Ion Aimers, the big cheese at The Works Gourmet Burger Bistro. (Darren Brown, OBJ)

A report by the Cornell University Center for Hospitality Research shows that more than 60 per cent of restaurants close or change ownership within their first three years of business. Restaurant owners are at the whim of changing consumer tastes, food scares such as mad cow disease, and a volatile tourism industry.

It all makes for a very challenging career choice with few big success stories. One success story is Ion Aimers' gourmet burger restaurant chain, The Works. Since opening up his first factory/warehouse-themed location on Beechwood Avenue six years ago, Mr. Aimers has expanded to five locations across the city. Surprisingly, this winner of OBJ's Fastest Growing Company program two years in a row, and one of Ottawa HR magazine's Employers of Distinction, said he doesn't have formal training in the restaurant business.

OBJ: How did you decide to get into the restaurant industry?

AIMERS: I've always been in the restaurant industry and my dad always asked me when I was going to get out of it. I don't have formal training, but it's all I've ever done and I'm passionate about it. I have never been involved in fine dining and I've never been involved in fast food. I've always felt part of casual dining – which is the $15-to-$20 per person segment – didn't necessarily mean taking things out of the freezer and putting them into the fryer. That's how the lower-end casual dining market is known in the industry: freezer to fryer. What we try to do at The Works is not rocket science, we do it fresh and we present it in an interesting manner with wacky toppings and good stories behind them. It's really about concept.

OBJ: So what is your concept? What makes it so different?

AIMERS: The concept is the food, which is a gourmet line of burgers done fresh. The second idea is small, intimate, locations, 70 seats or under, and in the heart of residential communities.

The decor and the menu itself reflect a lot of my own personality. As the staff have gotten to know me, they realize each burger has a story and I am happy to share that story with the staff and they can share it with the guests. The decor is not just random. I'm sure an interior designer would have a lot of issues with the decor, but we have fun with it. There's toys from when I was a kid in the wall, we recycle a lot of things, so we use a lot of things we find when we go into existing buildings.

OBJ: Why do you think you've been so successful when so many others have failed in the restaurant industry?

AIMERS: I think people use the restaurant industry as a fall-back position at times and don't take it seriously. I didn't just think one day, "I'm going to open a restaurant." I had this idea in my head for 20 years.

Within three to six months (of opening the first location) I knew that we had something. I was a server in that restaurant and I looked out one Saturday night and saw at least 20 people waiting outside the door at minus 30 (degree weather). I was very flattered and brought them out some onion ring towers. That was a moment.

OBJ: How did you get financing to start your first restaurant?

AIMERS: I did what I thought was most important when you're testing a new business: I built it on pennies and nickels and dimes. I scrimped by buying used equipment, and did a lot of the work myself. I brought in a financial partner and he helped me at first. Even though we had to replace a lot of the equipment in the first store, what mattered was getting it open and seeing if it worked, like the feeling that I got that night looking out the door and seeing the 20 people out there.

We didn't get bank financing until we opened our fourth store. Not because we didn't want to, but because we didn't need to. But we have opened two stores this year and we have bank financing. They were banging down our door to give us money. It's only difficult to get financing in this industry when you make it look like they shouldn't give it to you. Once you have reached a certain point and operated with a certain amount of responsibility, the banks will look at you positively.

OBJ: You said you didn't have formal training, how did you write your business plan?

AIMERS: I am a really tenacious person. I just wrote it. Our best business plan is our menu. Quite honestly, I don't even know if I still have that business plan around. I'm sure that if we went back to it, besides a couple of spreadsheets and some lines that describe my vision, most of it was menu. Our menu is our marketing tool and it was a major part of the business.

I think a person like a banker or an accountant who has been brought up to read statistics and numbers, they are hard to sway. But when you put a really passionate person in front of them ... Do you ever watch that show Dragon's Den? Have you ever noticed that those guys often turn people down based on that person's ability to sell their idea rather than how good the idea is? They don't feel a good idea can be driven by a poorly prepared person. I'm lucky; I got the ability to be passionate about what I'm doing from one of my parents.

OBJ: How is your business going?

AIMERS: Our sales go up every year, not just based on growth, but on same store sales, usually about 10 to 15 per cent per year. Ottawa has been fantastic to us. We just opened our Orleans location and with it I opened a new concept restaurant called Roost where we serve maple-smoked rotisserie chicken ... we imported this big smoker from Memphis. It's a real complement to The Works.

THE EXPERTS SAY

When you're looking to expand your business, it's about the people, the process and then having the financial resources to do it. From the people side of it, if you're a small business owner operating the business day to day, you need to have a person in place in your existing business who can manage it and run it. So when you expand, you will have an additional cost of promoting that person to a management role if you haven't already. But then there are the things that go along with having someone else running your baby. You need to learn how to delegate and you need to be able to make decisions (from afar) and give yes and no answers.

That leads into the process and controls. Just because you've hired someone, that doesn't mean that you're going to trust them with the bank account. Good financial and sound management means you have other controls in place to check up on that. In that sense, you have to make sure that the manager is not doing everything that you did, you have to have those checks and balances in place. The only person you can really trust is yourself.

That leads into the finances. A lot of small businesses are hesitant, and rightly so, about borrowing more cash. When you expand, you want to make sure that you have a proven track record with your first instance.

Karen Jerome, small business expert, Padgett Business Services

About 59 per cent of all Ontario restaurant owners are independent. A lot of what people don't consider is that the vast majority of chain restaurants are owned and operated by independent or local entrepreneurs, so the number is actually higher than 59 per cent.

There are three main challenges for restaurant owners, the first one being the high cost of doing business. It is constantly increasing, whether it be rising costs for labour, utilities or insurance. A good example of this is the recent minimum wage increase in Ontario. Small businesses are already operating on razor-thin operating budgets. For the restaurant industry as an example, the average profit margin for an independent food operator is only 2.9 per cent of overall operating revenue.

A second challenge would be a threat of tax increases. In the City of Toronto right now they have the ability to increase taxes. Any type of tax increase affects small businesses. For every one-per-cent increase in disposable income, the industry experienced a one-per-cent increase in sales. The same works in reverse.

The third challenge is the demand for employees. Ontario is already starting to feel the effects of a labour shortage so that is going to be a challenge in the years to come. In food services the demand for employees is expected to increase 23 per cent over the next 10 years.

Elaine Flis, VP for Ontario, the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association