TRAINING
If you’re thinking of opening a fast-casual restaurant and you’re coming from a background in another career, you might be wondering if you have the skills needed to run a Baja Fresh. While having a background in restaurant work is beneficial, our franchisees don’t need to come from any particular career field.
We’ve developed a comprehensive training program that’s designed to get all of our franchisees up-to-speed on how to run one of our fast-casual restaurants, regardless of their background. You’ll spend six to eight weeks in training if you plan on running a traditional location, and only four to five weeks if you’re opening an Express location! Let’s take a closer look at a few key components in the Baja Fresh training program.
Initial Training
Your initial training is where you’ll learn all the information you’ll need to operate a Baja Fresh fast-casual restaurant. You’ll visit our headquarters at the Kahala Training and Education Center where you’ll learn through a combination of classroom and hands-on programs. You’ll have five to eight weeks (depending on your restaurant concept) of training in an approved Baja Fresh restaurant working with a certified trainer. This gives you the opportunity to learn while applying your new skills. In your initial training, you’ll learn how to manage tasks such as managing inventory, employee schedules, food preparation, and more!
Best of all, we’ll work with you right in your own location to help you and your staff apply what you learned in your initial training to your own restaurant. Running a fast-casual restaurant can feel overwhelming to newcomers, and we want you to be able to run your location with confidence. That’s why our experts will be right there with you, helping you to hit the ground running.
Ongoing Training
Ongoing training and professional development is key for any business owner. At Baja Fresh, we help you stay on top of the latest developments in our business while also providing you with regular feedback. We’ll check in on you every month as you get your restaurant off the ground, giving you the opportunity to chat with us about your performance and your goals. We also make ourselves available to you by phone or email if you encounter obstacles or questions while you’re running your business.
Franchisee Support
Another key aspect of the resources we provide is our franchisee support program. This is different from training, but we think of it as supplemental resources to ensure that all of our training stays with you and that you’re able to apply what you’ve learned consistently throughout the life of your business.
In a way, the support can often act as an extension of or refresher to your training. Take marketing assistance, for example, which is something we’ll cover in training but can be hard to apply once you’re on your own if you’ve never done it before. As a Baja Fresh franchisee, you can simply pick up the phone and ask for ideas, samples, or a history of franchisees in similar situations and what they’ve done to succeed in the past.
Speaking of fellow franchisees, we encourage our franchisees to use each other as resources – everyone has a different perspective, and who better to ask for advice than someone who has been in your shoes and is thriving? We look at this like a “peer training,” and though there’s nothing formal about it and there are no requirements for any franchisees to help out, we’ve found that at Baja Fresh, we’re a family of like-minded people who enjoy helping others find the same success we have.
Want More Information?
These are just a few of the key components in the Baja Fresh training program. As you can see, it’s important to us that our franchisees have the skills they need to smoothly run their fast-casual restaurant. Whether you have a background in the restaurant industry, the corporate world, or something entirely different, we believe that our training program can give you the skills you need to jump into your new career as a Baja Fresh franchise owner.
If you are a service provider or real estate representative, please email franchising@kahalamgmt.com
