On the Food Network television show "Restaurant Impossible", celebrity chef Robert Irvine takes a failing business and turns it out around in two days on a $10,000 budget.

Unlike other Food Network shows, this one isn't just a food competition. Restaurant Impossible touches on all the aspects of running a business, including hiring, management, service, revenue, and more.

The similarities between restaurants and a startup are incredible.

Starting a restaurant and starting a tech startup seem super glamorous. Everyone dreams of being the boss at their own restaurant, sitting back with a Manhattan while the place runs itself and customers pour in.

And if you read TechCrunch every day, you will get the impression that starting a company is easy. Everyone is raising tons of money and gaining traction.

But that's wrong. It's a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. It doesn't matter how many employees you have. You have to give it 110%.

The most common scenario on "Restaurant Impossible" is when a restaurant that was once thriving has lost its way. The reasons are almost identical to why a startup might fail:

1. The business stops innovating. You can't let this happen. You have to keep changing and evolving. Your comptition will.
2. Employee quality goes down. You might make a mediocre hire, then another, then another. All of a sudden the quality of your team is way down. You need to cut them loose.
3. Your design gets stale. You must always be refreshing and giving customers something new and exciting.
4. The business is not metrics driven. There is no way to scale a company if you aren't looking at metrics. Even restaurants need to understand their "users".
5. Service quality goes down. It's hard to scale this, but it's important to keep overall sentiment and word of mouth positive.
6. The business owner loses motivation. You can't give up. It's up to you to keep pushing forward and keep your team excited.
7. Pricing doesn't sustain the business. Often restaurants don't raise their prices for years, even though costs have gone up. Similarly, startups sometimes never even find a business model.

A business owner or startup founder/CEO is trying to keep an existing business running, while still looking ahead to where the business needs to be in 3 or 5 years.

If you stop moving forward, you'll slowly see that you're actually moving backwards, as users leave and go elsewhere.