Carrying out a marketing research is the most important stage in the implementation of a cafe business idea.
Opening your own cafe almost always entails an initial investment, unless, of course, you buy a ready-made business (see also the article cafe business idea ). Therefore, it is important to be able not only to evaluate your strength from a financial point of view, but also to predict the future of this business in terms of payback and development.
In this article, we will not consider the option of opening a franchise cafe. This is a topic for a separate discussion.
Let’s focus on the options for opening a cafe from scratch:
First, you need to determine the amount of money you are willing to invest in this business. This volume will be the determining factor when choosing a room, a cafe profile, its interior, equipment and even a menu. It is necessary to evaluate not only the volume of your own initial investments, but also the possibility of obtaining a loan, since working capital is constantly required for the operation of a cafe.
Secondly, it must be taken into account that the work of the cafe is closely related to the observance of sanitary, epidemiological and fire requirements.
Therefore, these requirements must be taken into account at the stage of choosing a room for a cafe.
It is clear that it is most advantageous to locate cafes in crowded places, but in such places it is not always possible to ensure compliance with the prescribed standards. Therefore, you first need to determine how these standards will be met, and only then plan the premises of the cafe itself. And in no case do the opposite, first planning a cafe, and then trying to fit it to the norm.
Thirdly, at the first stage, you need to focus on obtaining all the necessary documents and permits.
If these permits cannot be obtained, there is no point in starting to implement the cafe business idea.
The main documents include a lease agreement (if the premises are not owned), permission to place a cafe in the premises, a certificate of registration, a license for trading activities, a license for the sale of alcohol (if you are going to sell it), a fire safety permit, a document on the compliance of the premises sanitary standards. Subsequently, you will also need a document confirming that employees have passed a medical examination, and possibly some local documents. It is better to determine the possibility of obtaining all these documents at the first stage of business deployment.
Then you can proceed directly to the cafe project. To do this, you need to determine which visitor the cafe will be designed for. It is from this that the location of the working area and the client hall will depend. The choice of furniture, interior, lighting will also depend on the characteristics of the expected visitor. It is necessary at the design stage to immediately provide for a parking lot, since the time of visiting a cafe will depend on this indicator.
The arrangement of the working area in the cafe will be designed taking into account the equipment. The choice of equipment is connected both with the planned attendance of the cafe, and with the proposed menu.
The choice and arrangement of equipment is a separate stage of marketing research and design of the future cafe.
As the opening approaches, it is necessary to come to grips with the search for suppliers. Not only the attendance of the cafe, but also its profitability will depend on the cost, freshness and quality of the products.
Marketing research of the supplier market must be combined with a study of the competitiveness of the future cafe in the nearby area. If there are other cafes nearby, then yours should at least differ from them in the menu and level of service. In such cases, the business idea of a themed cafe takes on a special meaning.