Many buyers approach us asking for the best restaurants for sale in our inventory of hundreds of business opportunities.  It’s always a struggle to explain that the best opportunity for one person may be the absolute worst for someone else.

What defines the best restaurant for sale?  Is it top line sales?  For some buyers, that’s the most important criteria.   For other buyers, they don’t care about sales as long as the profitability hits their internal threshold for success.  Some buyers will tell us they just want a business with “six figure earnings” and it doesn’t really matter what it is.  We’ve been restaurant brokers long enough to know they don’t really mean that. 

The reality is that the “best restaurant for sale” is the one that’s right for you and your family.  It will be the business that fits your income needs as well as your lifestyle and the quality of life you want for yourself.  After years of working with restaurant buyers, we developed a tool called the Restaurant Assessment Tool that helps buyers decide exactly what is driving their decision to buy a restaurant and from that, determine the best restaurant for them.

Our tool asks you to answer a series of ten short questions and from that, we can help you find the best restaurant.  For most people, buying a restaurant is a lifestyle decision.  Working late nights and arriving home at 4 AM after the bar closes won't be the best choice for someone with a family waking up at 6:30 AM and getting ready for the school bus.  On the other hand, a highly social individual who loves talking to customers may not enjoy a catering business that is focused on delivery but may be right at home in a dining room interacting with their favorite customers. 

If you download the We Sell Restaurants Restaurant Assessment Tool at this link, you can answer three important questions to help you find the best restaurant for sale based on your lifestyle choices. The questions we want you to consider and answer from this exercise are:

• What type of restaurant am I looking for?
• What type of restaurant delivers what I need for myself and my family?
• What am I willing to sacrifice to obtain this restaurant in terms of money, time and lifestyle?

Some of the items you have to consider when finding the best restaurant for sale for your individual situation include not only what the earnings will be but whether the business is financeable.  Not everyone has the full purchase price in the bank and will require lending.  If you do want a loan, how much debt are you comfortable taking on?  For some buyers, the amount of risk associated with lending can be a reason a business that fits every other criteria is not the best one for them to buy.

Understanding where the business is located in relation to your home is also an important consideration.  Most of our restaurant buyers are not young people who are mobile and have the ability to easily relocation.  Our average buyer is mature and has a family and thus significant responsibilities.  For that reason, even if we find their ideal opportunity and everything about it says it’s the best restaurant for them, it will never fit their needs if the commute to the business is more than an hour in each direction.

The bottom line when buying any business, is that is’ a personal decision and a lifestyle choice.  The best restaurant for one person will be the absolutely wrong choice for another. Spend plenty of time in your search and try our Assessment Tool before making a decision on the best restaurant for you to buy.  

Want to check out our restaurants for sale?  Visit this link.