I thought I was hiring someone to handle what I didn’t know.
Instead, I found out how expensive it can be when you don’t know enough to ask the right questions.
When I purchased one of my golf clubs in North Georgia, I decided to open a restaurant inside the golf club. The club was in a small town, kind of in the middle of nowhere. My idea was straightforward: serve Southern comfort food that people in the area would enjoy.
Then I hired a chef from a competitor who had experience in Las Vegas.
I figured he would take care of the restaurant side of things. I had never owned a restaurant, much less built one from scratch. Surely an experienced chef could fill that gap.
That assumption became one of many mistakes I made as a first-time restaurant owner.
A Bigger Restaurant Menu Than the Business Needed
He started ordering food. And ordering. And ordering.
He created a lunch menu and a dinner menu. That might sound reasonable, except people in that area weren’t going out much at night during the week. We were building a restaurant around demand we hadn’t established.
Looking back, it felt like my simple comfort-food idea had become somebody else’s dream, with me paying for it.
A few weeks later, the menu changed again.
That’s when I learned something that probably sounds obvious to anyone who has run a restaurant: what you put on your menu affects how much food you need to store, and whether you have enough space to store it properly.
Believe me, when you’re new to this, that connection can be nowhere on your radar.
It wasn’t on mine.
Food Storage, the Health Department, and a Moving Target
As the menu expanded, we ran into problems with the health department over whether we had enough food storage.
We would get shut down. The chef would adjust the menu to accommodate the situation. Then, a little later, we would find ourselves dealing with the same problem again.
It became a cycle.
Meanwhile, the food orders kept coming. There were orders around $20,000, and an alarming amount of food was spoiling.
I was paying to bring food in, then losing money when it never made it onto a customer’s plate.
But I still didn’t understand the full picture.
“Please Look at Your Cameras Tonight”
One of the cooks finally called me.
“Please look at your cameras tonight.”
That call prompted me to check what was happening, and what I saw led me to fire the chef that night.
By then, the damage went beyond wasted food. I had allowed purchasing, menu decisions, and inventory to operate without enough oversight from the people responsible for the business.
After that, I made sure the general manager became involved in purchasing and inventory control for both the restaurant and the bar.
I know. That probably sounds basic.
But when you’ve never owned a restaurant, you can make more mistakes than you care to admit before you learn which “basic” things can cost you a fortune.
What I Would Do Before Opening Another Restaurant
I would bring in an experienced restaurant operations consultant before opening the doors.
I would want someone to look at the whole plan: the customers, the menu, the kitchen, the storage, the purchasing, and the controls for tracking what came in and what went out.
I would also make sure my general manager understood those systems from the beginning.
A chef’s experience gave me confidence. What I needed was a way to check whether the decisions being made actually fit my business.
Who approves the orders? Who counts the inventory? Who checks the waste? Does the menu suit the people who live nearby? Can the kitchen and storage support it?
Those are questions I wish I had asked before the first food delivery arrived.
I wanted to offer Southern comfort food in a small North Georgia town. Somewhere along the way, I lost sight of how far the operation had drifted from that idea.
If you’re opening your first restaurant, whether it’s inside a golf club or on Main Street, get experienced help early, and stay involved enough to understand what that help is doing.
You’re still the one paying for the lessons.
If you own a golf club or are thinking about buying one, you don’t have to pay for these lessons yourself. Through Golf Course Consulting, I bring what I learned owning and operating five golf courses and country clubs to owners and buyers, including the clubhouse, restaurant and bar operations.
A&J Gulf Blvd Capital
Commercial Real Estate Financing | Golf Course Consulting
ajgulfblvdcapital.com