Tips on Selling Your Restaurant and Bar Business
The restaurant business is sort of like riding a rollercoaster in the dark. You never know when the next turn, up hill climb, or big down hill drops is going to come. It’s an emotional business, no doubt.
EMOTIONS: Check them at the door! Deciding to sell shouldn’t be an emotional decision, it must be a logical well thought through decision otherwise you’re on the restaurant selling rollercoaster, not a good place to be when people are depending on you to follow through with your agreements.
When I was the Vice President of Planning for a $6 billion music company there was a saying I would tell my CFO’s in each country and it goes like this “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.”
PLANNING: You must have a plan for the time after you sell your restaurant and/pr bar. What are you going to do? Do you need income? Do you need to work? Are you going to relocate? Are you going to stay in the business? Take a year off? These are only a few of the questions you must answer before placing your business on the market otherwise any road will get you to nowhere.
Have you ever walked into an office where every thing was neat, nothing was on the desk and all was filed and stored and it was clean. It almost looked as though no one worked at that desk at all, right!
NEATNESS: There is nothing more price killing than a dirty and messy restaurant. Get your dining area and kitchen spotless and stay on top of the employees to keep it that way. Get the hood system cleaned often…nothing grosser than dripping oil on the stoves…get the floor clean, under and behind the cooking equipment, clean the bathrooms and for God’s sake, make them smell good. Fix chairs that are damaged, replace tables that are chipped and broken and if the carpet is soaked in grease, replace it!
These three point will help you get your mind around selling your restaurant and bar and help get it sold fast and for a premium price!
Mel Jones is one of the premier restaurant brokers in the nation having published hundreds of articles on buying and selling a restaurant and bar business, selling thousands of restaurants in CA., WA and AZ and building one of the most copied business models in the brokerage industry. Mel started SellingRestaurants in 2004 with the one simple concept, give the buyers the information they need to make intelligent buying decisions without being pestered by a broker or hiding information, prepare the business for market by researching key details that make or break deals and educate the buyer on the buying process to create an intelligent buyer. Prior to SellingRestaurants, Mel was a Chief Financial Officer for Universal Music Group, the largest music company in the world. There he participated in more than $11.5 billion of merger and acquisition transactions. He also work for top companies such as Nestle Foods, USA. He hold a Bachelors in Business Administration Finance as well as attened Law School at Gonzaga University. Give Mel a call at 480.274.7000 or e-mail him at [email protected] if you have any questions.