Small Business Financing

We’ve learned a secret that restaurant owners should take advantage of, especially given the relatively high mortality rate of restaurants today.  Take advantage of this long, drawn out recession and make your restaurant a better place.  What we’re talking about is monitoring the pace of equipment sales, going out of business sales, and business for sale by owner (or broker) notices.  You’d be surprised at how easy it is to set up such a system, and take it from me, this is the kind of intelligence you’d wish you had when you started up your restaurant.  But, it is better to start this system up now, than it is to wait.

Now, for some background.

Nearly every single reader who has found this blog entry knows about craigslist, no doubt.  There are many other similar services, as well, but you needn’t stray far to accomplish the goal of major intelligence.  A poll of my friends, however, suggests that the use of so-called RSS feeds is far less well known.  If you put craigslist + RSS feeds together, you can create something akin to a scrolling headline of what’s happening in your industry in various geographies (of your choice), in various restaurant types (of your choice), or for certain thing (equipment sales, or whose restaurant just up for sale).

I was able to put together this this system in about a half an hour.  I spend something like 10 to 15 minutes a day scouring it, but for various reasons I look at this beyond just one geography.

Here is how to do it:

1. Select (and download if necessary) an RSS Reader.  I personally like Feedreader, which is free software that runs on your desktop.   Other alternatives include Google’s RSS Reader.
2. Select geographies you want to track.  Lets say you want to track items in Las Vegas only.  The way RSS Reader works is you set up a New Feed (F3 button) and the make sure the http://lasvegas.craigslist.org/ address is put into the new feed location.
3. Then, using RSS Reader, I set up a Smart Feed, which is basically a keyword filter.  For this example, I chose the word “fryer” in the body and in the title of each post.
4. You should see the software will populate with postings placed by others on the craigslist site in the new feed you just set up.  Also, the Smart Feed should show those posts that include the word “fryer.”

We actually created this smart feed and tracked how many times do people advertise or otherwise mention the word “fryer”, across about 1/3rd of geographies the craigslist covers.  You might wonder what the incidence of the word fryer looks like.  Its shown in this graph.

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