Business Plan – Café Laura
Executive Summary
The current business plan is for Laura Café Shop. Laura fast moving foods café shop will focus on providing daily necessity for local coffee, chips, fruits, chicken, blended juice, tea and soda enthusiasts among many others with a place to relax and think about ways of overcoming life stresses. Nevertheless, the café will offer people a comfortable place to meet friends, share meaning and read books. With the growing need for fast moving foods as mentioned in the list above, Laura café will take advantage of Outlet Shopping Center with a focus to build main group of daily customers. Laura Café will provide its customers with exceptional quality products that will ensure customer satisfaction hence making it a place to visit day in day out. The present report provides an analysis of the marketing strategies to be implemented for the restaurant including the product, price, place and promotion strategies. The report shall also provide a financial analysis of the sales and expenses of the new restaurant.
The restaurant shall achieve a breakeven in the second year of its operations.
- Introduction
Laura fast moving foods café shop will focus on providing daily necessity for local coffee, chips, fruits, chicken, blended juice, tea and soda enthusiasts among many others with a place to relax and think about ways of overcoming life stresses. Nevertheless, the café will offer people a comfortable place to meet friends, share meaning and read books. With the growing need for fast moving foods as mentioned in the list above, Laura café will take advantage of Outlet Shopping Center with a focus to build main group of daily customers. Laura Café will provide its customers with exceptional quality products that will ensure customer satisfaction hence making it a place to visit day in day out. The café will employ 7 employees for the start with different talents in order to enhance specialization and easy division of labor.
The café will operate a 1200 square foot area within walking distance from shopping center. The expected capital for the business is $250,000 with the major source of funding the business being the Bank of America Commercial loans. The target employees for the business will come from the immediate community with the experts for the café coming from various parts of the world in order to accommodate all customers considering their diverse cultural differences.
The café targets to raise sales revenue of about $350,000 for the first year then strategize on improving it as time progresses with an increment of 50% within three years. Ideally, this is to mean that within three years the café should have a net profit of $360,000. Expansion of the business will depend on the profits of the café’s in three years’ time.
- Situation Analysis
Market Summary
The fast food industry in the USA generated nearly 191 billion USD in the year 2013 and the figure is expected to reach more than 210 billion USD by the year 2018 . The majority of the fast food restaurants in the USA consist of on premise restaurants followed by cafeterias and buffets .
Figure 1 Fast Food Industry in USA
Restaurant chains such as Mc Donald’s and Starbucks are market leaders in the fast food segment. US restaurant industry sales in the USA have reached $683.36 in the year 2014 .
Figure 2 Restaurant industry food and drink sales in the U.S. from 1970 to 2014 (in billion U.S. dollars)
Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) Analysis
The SWOT analysis helps in the anaylsis of the internal strengths and weaknesses and the external opportunities and threats.
Strengths of Café Laura
Strategic location: The café shall be located at a convenient location at a very small distance from the city shopping center that will attract guests towards the restaurant. Parking facility is also available at the restaurant which shall provide convenience to the customers.
Convenient Menu: Laura fast moving foods café shop shall provide daily necessity for local coffee, chips, fruits, chicken, blended juice, tea and soda enthusiasts. The customers can have fast food at the restaurant location.
Meeting Place: The restaurant shall serve as a convenient and comfortable meeting place for people to engage in converstaions and have food and beverages.
Good Quality Food: The restaurant shall provide its customers with high quality food products that will ensure customer satisfaction hence making it a place to visit day in day out.
Well Trained Staff: The restaurant has a well trained staff of experts in the food industry from various countries and culture that will prepare high quality food menu for the guests.
Weaknesses of Café Laura
Captital Investment: The restaurant shall be able to function on a limited investment scale in the initial years of its operation and therefore shall be able to provide limited facilities to its guests depending on the initial budget.
Customer Acquisition: The restaurant shall have to invest in attracting new customers and building its customer base from the scratch. The restaurant does not have a high brand value or brand reputation and thus substantial effort shall have to be made by the restaurant management to promote the restaurant in the area and attract customers.
Opportunities for Café Laura
Menu Customization: The restaurant can customize the menu according to multiple cultural preferences and cuisines such as Mexican, Continential, Chinese, American, and Indian categories so as to offer its customers a huge variety of fast food according to their needs and choices.
Service Differentiation: The restaurant can train its employees so as to offer the best service to the customers. The service excellence includes on time food delivery, high food quality and restaurant hygiene.
Threats for Cafe Laura
High Competition: The competition from fast food chains such as Mc Donald’s in the shopping center offer a competitive threat to the restaurant as many customers shall favor food from Mc Donald’s rather than a new fast food restaurant chain.
Health Concerns: Many customers are avoiding fast food due to the raised health concerns all over the world regarding the harmful affects of consuming fast food such as burgers, chips and coffee on a daily basis that has decreased the fast food sales.
