PRLA Restaurant & Lodging Matters Spring 2020

14 •  PENNSYLVANIA RESTAURANT & LODGING matters  •  Spring 2020 Funds to Reopen If your restaurant is closed, you may need to raise funds to reopen it. Don’t underestimate how much it is going to cost to buy inventory and train new employees. It will be expensive. One option is to approach your existing lender. Put together conservative projections and ask for an extension of your existing credit to get the restaurant back open. If the bank is unwilling, you may have to raise money privately. Many of the sources of funding operators use when a new restaurant is growing will need to be revisited. They include options like private placements, crowd funding (both equity and the tried-and-true rewards approach), landlord assistance, and of course, friends and family. Take-Out and Delivery Do you remember the scene in The Graduate where a neighbor friend of Mrs. Robinson tells the young Dustin Hoffman to focus his career on “plastics”? You could say the same thing today in the restaurant business about “delivery.” If you sat out the past few weeks with no off-premise strategy, you better get up-to-speed soon. Food on Demand News (foodondemandnews.com) is a good place to start learning more about take-out and delivery. If the coronavirus resurges in the fall and next spring as it did with the 1918 Spanish flu, non-pizza, non-drive- thru, and delivery-inefficient restaurant owners will find themselves in the same boat they are in today.