I was watching America’s Next Great Restaurant over the weekend. It’s a reality TV series wherein the contestants are trying to pitch their restaurant ideas to a panel of investors. The prize is to open three restaurant locations across the country, so the key is grabbing the interest of the investors (who serve as the judges) and showing them that your restaurant concept is viable, profitable, and sustainable.

The challenge on this most recent episode was to create a food truck with a menu that would work on the streets of Los Angeles. The food truck should also be profitable. One of the contestants, however, was at a loss for words when asked about the food cost for each individual portion. One of the judges then asked how he could possibly know how to price his plate when he does not know how much it costs to put that food on that plate.

In the context of running a restaurant, food costs are usually about 20-30% of the final menu price. In the context of other kinds of businesses, the equivalent costs can be different. Either way, though, it is of paramount importance to have a firm grasp on your operating costs, your business expenses, and the other related costs that go into making a product or service available to your customer.

Yes, keep an eye on your bottom line. Yes, be mindful of how you price your products and how you increase revenue. But, you have to realize that the bottom line consists of both revenue and expenses. Without a firm understanding of the latter, it is impossible to run a successful business over the long haul.

Most people would agree that any business, regardless of size, should have some sort of presence on the web. In general, it is best to have a website with your own domain and your own hosting, because this helps to legitimize your company in the eyes of consumers.

While there are certainly some smaller businesses that are willing to accept “free” websites under subdomains, this does not give off the same sense of professionalism has having your own domain. That said, some people may be intimidated by the prospect of designing and maintaining a full website.

And that’s where a .tel domain might be worth considering. Unlike conventional top-level domains (TLD), a .tel domain does not need conventional hosting and it is completely operated by Telnic. It comes with a default design that can be filled with basic contact information and other links.

This can prove useful to some businesses, but it should not be your only online presence on the web. The .tel website can be used to house basic contact information, but anything more comprehensive should be handled with a more conventional domain (like .com or .net) with more conventional hosting.

It’s far too easy to develop tunnel vision when thinking about how your business is perceived by the public. It’s easy to focus solely on your own website, your own Facebook page, and your own Twitter account. However, you have a much bigger reach than that.

For instance, it is very important that you take a look at your business listing in Google Maps. When someone looks you up by business name, Google provides a “more info” page complete with address, phone number, category, description, photos, reviews, and more. It is up to you to make sure that this information stays up to date.

When you arrive on the page for your business, you’ll notice a link near the top with “Business owner?” as the anchor text. Click on this and you will go through a verification process to demonstrate that you indeed own that business. After that, you can edit information as needed.

Similarly, you should pay attention to other areas where your business may be listed like the online yellow pages, Yelp, UrbanSpoon, and so on. People aren’t going to come to you if they can’t find you.

No matter what kind of business you run, you can’t possibly be all things to all people. You also can’t satisfy every last customer that walks through your door, whether that door is physical or virtual. You should aim for customer satisfaction, but you should also realize that perfection is impossible.

As such, as your business continues to grow, you will inevitably come across people who are less than pleased with what they got. You may get negative reviews through Twitter, blogs, Urbanspoon, Yelp, forums, and any number of other online venues.

If the negative reviews become a trend, you should most definitely get into “damage control” mode and see what you can do to make things better. However, if the majority of reviews are positive, you have to be careful not to feed the trolls.

There are going to be people who will never be satisfied. There are going to be people who raise trouble for the sake of raising trouble (or to draw attention to themselves). Accept that and move on. The trolls are not worth your time.

I think we’d all agree that just about any restaurant, regardless of size, can likely benefit from having a website. This is true of big brand name chains, as well as smaller mom-and-pop diners. However, you’ll find that not all restaurant websites are made alike.

In my journeys through the Internet, I’ve come across more than a few common concerns that seem to be pop up with restaurant websites. For instance, some sites may have the physical address of the restaurant as an image, possibly because they want to use a special design or font.

The problem with this is that customers are not able to copy and paste this text into a tool like Google Maps to find the location of the restaurant. This is just as much of a problem with Flash-based sites, because the text may not always be available to highlight for this purpose.

“But I already have a map on the site.” That may be true, but people may want to enter the address to get specific directions, to enter into a list of restaurants to visit, or any number of other reasons. So, make sure the text can be highlighted. You do want customers to be able to find you, right?

When the harmonized sales tax (HST) was introduced in Ontario and British Columbia last year, many entrepreneurs and small business hours were confused about the new rules. The confusion lay not only in what tax applied to what kind of products and services, but also how to charge out of province customers when it came to the sales tax.

Those concerns have been mostly addressed, but now we are in the midst of another set of confusion. After charging the appropriate tax rate for the appropriate customers, how do you go about remitting these collected sales taxes back to the government. The quick method of accounting is supposed to simplify the process, but the introduction of HST has complicated it once more.

Essentially, you need to separate your customer receipts in terms of the tax rate that you charged them. For instance, if you are a BC-based business, your BC-based customers are charged 12% HST while you Alberta-based customers are charged 5% GST. You need to keep them separate and calculate the remittance rates accordingly.

These rates can be found on the Canada Revenue Agency website. In the past, you could clump together all of your (Canadian) clients and largely work with a single remittance rate. If you have customers in multiple provinces with multiple rates, you will now need to calculate them separately, but still remit all of your collected sales taxes at the same time.