Improving your restaurant using Bartercard
Welcome back to our series on La Scala Restaurant. This week the owner Gabriele Saccardo, talks to us about how he used Bartercard to extend and renovate his restaurant, located in the heart of Canberra.
"Hello and welcome back, today I will tell you a little about how I used Bartercard to keep the restaurant clean and fresh and how I used the Bartercard interest free line of credit to extend and renovate my restaurant.
Our restaurant is situated on a very busy road, right in the heart of the city. It’s a great location with a big shopping precinct right across the road. To attract extra foot traffic we use our trade dollars to constantly update our signage to promote our different offers and keep our neons in good working order. Our restaurant is also cleaned 3 times a week, we get our pest control done and our window cleaning, all using our Bartercard trade dollars.
About a year ago we had a funny situation, or should I say an opportunity, when the shop next to us became vacant. It was a bookshop that was closing down and we discovered it was going to become a tattoo parlour! We realised that this would not be good for our business, so we took it over. At the time we didn’t have the money to make it join our restaurant, so we tapped into our Bartercard interest free line of credit. It cost $90,000 in total and we did it all on Bartercard, not a single cent of cash.
We installed parquetry floors, got all the electrics done, plastering, painting, bought new tables and chairs, installed a stain glass, built a bar...the whole lot!
By having this extra room we have been able to increase our capacity and in turn increase our revenue. We can use it for private functions or just open it up to make the restaurant bigger. To this day it is affectionately known as the “Bartercard room.” It attracts a vast array of clients and is used all the time by the Liberal Party for lunches.
In the future we plan to use Bartercard and the interest free line of credit to buy new chairs for the rest of the restaurant, re-do all the electrical and give it a little TLC by doing a bit of a renovation.
Bartercard are currently running a promotion to all business owners offering a $10,000 interest free line of credit. The offer ends 31st October 2013. These opportunities don’t come along all that often.
Click here to access the offer www.interestfreeforbusiness.com.au
www.bartercard.com.au/hospitality
17th October 2013
