Thinking Differently Before You Act: Why I Advised a Client Not to Open a Restaurant
In my experience, one of the most important questions in business is not “What can we open?”
It is:
What is the smarter commercial position to take?
2 decades ago, I worked with a client who was interested in entering the food and beverage space.
His initial thinking was familiar: open a restaurant, eatery, or possibly a high-end grocery concept. On the surface, the idea made sense. Food is a large market. Consumers are always eating. Premium food concepts can look attractive from the outside. A well-designed restaurant or gourmet retail outlet can feel exciting, visible, and aspirational.
But visibility is not the same as viability.
Before encouraging him to proceed, I took a step back and looked at the situation more carefully.
The F&B market was already crowded. Restaurants were competing not only on food quality, but also on location, rent, manpower, concept, pricing, service, customer experience, repeat visits, reviews, and marketing. A high-end grocery store would face a different but equally difficult set of challenges: inventory risk, perishability, rental costs, footfall dependency, price sensitivity, and the need to constantly attract customers into a physical space.
The more I examined the situation, the clearer it became that opening another consumer-facing outlet would place the business directly into a highly competitive and operationally demanding environment.
At the time, the food supply business in Singapore wasn't as well developed as it is today, and there was sufficient room for a specialist boutique quality food supplier.
That was the visible opportunity.
But the deeper question was:
Was this the best way for him to enter the market?
Instead of asking, “What restaurant should he open?”, I asked a different question:
Who else in the F&B ecosystem needs supply, quality, consistency, and differentiation?
That shift changed the direction of the recommendation.
Rather than opening his own restaurant, grocery store, or eatery, I advised him to consider a food supply business instead. The idea was to supply quality meat and dairy products, including cheese and other products from Australia, to other restaurant businesses that were already operating in the market.
This was a very different commercial position.
Instead of becoming one more restaurant competing for diners, he could become a supplier to multiple restaurants, hotels, grocers, cafés, caterers, and food businesses.
Instead of depending on one location, one menu, and one set of daily customers, he could build relationships across many operators.
Instead of carrying the full operational burden of running a restaurant, he could focus on sourcing, supply reliability, product quality, pricing, logistics, and business-to-business relationships. His strength was that he already had strong ties with dairy and meat suppliers overseas, so why not play to his strengths?
That did not make the business easy. Food supply has its own challenges: cold chain, import requirements, quality control, working capital, credit terms, delivery consistency, and customer trust. But strategically, it offered a different route into the same market. It allowed him to participate in the F&B economy without fighting the same battle as every restaurant operator.
This is where planning ahead matters.
Many entrepreneurs begin with the most visible version of an opportunity. They see restaurants, cafés, retail shops, lifestyle concepts, or consumer-facing brands, and they assume that is where the opportunity is. But in many industries, the better opportunity may sit behind the visible market.
The business that serves the businesses can sometimes have a clearer path than the business trying to serve every end consumer directly.
That was the point I wanted the client to understand.
Opening a restaurant is not just about food. It is about rent, manpower, service consistency, branding, pricing, marketing, reviews, customer retention, and daily execution. A restaurant can be full on opening week and still struggle months later if the economics are weak. A high-end grocery store can look premium and still suffer if footfall, basket size, wastage, and repeat purchase do not work.
Before committing capital, the business needed a sharper strategic view.
The recommendation was not simply “do not open a restaurant.”
It was:
Do not enter the market in the same way everyone else is entering it.
And Think differently before you act.
Look at the whole value chain.Look at where demand already exists. Look at where competitors are crowded.Look at where your strengths can create leverage. Look at whether you are building a business or just opening a location.
That is the difference between activity and strategy.
Activity says: “Let’s open something.”
Strategy asks: “Where is the strongest position to play?”
In this case, the stronger position was not another outlet. It was a supply business that could serve multiple outlets. It was a shift from being one more player in a crowded consumer-facing space to becoming part of the infrastructure behind the market.
This is the kind of thinking I believe more business owners need before they commit resources.
The most obvious business idea is not always the best business model.
The most visible opportunity is not always the most viable one.
And the most exciting concept is not always the strongest commercial position.
Before starting, expanding, hiring, investing, or launching, business owners need to pause and ask better questions. What market are we really entering? Who are we competing against? Where is the pressure? Where is the margin? Where is the demand? Where can we create advantage instead of simply copying what already exists?
Planning is not about slowing down ambition.
Good planning protects ambition from being wasted in the wrong direction.
That client’s situation remains a useful reminder: sometimes the smartest business decision is not to do the obvious thing. Sometimes the real opportunity appears only after you step back, study the market, and think differently from your competitors.
Because activity is not strategy.
And before you act, you need clarity.
Disclaimer:This article is based on past strategic advisory experience and is shared for professional commentary, portfolio, and thought-leadership purposes only. Certain details may be generalized or anonymized to protect client confidentiality. Any business observations expressed are contextual and should not be taken as universal advice. This article does not imply any current engagement, endorsement, or representation of any past client, supplier, company, or brand mentioned or implied.
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