Opening a new bar will involve many decisions throughout the planning stage
. Take care to avoid these three big mistakes during the pre-launch phase to better set your bar up for success.
Making the Business Plan an Afterthought
Try to start preparing a draft of your business plan from the day you considering your bar's opportunity and allow it to evolve with your thinking. Do this by being familiar with the business plan format or working with a business plan template. This ensures that whenever an opportunity to pitch to an investor arises, you can buckle down to make the plan presentation-worthy with a little focused effort. If you haven't put pen to paper at the point when someone asks to see your plan, you can spend a lot of time putting your ideas into business plan format while you could have been doing so all along.
Starting the License Process too Late
Before you announce an opening date and spend marketing dollars to make sure the community is aware of that launch date, you should be extremely confident that you can have all of the licenses you need by that intended date. If you start the process of getting your liquor license and other licenses too late or without contingency time built in, you may find that any hiccup in the process throws off your opening date, causing you to waste money on more notices to explain the change to customers.
Forgetting to Ask "Why My Bar?"
Simply knowing that there is extensive foot traffic of potential customers going by your intended location is not enough. If no other bar operates in the neighborhood where such a great opportunity exists, you can be relatively sure that other businesses are planning to open as well. You need to not only defend against any existing competitors, but against these new entrants into the market who you have no way of knowing about. By thinking through a clear brand image that you want to project for your bar and how you will do it, you answer the question of "why my bar?"