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Finding a Manager whilst living in Britain for a year


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We are thinking of buying a restaurant as a going concern in France, but would not be ready to settle there full-time until 2007.

It would be nice to find a manager for 6 months between april to october next year, but are unsure whether this would be easy, whether we could trust somebody not to diddle us and how easy the tax system is there, while living in the UK.

Anyone got any advice on this?

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Salut Monsieur Lélan

I am taking it that you will be running your restaurant yourself after 6 months, that you can speak French and have worked in a restaurant either front of house or in the kitchen before as working in a restaurant is no mean feat 16 hours a day and perhaps 7 days a week dealing with demanding customers some pleasant and some very unpleasant!!

Employing staff in France is very expensive and if you were not running the restaurant yourself you would not only need to employ a manager but chefs, waitresses/waiters and a washer up/plongeur.. The social charges on top of a salary can amount to up to 50% extra on your salary costs.Plus it is extremely difficult to dismiss people in France although there are two types of contract a CDD which has a time frame and used for seasonal/temporary workers or a CDI, which is a contract virtually impossible to get out of and used for workers without a set time frame ---indertermine..Hours are specified by law with the 35 hourweek which could double your workforce requirements. You will also need a good accountant and a person to complete french payslips/salaries as some accountants will not touch salary work as it is too complicated ... french payslips are huge.

You will need to take into account the location of your restaurant is it seasonal or all year trade .. most restaurants are busier in summer than in winter unless you are in a skiing resort.

As for will you be diddled who knows?? You may not be but, if you are not there then you are leaving yourself wide open to anything and what is something goes wrong will you be able to leave England and dash across to deal with issues as they arise??

Needless to say a lot of thought needs to go into what you are doing.

A book I found to be very enlightening is STARTING A BUSINESS IN FRANCE by Andre de Vries I suggest you read that as it is full of useful information...

Please do lots of research it will pay dividends in the end and always remember no one will work as hard for you as you will yourself

I wish you all the best in your venture

Cheers

Barry

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Thanks Bizzer. I have already the book you mention. I have advertised elsewhere on the site for people who may be interested in running such an operation.

The place we are considering is fairly small operation (the current owners are the chefs, as it's a creperie, and they employ 6 staff every summer, probably on CDD contracts).

We really love the place, but probably wisdom dictates we should wait until "Nous sommes prêt à s'installer" in 2007.

 

Jon

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Wise move to wait I think. Aside from the hassle of finding a manager, you'd then have the problem that he'd be imposing his ideas and then later on you'd be imposing yours ie you'd have two "under new management" periods which isn't good for maintaining a customer base.

 

Arnold

 

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Thanks to all.

What do you think the risks would be to mothballing the place for a year? Catastrophic for the goodwill built up by existing clientele, or is loyalty so fickle that we could restart the year after and quickly regain trade?

 It's a small village, so it probably would be noticed if it shut down. We are having to be raelly pragmatic here, as the place is a dream, which is always dangerous, as we need to remain objective.

Maybe we should wait. Do a lot of plaves come on the market regularly?

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Don't even think of closing and attempting to reopen if there is any way to avoid that. Two owners back our place was a flourishing restaurant, last owner closed that down and a year down the line we still haven't regained the "local" market (in our case the catchment area was quite wide - at least 25km around - and therefore difficult to target). By contrast, friends of ours with a broadly similar place which never closed the restaurant have a very regular trade.

However, it might be different for you. It really depends on where the place gets the trade from. If it needs to pull from a wide area as ours did then definitely don't close. If the market is largely confined to the village then it might not be a problem (assuming that the locals don't get into the habit of going somewhere else in the meantime). If it's mainly tourist trade then watch that you don't alienate them by leaving the "open for business" signs up all over the place; hard to avoid really as French owned places tend to distribute brochures far and wide which you can't really recall and there may be guidebooks that you're listed in.

When we were looking for this place we had a broad range of places that we were considering broadly from standalone restaurants through to hotel/restaurants. There are loads of such places on the market all the time (except, possibly, in the high season) all over France. We have a look ourselves now and again (we gotta stop looking!) and in the last month or two we've seen four or five places that would fall in the above range and that's without really looking hard.

It really depends on what you're looking for. If it's a very specific type of place in a specific area of France then you could wait a long time for your ideal place to appear. On the other hand if you say that you're looking for "a 10-20 room hotel/restaurant in the south of France" (as we did), then you'll find a fair number of places quite regularly (with that broad definition, our limiting factors were money and time to look at specific places rather than the availability). Even just casually looking in the windows of estate agents we still see properties that fit our "ideal" every time that we look.

You may find that you need to move quite quickly if you do happen across somewhere that's "ideal" for you. We found that all but one place we'd chosen to see was sold when we returned to France less than three weeks later. This place (www.mascamps.com) never made it into either brochures or onto the net and was listed with our agent between the time we flew out and when we'd arrange to see her just a few days later; it sold within the week!

If it were up to me, and it was definitely impossible to move over right now, I'd be inclined to wait and look again when I was ready to move.

 

Arnold

 

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Yes Arnold I agree entirely with your advice...

Don't buy it and then close it as the goodwill will evaporate very quickly and take an absolute age to get back it sometimes never comes back.

Wait until you are ready to buy and move. We were tempted many times during our many searches.. in fact I was devastated when one property sold just as we arrived at the agency....everything we had seen on the web had gone months previously.

We eventually went to a village (we were going to cancel the appointment) where we met a great guy and he showed us lots of potential places all of them matched our wish list...

We did not buy any of them and left to look another day. One month later an e mail arrived with a pic (the only agent out of 9 to keep in touch)--- hated it, went over to look at some more properties and the pic we hated was the place we bought( pic was taken of the rear of the property) it had absolutely nothing on our wish list... no garden no well, few neighbours but we loved the building ... it was as if it chose us (strange I know) we love it...

Please wait until you are sure... is it a line of work you want to follow (working for yourself)or do you just want to invest in a restaurant and run it from a distance even when living in France?

Just food for thought

Cheers

Barry

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I'll echo Barry's experience with agents. We put a lot of work into producing a short specification of the type of property we wanted and what type of region we wanted it in yet out of perhaps a dozen or so agents that we spoke to, only two read it (net effect: a lot of time wasted seeing places that were of no interest). One of those was lucky enough to have this place on her books, the other had a fair number of places that were almost what we wanted, but not quite there.

Same here with the photos too. Many places look either ideal or awful depending on how much trouble people have gone to in taking the photos. If a place broadly meets your requirements go and see it for yourself.

 

Arnold

 

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Well, we bit the bullet and informed the agent that the place had arrived 12 months too early for us. If they were able to find a trustworthy custodian for a year, maybe we could be persuaded, but I doubt it.

If it is still available in 12 months, who knows???

Assuming we restart our searching in 12-15 months, can anyone recommend either:-

1) an inxpensive region with easy flight access to UK (generally south-ish, we were looking in Vendee, but any up and coming regions would be worthwhile). We discounted brittany and normandie as being too similar to the UK for weather. I know south east and dordogne areas are already full of ex-pats and expensive.

and/or

2) A decent Immo commerciaux on a national level that can be trusted to have property available? I too have heard elswhere of problems with immos on normal housing that have property on their sites which have been sold for months (not always their fault I know due to vendors flgging their house via anyone who'll take them) - I didn't realise the probelm was just as fraught with businesses.

I always finf it fascinating to hear of experiences of people who have done it.

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