenue picks up. However, it is typically a more expensive form of financing and most business owners are scheduled to complete repayment within six to nine months.

It is also important to understand that all business cash advance companies are not created equal. As with any business; some are more reputable that others. Do yourself a favor and perform a background check before doing business with any particular provider. One good tool is http://businesscashadvancequote.com. They do all of the background checks for you and find the cheapest quote.

Bottom line;

If you are thinking about making an investment into your business, consider getting a credit card advance loan. As you have read from my experience; it could make all the difference in the world.

Chris Ronk
http://www.articlesbase.com/loans-articles/my-experience-with-merchant-advances-part-2-732416.html

Is the easy home based business the elusive Holy Grail or is there really an opportunity to have your cake and eat it too? I can tell you from first hand experience that there is such a creature, the easy home based business does exist and I’ve seen it with my own eyes.

But let me warn you right now that the siren song of the easy home based business has lured many unsuspecting souls into the jagged rocks of internet failure. And it’s easy to see exactly why this is the case as there are literally hundreds of websites selling to the emotional appeal of just this type of home based internet business.

And when the sales page of these unscrupulous internet home business purveyors are expertly written, they seem like just the ticket to financial freedom. But behind the sheep’s clothing of promised wealth and freedom lies the hideous wolf of broken promises, personal disappointment and shattered dreams.

So what should you do, just give up? Simply accept your lot in life and crawl back into the office with your tail between your legs and your lips puckered up and ready to plant where your boss tells you to plant them? Nah, I didn’t and neither should you.

You see, it wasn’t too long ago that I was also looking for a way to make a living online. The internet is the great new frontier so I knew there had to be an easy home based business as there were so many others out there making bucket loads of cash without ever changing out of their pajamas. Why not me?

So I took the normal route, I came up with a business idea. I added 3 partners to help with the business and hired a website designer; spending thousands of dollars on a restaurant review website. From there, my partners and I slaved away for over three years, burning through over $10,000 in cash and hundreds of hours nights and weekends.

And do you know how much money I made? A big fat ZERO.

I couldn’t believe I was spending so much money, working so hard, yet losing so much money, it was simply not working. But then I got lucky. I stumbled across a website for sale and decided to take a chance and I bought it. It was more than I wanted to pay but not so much compared to what a ‘real’ business would cost.

Looking back, I can clearly see that without making the tough decision to buy this business, I never would have learned just how easy an internet business could be. I learned that all my previous time and effort was wasted because I was racing ahead but on the wrong path. I was following the ‘traditional business’ map instead of the internet business map.

And these are two altogether different animals.

But the funny thing is, as it turns out, the internet is actually a lot simpler way to make money than any other home based business, easy really. The secret is that you need to follow the right map. And with this map in hand, traveling to the pot of gold is a short trip.

So avoid the slow meandering path that drains your wallet and zaps your energy. Find a reputable map vendor, one with an impeccable reputation, and get a copy of his map. Take his short cuts and straight line paths through the woods and you too will realize that there really is an easy home based business that’s just right for you too.

Gary Jezorski
http://www.articlesbase.com/home-business-articles/easy-home-based-business-fact-or-fiction-66596.html

Is it ethically defensible to choose customers? For example, a white-owner of a restaurant have a preference that white-only customers are allowed to eat in her restaurant and all blacks, Asians, and Hispanic won’t be allowed. Is it ethically defensible? Is it possible?

Darn krappers and a half….um, you can’t do them stuff , gesus krist.

….. that is darn wrong and um, i would plow the dude in the mouth and call the cops or sumthing LOL

Being that is all I know, what are other options of work for someone who is 60 years old and without a college education. Would advising other business owners about running a business be an option if I don’t have a degree? What are other obvious choices?

I think hotels would find your experience and knowledge quite valuable, either as a restaurant manager or a consultant.

you know just general advice or maybe advice from people that have ran restaurants in the past , i know there has to be a website out there!

Firstly, if you have no experience in the restaurant business, I’d advise that you work in restaurants for the next six months or so doing everything from busing tables and washing dishes to waiting tables and cooking if they’ll allow you back there and if you have the skills. This will give you some of the work experience that you’ll need to understand and run a cafe/restaurant profitably.

If this is your first business venture, I would strongly recommend that you talk to a business counselor before you do anything especially spend money. I’d call the local office of SCORE (see link below) and input your zip code to find the chapter nearest you), the advice is FREE. Ask for someone who has a background in restaurants and they’ll try their best to match you with the right counselor.

The counselor at SCORE will most likely advise you to write a business plan which is very good advice because it will force you to dig out all of the start up details and the costs of starting a restaurant and force you to also understand all of the aspects of this business including the customers you’ll concentrate on (your market ) and how you’ll get them to find out and want to come to your fabulous cafe/restaurant.

The location of the restaurant is important but doesn’t make it successful. To prove that all you have to do is walk down a street in your town where there are several nice restaurants all in a row and you’ll find one or two that are empty while the others are very busy. It has to do with menu, ambiance, and your reputation at the beginning and over time.

You also have to have food handling licenses, the right zoning, the right city and county licenses and permits and you have to be skilled at negotiating with your landlord about who’ll stand the cost of the build-out or the changes to the premises to make it ready for your look and feel. You also have to worry about the normal business planning and management issues related to starting up any business.
Take a look and read some of the articles at YCHANGE (see link below) especially the ones about a business plan and starting a business.