Taking over my father’s business is very confusing.
This year, I started spending much more time in my father’s business. We have a successful family restaurant, and we recently opened a café at a new location. Currently, I manage the café almost entirely on my own, and through this experience I have started taking responsibility for many aspects of the business.
However, I am confused about the future. My biggest concern is how I will eventually take over the restaurant operations while also managing the café. Running one outlet is manageable, but managing two locations, around 20 employees, inventory, customer service, finances, and daily operations seems overwhelming. My father also hopes to build a proper hotel in the future, which adds another layer of uncertainty because I don’t yet understand how we would manage a business of that scale.
At the beginning of this year, I believed that when I became fully involved in the business, I could simply hire a business consultant who would help organize everything. I imagined they would redesign the kitchen, optimize workflows, create standard operating procedures (SOPs), improve staff management, and provide a complete operational manual. I expected this would solve many of the problems related to scaling the business.
Our current situation is interesting because our restaurant performs very well, while our café has not been as successful as the restaurant. We intentionally opened a café instead of another restaurant because restaurants require significantly more staff, more operational complexity, and greater day-to-day management. A café generally operates with fewer employees, lower operational pressure, and often higher profit margins, even if total sales are lower.
This raises an important strategic question for me: if we converted the café into a full-scale restaurant, would we actually be able to manage the increased complexity? Even if the restaurant generated higher revenue, it would also require more staff, tighter systems, and stronger management. At the moment, I am not confident that we have the systems or organizational structure to handle that expansion smoothly.
My long-term goal is much bigger than operating one successful restaurant. I want to build a chain of restaurants and cafés, similar to successful regional brands like Gopal’s or Haldiram, where every major city or district has a well-managed outlet that operates consistently and efficiently. However, I currently lack the knowledge required to build and manage an organization at that level.
I believe business consulting could provide valuable guidance in areas such as organizational structure, hiring, staff allocation, SOP development, kitchen design, financial systems, inventory control, quality control, and expansion planning. More than anything else, I am looking for clarity. My biggest insecurity is not whether I can run one outlet—it is whether I can build systems that allow multiple outlets to operate successfully without everything depending on me personally.