Most restaurant dreams are profitable right up until somebody puts numbers on them.

That is usually the moment I enter the picture.

My job - or at least the one that rests somewhere inside quotation marks - is to take ideas and make them happen. That is still the fun part for me. Somebody walks into a room with a dream, a sketch on a napkin, a menu in their head, an empty building they have fallen in love with, or an idea they have been carrying around for years.

They can already see it. They see the dining room full. They hear the noise. They know what the kitchen will smell like. They can picture the sign over the front door and maybe even imagine themselves standing there on opening night while everyone tells them how brilliant the idea was.

Then I start asking questions. How many seats? How many turns? What is the average check? What does the kitchen have to produce? How much electrical capacity is available? Where does the exhaust go? How much refrigeration? How many people? How much payroll before Opening Day? How much inventory? How much working capital? How much money can you actually afford to lose while the restaurant learns how to become the restaurant you imagined?

That is usually where the dream becomes a concept. And, quite frankly, that is where I lose a lot of potential clients.

Because there are no dollar signs in a dream.

Dreams come with beautiful dining rooms, happy guests, wonderful food, loyal employees, perfect reviews, and a grand opening where everything works. Concepts come with budgets. That changes the conversation.

For the people who make it past that point, I have noticed that they usually have one of three things: deep pockets, a rich grandfather, or enough experience in this industry to know that the first estimate is rarely the last one. Sometimes they have all three.

Over the years, I have been involved in opening hotels, restaurants, factories, culinary schools, foodservice operations, kitchens, and other hospitality projects in different parts of the world. They have varied enormously in size, style, budget, and complexity. Every one of them started the same way: with one little spark of imagination.

That spark is important. Without it, nothing gets built. But imagination is only the beginning.