Is it possible to start a restaurant with no experience?

Brian M: Is it possible to start a restaurant with no experience?
I have what I think is a great idea — a restaurant that specializes in salads to cater to the lunch crowd. I’d love to open a restaurant, but I have no experience outside of a fast food job I got fired from. Is it possible to start a successful restaurant with no experience, or is this just a pipe dream?

Answers and Views:

Answer by Common Sense
Possible but a really really really bad idea unless you know what you’re doing.

Answer by Mr. Learn
Everyone needs to start somewhere ok. But I would suggest to get a job in a restaurant or anything something like that to gain some inside knowledge about the bussiness. You really need to read and research a lot to to familiarize yourself with the ins and out and other tricky things that go along in having that kind of bussiness. Never never embarked yourself in a bussiness without doing all this things.

Answer by Molly
Yes, it is possible to start a successful restaurant with little to no experience. You probably have a good bit of experience in what NOT to do based on your fast food experience. The key is to make up for your missing experience in research and planning.

With this type of restaurant, you will definitely need to hire a staff, so you should plan to hire as your kitchen manager or chef someone with experience in a similar type of restaurant (such as Sweet Tomatoes or Souper Salad).

Contact your county extension service — in many areas they provide food service training. Another great ressource is Business Startup and Growth Magazine (see below).

Answer by NervXT
It’s possible to do anything, if you invest your time in it. To understand some of the permits and licenses you’ll need alongside with federal requirements, check out the link provided. Since each state is different, it would be best to contact your state to see what you’ll need to clear your business for launch.

The next part is to get your business started, which costs money. If you think about it, you’ll have to buy or rent the building your business will operate out of, provide all of the things needed in a salad bar (tables, seats, chillers, etc…), along with paying taxes, employee salary, and purchasing the food from some sort of vendor. It’s a long laundry list of stuff, but you can see that to make money, you must first spend that money.

How you go about getting that money to start up is usually done in two ways; either through an Investor(s) or through a loan. An investor is someone that is going to invest money in you to get your business set up and running. This can be a family member, friend, or even a private investor. The other way is through a loan, which you’ll be responsible for paying back over time, just like college loans or credit cards.

If you happen to get the money to start up your business, and you’ve cleared everything with the state and the government, you’re pretty much set. Again, you’ll need to purchase or rent available space to have a building to operate out of and purchase all of the things to put into this building which will be your salad bar. You’ll obviously need to hire employees and create a staff to operate and maintain your business. Also, you’ll probably want to have somebody to cover you legally and someone to help you keep up on your taxes, finances, spending, earnings, etc…

Most small businesses fail within the first year. I don’t say this to scare you but more to encourage and enlighten you. Don’t be afraid to try something, even if others don’t understand it.
Starting up a small business can be fun but you also should do some research to find out more about the industry you’re getting into. You don’t have to have experience to do any of this, but it generally might help if you had some unique and interesting ideas, especially when you’re proposing your business idea to a potential investor.

This isn’t everything of course, there are plenty of other things that didn’t get covered here. I would suggest you do more research on it yourself, so you learn at your own pace. I hope this helped, remember to check out the link below.

Remember, if you really put the time and effort into this, it’s possible. Best of luck.