What Do Restaurant Consultants Do?

A topic our team wanted to explore and answer for our clients, and prospective clients.

What is a restaurant consultant? How do you become a restaurant consultant? What does a restaurant consultant’s typical day look like? And maybe the most important question: Why should you hire us?

Why? Because we make it our business to improve your restaurant and hospitality business. From the ground up.

We Engage. We Coach. We Guide.

Our collective experience and resources allow us to create tried & true strategies and services only our team can provide. We work in restaurants. We own them. We brand them. We open them. We are passionate about hospitality. In discussing this topic, our dynamic team had lots to say (as always!), so we looked to our Managing Partner Tom Prykanowski to streamline: Working with The Best: An Inside Look at VSAG.

Here’s a sneak peak into our world. Welcome.

What Do Restaurant Consulting Jobs Typically Look Like?

The experience and daily tasks of restaurant and hospitality consultants vary, which keeps it interesting.

  • Experience. Sure, a degree in hospitality management or culinary arts is helpful, but there is no substitute for experience. Working for a company steeped in the food service industry like VSAG, with clients that vary in needs, size, and structure, is crucial to growing our skillsets.
  • Client Relationships. Finding new clients and developing them, while also strategizing and catering to current and past clients is a big part of the job. We have the wide range of expertise and experience to cultivate and grow clients’ brands.
  • Business Briefs. Putting strategies, creative paths, and project proposals into concise, briefs is a key element of what we do. The goal is to wow clients, and prospective clients, with strategies and cohesive alignment of client-consultant visions in order to maximize project outcomes. We recommend taking a business writing course or working with a trained writer/editor to facilitate successful, streamlined business plans.
  • Act as Liaison. Once projects are full steam ahead, our team has perfected the art of acting as liaison. We work with clients, vendors, and recruiters to make sure budgets, timelines, plans, hiring, and the like are adhered to. 
  • Trend Master. Conducting industry research and staying ahead of food service trends and how they impact different segments of the industry is vital to setting us apart.

Restaurant and hospitality consulting is dynamic and sometimes challenging, but at the end of the day we get to help operators and owners grow and develop their businesses and brands.

Food service businesses can seemingly be made or broken overnight. Waiting till it’s too late should not be an option. We work everyday to ensure that our client’s feel that adding that consulting line to their operating budget was the best thing they ever did!