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how to
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How to Manage Restaurant Openings
When a new restaurant opens, it is a time for celebration. Like any kind of significant event, an opening takes preplanning. Restaurant chains that open a number of units each year have developed best practices for what could be called the countdown-to-opening period. While the key elements are similar — punch lists, marketing, training — the specific focus and timing can be quite different, depending on the chain’s corporate mission and brand promise.
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Restaurant Chains Are Going Global, Here's How
For brands looking to expand into international markets, location should almost be last on the list of considerations. While hot international growth markets such as Canada, the Middle East and parts of Asia remain attractive, it’s their correspondence to other factors that make a successful transition.
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How to Negotiate Restaurant Leases in a Tough Market
There’s not much good to report about the current real estate environment for multi-unit restaurant companies. Top sites remain scarce and many rivals continue to bid on them. New shopping center construction, the source of growth for years, hasn’t made much of a comeback. As a result, occupancy costs have shot up for second- and -third generation sites that are often in questionable condition.
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How to: Host Franchise Sales Webinars
Michael Haith, chairman of RainTree, an outsource franchise sales agency, counsels brands to offer sales webinars and tells them what potential partners can learn about each other. Potential franchisees learn about the brand's culture during the webinar, and the brand learns about the candidates in subsequent follow-up. When there is a match and satisfactory financials, the restaurant chain grants a franchise.
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How to Identify Local Vendor Partners in New Markets
As exciting as it may be, expanding into new markets brings with it a number of pain points: ensuring that the demographics will support the brand, finding the right location, hiring and training staff — and, among the biggest, determining who will build the new units. Is it better to import architects and general contractors used for previous projects or to identify local vendors for design and build-out?
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How to Get the Most from Discovery Days
Love them or hate them, discovery days are a fact of life for most franchise companies. While they're just one of many steps involved in finding the right franchisee partners with which to grow a brand, they're also among the most important because of the opportunity they present for senior-level staff to personally engage with potential franchisees.
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How to: Make Smart Flooring Choices
When selecting flooring, there is much to consider beyond simple aesthetics, and the options for a restaurant are many and diverse: traditional carpet and quarry tile; a wide variety of hardwoods, both natural and engineered; decorative tile; high-end environmentally friendly options; and more.
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Hire the Right Contractor
Arguably, the most important decision to be made in any restaurant build or major remodel is who will serve as general contractor. Get that right, and odds are the project will finish on budget, on time and with a minimum of headaches.