13 Common Mistakes When Opening Your First Café, Restaurant, or Bar

Here is my list of 13 essential lessons, ranging from major operational decisions and pricing strategies to the “small stuff” that can make or break your first month.

13. Forgetting Local Authority Registration

In the manic overwhelm of opening a food business, notifying your local authority can easily be overlooked – especially if you are taking over an existing site. New owners mean new details must be registered. In Scotland, you must notify the council 28 days prior to opening. It’s free and simple to do. Check your local council’s website for “Food Premises Registration” forms. Here are my local authority in West Lothian and our neighbouring Edinburgh’s forms:

• West Lothian: Register your food business
• Edinburgh: Food premises registration form

12. Failing to Draft “House Rules” Early

Drafting your operational procedures is a huge task that often gets pushed to the back of the queue. If you wait, I guarantee you’ll be the one up at night stressing before an unexpected Environmental Health Officer (EHO) visit. Having a rough draft in place is much more practical than starting from scratch while you’re already trading. It also signals to the EHO that you take public health seriously.

• Scotland: Follow the CookSafe manual.
• England & Wales: Use Safer Food, Better Business (SFBB).

11. Under-pricing and Undervaluing Your Product

You might think low prices pull people in, but it usually just results in a lot of work for very little revenue. You must hit a healthy Gross Profit (GP) percentage on every item. Don’t run yourself and your team into the ground for thin margins. If you realize you’ve underpriced, act quickly to adjust; it is much harder to implement a massive price hike six months down the line.

10. Ignoring Supplier Credit Terms

You will likely deal with multiple suppliers, all with different terms. I recommend creating a master document listing each supplier, their payment method (Direct Debit vs. Bank Transfer), and the frequency (weekly, fortnightly, or monthly). Pro tip: Be clear about your credit status from day one. In my experience, some suppliers demand cash on delivery for the first few weeks until trust is built. I’ve had to make many “mad dashes” to a cash point to ensure a delivery driver didn’t leave with my order!

9. Selling Products That Don’t Suit Your Customer

The most critical mistake is clinging to a product simply because you love it. Success lies in listening to your customers and adapting promptly. When I opened my café, I expected counter top pastries to fly off the shelves because they were popular in the city spots I frequented. In my new location, they sat untouched. It wasn’t a quality issue; they simply didn’t resonate with that specific audience. Passion should never override what actually sells.

8. Hiring Friends

Hiring friends is rarely a good idea unless you have a pre-existing professional relationship. If you’re “doing them a favour,” stop. You will struggle to be authoritative and that can very much cause problems in your team, or your friend will resent the shift in your dynamic. My advice? Keep your friends as friends, and your staff as staff.

7. Hiding Holiday Policies Until After the Interview

If you don’t set your holiday and availability expectations during the interview, you’ve already had your first major communication breakdown. You need to know their weekly commitments: kids, education, or second jobs; not to mention and any pre-booked holidays. You don’t want to find out after hiring, that your entire team is heading to Coachella in April, leaving you with no cover. Now that is stress inducing!

6. Skipping a Pre-Launch Training Day

If a customer has a bad experience due to a poorly trained team, they won’t come back. Opening a restaurant is a huge undertaking, so don’t stumble out of the starting blocks. It’s vital to have a dedicated training day to refine your order of service & operations and ensure everyone is “banging the same drum.” Your team is your biggest asset – invest time in them. Without great service, you aren’t a great business.

5. Forgetting the Sundries

It might seem like the small stuff but no hospitality business can function without them.  So save yourself a last minute dash to the shops.  And if there’s one holy grail in hospitality it’s blue roll – we use it for everything. We’ve yet to meet a professional in the industry that doesn’t panic when the blue roll runs low.

4. Understocking for the Launch

While we want to avoid waste, running out of supplies in your first week is a disaster for first impressions. If you’ve taken over a business, use their old order sheets as a guide and order slightly extra to be safe. Know your last order cut off times, speak with suppliers to find out if extra deliveries are possible and be prepared to visit a ‘cash and carry’ or supermarket if footfall exceeds your expectations.

After the initial period, you can settle into your ‘par’ stock levels.

3. Overstaffing

Nothing looks worse than staff milling around with nothing to do, loitering in corners while they fight over who gets to polish a single teaspoon. To protect your bottom line, you must minimise labour overheads and strictly manage your staffing levels. Paradoxically, teams often perform better when they are busy; it creates an efficiency and an energy that customers enjoy.

2. Working Salary Free

Setting a standard and paying yourself a basic salary from the beginning is essential. This is a business, not a hobby. While you should always pay your team before yourself if the ‘s%@! hits the fan’, working for free as a long-term strategy is a recipe for burnout. This business has to work for you. No one ever dreamed of slogging away, putting all the hours of the day into a venture they aren’t getting paid for.

1. Having No Intention of Working in the Business

This is the ultimate mistake. A restaurant, pub, or café is not a “side hustle” or a project to “play shop” with. It requires absolute dedication and passion. If your plan is purely financial gain without being on the floor, you will likely fail unless you have a world-class manager and those are rare and frankly expensive. If you don’t want to be in the business, rethink the venture entirely.