Free Restaurant Business Plan Outline

Lots of people seem to think that a restaurant business plan is a complicated document that they need to spend literally months working on, honing and perfecting in order to “do it right” but that’s not the case at all.

Restaurants have been around forever- literally thousands of years. And lenders and investors know how restaurants work- they probably ate in one in the last 24 hours. So you don’t have to spend a lot of time explaining that a restaurant is a business that makes money by selling food to customers (you won’t believe how often I see people doing that!) or anything else so silly.

All you need is to complete the following restaurant business plan outline, with one page or so per section:

1. Title Page- contact info

2. Executive summary- what, where, who, how much you need

3. Business Operations- location, hours, business form, owners, advisers, vendors

4. Concept- your menu and ambiance

5. Market- demographics of your area and expected customer profiles

6. Competition- who are you up against

7. Marketing- how will you find and attract customers to your location

8. Management- who are you, your experience

9. Financials- how much you need, what you will spend it on, your estimates of sales, expenses and profits for the first three years

10. Appendices- anything else- a website, menu, lease, resumes, etc. that support your claims

That’s it. You don’t need to go 20, 30 or more pages into this. You don’t need to spend months writing it.

Of course if you aren’t sure where to get some of that information it helps to have a package that shows you exactly where to find everything.

More important than the plan however are the financials. The plan could be a work of art but if the numbers don’t make sense then it doesn’t matter. You could pay a CPA to prepare them for you but this will run at least $1,000 and won’t include changes and updates.

A better alternative is to use restaurant plan software that will let you create the numbers yourself, in a way that will let you understand them but not require you to know anything about accounting, bookkeeping or how to put all the figures together. Plus, you can make all the changes you want or try out a lot of different scenarios in a just a few minutes and again without knowing anything about the actual math behind the scenes.

A free outline is fine but if you want the full package plus unlimited support from restaurant experts it is probably worth the small investment to you to do it right with the best chance of success.

Check out the ultimate guide to creating a “guaranteed to get funded” restaurant business plan quickly and easily that was created by the author, former restaurant owner and full time startup business consultant Matt Remuzzi, who also writes a popular restaurant entrepreneurs blog to help aspiring restaurant owners make their dreams become a reality.