How I sold my restaurant in a week

I’ve been told selling a small mom and pop restaurant for anything above scrap prices is a pretty solid accomplishment. When I opened Camo’s in VA I had one goal -to get out of it as quickly as I could. I could have auctioned the equipment off, thrown the keys at the land lord and skipped town with a few grand and a legal battle but that just didn’t seem like the best way out. For context, I opened Camo’s in the space that I was using as a commissary for my food trucks. I was winding down the food truck business to jump on board with a fintech startup and I needed to move to Atlanta ASAP. That lease needed to be in the rear view, and I didn’t want to spend any more money than I had to.

Instead of starting by building my dream restaurant in the hopes of dazzling a buyer as if we were peacocks, I built the most badass, front to back, digestible manuals I could muster. The team and I focused for three months on building a set of docs that covered everything from changing the toilet paper to how many seconds it should take between steps in our potato tot recipe. We roll played edge cases, timed our movements through the mocked up kitchen setups and consulted with seasoned restaurant managers. My favorite project was creating visual build sheets for each menu item, and the most terrible was compiling hiring and firing procedures, but both are equally important. Front of the house and Back of the house had their own books and management had one that covered how everything worked together.

Anybody can cobble together equipment, smallwares and furniture to fashion a space into the shape of a restaurant but not everyone takes the time to build the training material, processes and procedures that purposefully animate that space. The restaurant wasn’t a cash flow machine and the value of the equipment outside those walls was essentially zero. The real value was in what held it all together. Those books sold the restaurant.