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Opening a restaurant is one of the most common business dreams. It's also one of the fastest ways to hear people tell you not to do it.
A restaurant worker with more than 25 years of industry experience posed a simple question on Reddit: "Do you already have to be a millionaire to start a restaurant?"
The responses were brutally honest. While most people agreed you don't need Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk-level wealth to get started, they also warned that restaurants remain one of the toughest businesses to make work.
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"How do you become a millionaire in the restaurant business?" several experienced owners repeated a well-known industry joke, "Start as a multimillionaire."
Behind the humor is a real concern. Restaurant owners face rising food costs, labor shortages, expensive equipment, rent, permits and unpredictable customer demand. One commenter said their tax professional had rarely seen restaurants earn more than 15% profit margins, with many operating in the single digits.
"You will work more and harder than you ever have," a former operator said. "It took us 8 years from when we started our business to when we opened our own place."
Still, many pushed back against the idea that opening a restaurant is only for the wealthy. Some owners shared stories of starting small and growing over time. One restaurateur said four partners opened a bar and grill with a combined investment of just $50,000. Another said they launched a food business with only $5,000 before spending years building it into a brick-and-mortar operation.
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What kept coming up was that most successful operators didn't jump straight into opening a big, expensive restaurant right away.
Instead, many began with food trucks, ghost kitchens, catering businesses or small takeaway concepts that allowed them to test demand before taking on major financial risk.
One of the most repeated pieces of advice was to keep overhead as low as possible.
The importance of negotiating a favorable lease was often stressed, because as one longtime restaurant owner who successfully operated for more than three decades said, "You don't want to be working for the landlord."
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