You know why McDonald’s is so successful?

It’s not because its burgers are the best in the world. It’s because McDonald’s is very, very good at streamlining and optimizing the complex operations of a busy restaurant.

But mostly, it’s because McDonald’s owns the real estate underneath its franchisees’ restaurants.

Odds are, you’re not trying to be the next McDonald’s. You know today’s diners aren’t as easily swayed by mass-produced burgers as they once were.

When every restaurant in driving distance is searchable and easily reviewed on Google and Yelp, a successful restaurant has to be good before anything else. You need good food, good presentation, and good customer service just to have a hope of standing out. To really thrive, you’ve got to be great at all those things.

A great restaurant begins with a great staff, and it’s no easy feat to retain good cooks, servers, managers, and others in an economy with record-low unemployment.

Competition is fierce for the restaurant workforce, so you may find yourself offering higher pay than ever before just to keep enough people on the floor and in the kitchen to take care of your guests. There’s not much wiggle room in a restaurant’s margins to raise pay rates.

If only it were easy to bring in enough diners to pay your team’s salary.

The restaurant industry is so ultra-competitive that even McDonald’s has had to improve its menu recently. Upscale burger joints are popping up everywhere, leading the fast-casual charge to better food on a budget.

If your restaurant is in any reasonably-sized metro area, you’re likely to have a whole grab bag of close competitors in your niche, not to mention competitors offering nearly every other popular cuisine in the world besides.

Getting people in the door begins with strong branding and active marketing, and that costs money and time, especially if you want to do it right

You could use technology to improve your results. Online marketing can be a cost-effective way to get the word out, and there are many ways to track the performance of your campaigns. But you probably got into the business to make great food and delight your customers, not fiddle with data analytics and complex hardware.

Effective use of today’s restaurant tech often requires the help of outside experts, and they don’t come cheap.

Let’s say you’ve figured all that stuff out already. You’re doing great! You want to expand, maybe start a chain or franchise.

But that means you’ll be opening more restaurants, and you remember how expensive it was to get started with the first one. You might get some economies of scale on your supplies and inventory, but equipping, staffing, and promoting a new restaurant in a new place is always going to cost a lot of money, no matter how big you get. That’s why restaurant franchise fees usually start at a quarter million dollars per location and end up much higher.

You don’t have time to do everything yourself while trying to build your restaurant, but you might not have a ton of resources to properly address your biggest challenges.

That’s where we come in. If you need business funding to build a better restaurant, talk to Amerifi. We’ll help you find the restaurant loan or financing you need to succeed.