Costs of Running a Restaurant (Infographic)

Perhaps you’re a chef that wants to own and manage your own restaurant, or perhaps you’ve been managing other restauranteurs restaurants for years and want to take the next step in your career. Whatever the case may be, it can be hard to leap into the unknown – especially when your hard earned money, and your livelihood is at stake. When examining the costs of running a restaurant, you need to look at a number of categories including construction costs, legal fees, permits and licenses, equipment, labour, insurance and marketing. A tip to keep in mind is to look for existing restaurants that are for sale that employ a similar concept you’d like to start up, instead of renovating a blank space into a restaurant. Existing restaurants will already have proper infrastructure in place such as proper ventilation, plumbing, electricity, cooking equipment and restaurant dinnerware (or at least they should in theory). Here’s a great infographic from Servy that outlines the initial costs of starting a restaurant, the ongoing operating costs along with an average percentage of categories such as expected profit, labour expenses etc.

Infographic courtesy of Servy App