Andrea Carlson has worked at some of the city’s well-known eateries, but she always dreamed of owning her own restaurant.
Two years ago, she opened Burdock & Co. in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood; she also owns Harvest Community Foods, a grocery store on fashionable Union Street in Chinatown.
“It was super difficult,” she remembers. “I was looking into going into … two businesses without having previous business experience. I didn’t realize how much I didn’t know.”
Finding the right location is vital for the success of a restaurant, but in high-priced, competitive Vancouver, it’s not easy.
Carlson said she made sure to have the financing in place from Vancity, which required her to do a thorough business plan. She also got help from a small-business adviser.
“If I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have had a good understanding of what all the costs were going to be,” she said.
It took months of searching before Carlson found the right location through a friend who knew the owners. Importantly, the space had been a restaurant and had an existing liquor licence. Carlson was able to act quickly to secure the space because she already had the financing in place.
“You can just be looking and looking and looking and an opportunity will just present itself, and if you’re in a position to take it, then that’s when things work out.”
Once she’d signed the lease, Carlson had to wait months longer for city permits to come through to renovate the space – a period in which she was paying rent but making no revenue.
The restaurant is now profitable, but finding and keeping qualified staff is always a challenge, especially for positions like front-of-house manager. Carlson said she is now looking into offering benefits like a health plan and schedule flexibility to make her restaurant more competitive.
On doing the liquor math | “Liquor costs are one of the trickiest things in our industry to manage. Once we got that sorted, we were able to see consistent profits. It’s different for every restaurant because everyone’s selling a different liquor – some people are more cocktail-oriented, some are more craft-beer-oriented. Because the majority of our liquor sales are wine, making sure that we were costing it the way we needed it to be costed rather than just what the industry told us we should be costing it at was a … lesson.”
Has a work or life challenge taught you a key career lesson? Contact Jen St. Denis at [email protected]
