8 Carmines Italian Restaurantrita Carmine The Owner And Manager ✓ Solved

/^8. Carmines Italian Restaurant^ Rita Carmine, the owner and manager of Carmine’s Italian Restaurant, is reviewing the slow growth of her restaurant. She’s also thinking about the future and wondering if she should change her strategy. In particular, she is wondering if she should join a fast-food or family restaurant franchise chain. Several are located near her, but there are many franchisors without local restaurants.

After doing some online research, she has learned that with help from the franchisors, some of these places gross 0,000 to million a year. Of course, she would have to fol low someone else’s strategy and thereby lose her independence, which she doesn’t like to think about. But those sales figures do sound good, and she has also heard that the return to the owner-manager (including salary) can be more than 0,000 per year. She has also considered creating a Facebook page for Carmine’s Italian Restaurant but is not sure how that will help. She knows people go to Carmine’s web page for directions and to see the menu—but why might she need Facebook or some other social media?

Carmine’s Italian Restaurant is a fairly large restaurant about 3,000 square feet-located in the center of a small shop ping center completed early in 2013. Carmine’s sells mainly full-course “home-cooked†Italian-style dinners (no bar) at mod erate prices. In addition to Carmine’s Italian Restaurant, other businesses in the shopping center include a supermarket, a hair salon, a liquor store, a computer repair business, and a vacant space that used to be a hardware store. The hardware store failed when a Home Depot located nearby. Rita has learned that a pizzeria is considering locating there soon.

She wonders how that competition will affect her. Ample parking space is available at the shopping center, which is located in a residen tial section of a growing suburb to the east, along a heavily trav eled major traffic route. Rita graduated from a local high school and a nearby univer sity and has lived in this town with her husband and two chil dren for many years. She has been self-employed in the restaurant business since her graduation from college in 1998. Her most recent venture before opening Carmine’s was a large restaurant that she operated successfully with her brother from 2004 to 2010.

In 2010, Rita sold out her share because of illness. Follow ing her recovery, she was anxious for something to do and opened the present restaurant in April 2013. Rita feels her plans for the business and her opening were well thought out. When she was ready to start her new restaurant, she looked at several possible locations before finally deciding on the present one. Rita explained, “I looked everywhere, but here I particularly no ticed the heavy traffic.

This is the crossroads for three mÄ…jor in terstate highways. So obviously the potential is here.†Having decided on the location, Rita signed a 10-year lease with the option to renew for 10 more years, and then eagerly attacked the problem of outfitting the almost empty store space in the newly constructed building. She tiled the floor, put in walls of surfwood, installed plumbing and electrical fixtures, added an extra washroom, and purchased the necessary restau rant equipment. All this cost 0,000—which came from her own cash savings. She then spent an additional