I have some experience. Things you need to look at
- Creating a business
- Leasing a space
- acquiring a liquor license
- renovating and branding a venue.
You figure those out and you are well on your way. Your best bet would be to either buy an old bar that's going out of business or may have been out of business for a while and renovate it because that way you can use that liquor license.
A simple business organization like an LLC should suffice to shield you from liability so long as it's properly funded and your paperwork is right.
As far as renovations, whatever your estimate is...double it. Make sure to account for the outside, inside, furniture, bar equipment, audio/video (don't go cheap here, this is very important). Also, you need to decide if this place will have any type of food service. A small fryer and range can go a long way as far as happy hours, sporting events, etc even if it's a limited time thing (food only served Open until 10PM or whatever).
After you get it up and running, it's all about running the operation smoothly to account for weaker and slower nights/weekends.
The way we did it was something like this, there are 52 weeks in a year. With Howard, Mason, Gtown, GW, and UMD, we know we're feasting all those weeks from when school starts until new year's then it generally slows down until graduation and summer day parties from memorial day to July 4th and then it slows down again until school starts. So we look at it in a way where we look to make our yearly revenue in about 30 of those weeks. The other 22 weeks where the venue slows down, we look to offset that loss with the other weeks gains and also try to bring in special events/private events to make some money.
If you have more questions, feel free to ask here or DM and I'll get back to you when I can.
ok fam first lets see if i can acutally get this idea of mine off the ground first