Competition
The restaurant faces high competition from established larger fast food chains such as Mc Donald’s, Starbucks and Burger King in the region that offer attractive fast food to customers and have an established brand name in the US fast food market. The customer loyalty for fast food brands such as Mc Donald’s is quite high that will play a significant role in limiting new customers to try the new restaurant Café Laura food menu.
- Marketing Strategy
The marketing strategy of the new restaurant Café Laura includes its mission statement, its target market, brand positioning and the market mix.
Objectives
The main objective or the mission statement of the restaurant Café Laura is to extablish itself as a convenient and customer oriented fast food restaurant that offers high quality food and best services to its customers in a comfortable location. The long term objectives of the restaurant is to establish itself as a leading fast food restaurant in the region that is convenient to the customers and offers them with a comfortable meeting place. High quality food is an important strength of the restaurant and shall be a differentiating factor for the restautant.
Target Markets
The target market can be segmented on the basis of various factors such as demography, psychographics, geography and behavioral segmentation. The target market for Café Laura shall include males and females living in the USA that are in the age groups of 6-19 years, 20-50 years and 50-70 years and belong to the middle class families. The people shall be visiting the shopping center quite often and would love to try new eating joints. The target customers would have an attraction towards fast food and shall be regular consumers of fast food.
Positioning
The positioning strategy involves the positioning of the brand or making an impression about a brand in the minds of the customers. Café Laura can position itself as a leading and convenient fast food restaurant in the minds of the customers that offers high quality food and multi-cultural cuisines. The restaurant shall position itself as a high quality restaurant in the minds of the customers. High quality shall ensure that the customers associate the preducts and services of the restaurant with high value.
Marketing Mix
The marketing mix strategies incluce the product, price, place and promotion strategies.
Product Strategies
The product strategies include the strategies related to the product manufacture, product design and product packaging. The restaurant shall provide high quality products to the customers that will be manufactured in hygienic and clean conditions using fresh ingredients. The product menu shall include burgers, chips, beverage items and other fast food options so as to provide a variety for customers. The food shall be served at the perfect temperature in paper plates for packaging and in normal clean plates with sauce in the restaurant.
Price Strategies
The restaurant shall follow a price penetration strategy according to which the restaurant shall price its products lower in comparison to the other competitors in the fast food market segment so as to gain a larger market share and attract more customers towards the restaurant in a short amount of time. The restaurant may also adopt competitive pricing so that the prices of the restaurant products as competitive with other restaurants in the region.
Place/Distribution Strategies
The place or distribution strategies shall involve the restaurant distribution of the products and services. The restaurant shall operate as a self-service fast food restaurant that will involve customers directly paying and receiving products at the cash counter. The restaurant may later expand in its operations through more outlets through Franchise mode as is the case with other fast food chains such as Mc Donald’s.
Promotion Srategies
The promotion strategies shall involve the promotion of the restaurant brand in the target market so as to increase the level of brand awareness and brand reputation among the target consumers and to attract new customers towards the brand. The promotion channels used by the Café Laura for its promotional strategy shall involve a mix of the traditional promotional channels of print media in the form of pamphlets and the modern digital media such as social media websites including Twitter and Facebook. The restaurant shall promote itself on Facebook fan pages and through its website inviting customers to connect online with the brand. Social media is an effective and economical means of brand promotions.
- Financials
Sales Forecast
Expense Report
Break-even Analysis
The restaurant shall achieve breakeven in the second year of its operations.
- Controls
Implementation
The implementation of the marketing strategy shall involve the creation of the social media profiles, placing orders with the printers for pamphlets and the social media optimization and user engagement through social media. The pamphlets shall be distributed to the regular visitors of the shopping center to increase the brand awareness. The effectiveness of the marketing campaigns shall be measured through the number of fans on Facebook, followers on Twitter, level of user engagement in social media through comments and likes and shares. The distribution of pamphlets shall be measured through the number of footfalls at the restaurant.
Organizational Structure
The restaurant shall employ one employee for its marketing and social media activities who shall be responsible for social media promotions as well as pamphlet distribution in the nearby areas such as shopping center.
Contingency planning
A threat to the implementation of the marketing plan can be the inauguration of a new fast food restaurant in the region that is offering similar products and the ignorance of the customers to read the pamphlets or reluctance to try the new restaurant.
References
- Statistica. (2014). Restaurant industry food and drink sales in the U.S. from 1970 to 2014 (in billion U.S. dollars). Retrieved from Statistica.com: http://www.statista.com/statistics/203358/food-and-drinks-sales-of-us-restaurants-since-1970/
- Statistica.com. (2014). Statistics and facts about the Fast Food Industry. Retrieved from Statistica.com: http://www.statista.com/topics/863/fast-food/
