Starting a restaurant, need three buy-ins.

AardvarkGoodSwimmer · Snowy Owl Joined: Apr 27, 2009 Age: 46 Posts: 162

Similar to poker, you going to try and start generating a cash flow through no-limit? Well, you need about three hundred buy-ins.

With a restaurant, let's say, three buy-ins. You can't plan every variable to the nth degree. Books preach that, but we who have Aspie skills already take that pretty far.

You teach, coach, and delegate to people who may not be as good/skilled as you are, who aren't taking it as seriously as you (they really can't, it's not their business. Plus they're not Aspie!). So, you need to develop a feel for when good enough really is good enough.
It's a whole bunch of tasks getting done good enough, rather than a few tasks perfectly.

And you're got to make decisions early in the game with incomplete information, observe the feedback, and take it from there.

So, if it costs $70,000 to open the average restaurant, you really need $210,000, which might sound insane, but I really think that's the way to go. That way you can have the requisite light touch. If the first one fails, you can make a measured decision whether you want to open the second. If the second also fails, you probably want to call a pause to it, until you are back up to three buy-ins.

And remember, any kind of entrepreneurial business has about an 80% failure rate, and restaurants probably even higher. Books preach determination, but again, we as Aspies already take that pretty far. What we really need is to lighten up and get an interchange going between a great plan we have and the feel and texture of the actual situation.