This spring and summer Boston and Cape Cod will be overrun by tourists - by Dennis Serpone

For 46 years I’ve watched the transitions of the seasons spring to summer, to fall to winter, back to spring. Looking back, certain things become evident. Being a chronic entrepreneur, I can honestly say that for most people the food and beverage industry can be the easiest, most rewarding road to success…both financially and personal accomplishment. Seventy-five percent of all small businesses are food and liquor related…seventy-five percent. Every street corner, every highway, every shopping center…no matter where you go, you’ll find a food or beverage business manned by average hardworking folk, owned by risk-taking average family types. Then you have a layer of entrepreneurs who band together and form management or venture capital companies to move your concept to a higher level.

The food and beverage industry is one of the only careers where you don’t have to go to college, where, instead of paying for an education, ‘the teacher/school’ pays you to learn.

If you go through grammar and high school and you find that you have an aptitude for science or medicine, then the obvious path is college, but if there’s no clear cut road to follow working in a restaurant might be a first step to a solid future. If you interview any of the CEOs of major fast food or dinner house chains, you’ll mostly likely hear the same story. They started in the kitchen cooking on the line, worked their way up to kitchen manager, left that job to be assistant manager, which led to a management position. Later on, the opportunity came along and they bought a restaurant. “I ran my restaurant successfully for a number of years, eventually partnering up with a friend and opened several more. Now, after 38 years and six terrific restaurants, we’re selling out. The National Restaurant Exchange has found us a buyer, and while we’re still fairly young, my partner and I will be splitting our time between Boston and Jupiter, Fla. I have one son who is an Air Force pilot and daughter who is a nurse. My partner’s three children are all in the restaurant business…two are partners in a very busy breakfast/lunch in the financial district and his son owns a pub on the Cape.”

If you’re the average working person, for the most part, half of your pay is going to taxes and miscellaneous deductions and fees that you can’t control. Most people, even executives aren’t living ‘the golden life’. However, see if you can pick out the owner of a successful, busy restaurant. He’s either not there or in his office doing some paperwork. In some cases, he’s the disheveled older man with the apron helping putting orders together in the kitchen. In both cases, these owners have an average net income of $100,000 to $500,000 per year, drive Mercedes, have a beautiful home, and typically don’t die from stress overload. When you work in the corporate world, ‘the man’ can end your job, your career overnight, in an instant…not so when YOU’RE THE BOSS. You control your success, you control your future.

I think that we can all feel a sense of uneasiness with the war in Iran. But this summer, celebrating our 250^th birthday, Boston and Cape Cod should be overrun with tourists. The biggest problem facing operators is finding good help. The legislators approved to bring back Happy Hours a couple of years ago, but the industry is still waiting while sports betting is huge everywhere. Restaurant eating habits are changing. Sports bars, Irish pubs seem to be somewhat static, and full-service dinner houses are seeing the activity slide back from 8 :00 pm to 6:00 pm.

Ethnic restaurants are exploding. Without getting into the politics, there’s a robust growth happening all around Boston. In almost all categories of fast food, the growth has been substantial. Fueled by online ordering and delivery by Uber, Doordash, and GrubHub, a lot of people ‘order-in’.

This spring and summer should be huge for our industry, but the casual dining and full service restaurants can’t make money if their patrons are going home at 8 o’clock. So the successful operators have to come up with that ‘COMPETIVE ADVANTAGE’…the reason that customers will stay for that extra drink or dessert.

Is it music, comedy, tableside magic, or wine tasting that will keep them there?

Dennis Serpone is founder of the National Restaurant Exchange, Wakefield, Mass.