Maybe you love exotic and unusual flavors as well as high quality products, and you wish that there was a way for you to make a living selling not just food, but food that you love talking about, tasting, and sharing with others. You have the passion, but you need information to figure out the nitty-gritty details like regulations and financing. This book will give you industry-specific advice by discussing how to refine your vision, how to market your product as a specialty food, and more. This book will also cover the basics that any retail store owner needs to know. You want to make sure that you’re not missing anything as you carefully decide if owning a gourmet retail store is right for you — and this book will guarantee that you don’t. Gourmet food products (and corresponding gourmet retail stores) are here to stay as a part of the U.S. economy, despite economic uncertainty, since they are far more affordable luxuries than many other specialty items. They have also weathered the change to a more e-commerce–filled world, even though a big part of the appeal of specialty stores is the in-person experience. Websites can be thoughtfully designed to supplement a brick-and-mortar store, or a completely online enterprise can provide specialty goods to consumers via shipping. This new A-to-Z guide is updated and completely revised to reflect changes in the specialty food industry and the technology that governs retail stores. Enjoy stories from real-life entrepreneurs and practical insights needed to start, operate, and manage a highly profitable specialty store. It is the perfect book for entrepreneurs, schools, and technical training centers.

Book & CD-ROM. This is the A-to-Z guide to making it in your own store. Learn the expert tips, tricks, and a vast gold mine of crucial how-to information you just can't find anywhere else. This is a perfect book for entrepreneurs, schools, colleges and technical training centres. This detailed text contains all the information you will ever need to needed to start, operate, and manage a highly profitable speciality store. This is an ideal guide new for comers to the business as well as experienced operators. In addition to basic operational practices the book will demonstrate how to: increase impulse sales and improve presentation, utilise merchandising fixtures and techniques, cross merchandising, point of purchase materials, how to develop a product sampling program.

Experts indicate that gourmet products do better in uncertain economic times as consumers seek out affordable luxuries. Updated and completely revised in 2105, this is the new A-to-Z guide to making it in your own gourmet store. This detailed text contains all the information needed to start, operate, and manage a highly profitable specialty store. It is perfect book for entrepreneurs, schools, and technical training centers.

Book & CD-ROM. According to the U.S. Department of Labor one of the fastest growing segments of the food service business is providing professional personal chef services. Personal chefs can expect to make between $100 and $400 a day every day. Until recently having a chef prepare food for you and your family was considered a luxury for only the wealthy. Today, many individuals and families have discovered that a personal chef service is an affordable, timesaving, and healthy alternative to the stress and time constraints of working to put a wholesome, economical, and tasty meal on the table every night. A personal chef offers a professional service of meal preparation. A client's individual tastes drive the creation of their customised menu. These personalised meals are prepared either in the client s home or your catering kitchen and then packaged, labelled, possibly delivered, and stored in the refrigerator or freezer. Most services include complete grocery shopping, customised menu planning, and storage in oven/microwavable containers. Families in which both spouses work, singles and couples who work long, hard hours, seniors who would rather not or cannot cook anymore, gourmets who love to cook but who do not always have the time, and individuals that have medical conditions, such as wheat/gluten intolerance, milk or other sensitivities, diabetes, or high blood pressure, who require specialised meals will seek your services. This book will not teach you how to cook, although there are some sample menus. What you will learn is all the aspects of starting your business, pricing your products, marketing your business, and conducting your day-to-day business operations. This comprehensive book will show you step-by-step how to set up, operate, and manage a financially successful personal chef business. The author has left no stone unturned in explaining the risky business of food service. The book covers the entire process of a personal chef business from start-up to ongoing management in an easy to understand way, pointing out methods to increase your chances of success and showing you how to avoid the common mistakes that can doom a start-up. The companion CD-ROM contains all the forms used in the book in PDF format for easy use, as well as a detailed business plan, which will help you precisely define your business, identify your goals, and serve as your firm's résumé. The basic components include a current and pro forma balance sheet, an income statement, and a cash flow analysis. While providing detailed instructions and examples, the author leads you through finding a location that will bring success (in your home or a rented kitchen), managing and training employees, accounting and bookkeeping procedures, auditing, successful budgeting, and profit planning development, as well as thousands of great tips and useful guidelines. You also will learn how to draw up a winning business plan, how to set up computer systems to save time and money, how to hire and keep a qualified staff, how to generate high profile public relations, and how to keep bringing customers back. In addition, you will become familiar with basic cost control systems, profitable menu planning, successful kitchen management, equipment layout and planning, food safety and Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP), low cost marketing ideas, and low and no cost ways to satisfy customers and build sales. This book covers everything that many companies pay consultants thousands of dollars for. PCRs, as those in the business are nicknamed, will appreciate this valuable resource and reference it in their daily activities as a source for ready-to-use forms, Web sites, operating and cost cutting ideas, and mathematical formulas that can be easily applied to their operations.

Accompanying CD-ROM contains all the forms, over 475, available in the book in pdf format, and can be customized and printed.

Book & CD-ROM. Ask any manager today and they will say their biggest concern is the competition for talented, good employees. The business costs and impact of employee turnover can be grouped into four major categories: costs resulting from a person leaving, hiring costs, training costs and lost productivity costs. The estimated cost to replace an employee is at least 150 percent of the person's base salary. As you can see, managers must learn to hire, train and keep your employees highly motivated. This book will help you to learn the fundamentals of sound hiring, how to identify high-performance candidates and how to spot evasions. You will learn to create a workplace full of self-motivated employees who are highly purpose-driven. The book contains a wide assortment of carefully worded questions that help to make the process more effective. Innovative step-by-step descriptions of how to recruit, interview, hire, train and keep the best people for every position in your organisation. This book is filled to the brim with innovative and fun training ideas (that cost little or nothing) and ideas for increasing employee involvement and enthusiasm. When you get your employees involved and enthused, you will keep them interested and working with you, not against you. With the help of this book, get started today on building your workplace into one that inspires employees to do excellent work because they really want to!