There is a number on your POS report at the end of every shift, and there is a different number on your P&L. Most operators know these figures do not match, but fewer can explain precisely why — or why the gap between them is one of the most important things to understand about your… Read more

If you could look at your entire guest base and sort every person who walked through your door in the last year into groups based on how often they visit, what you would find — in virtually every full-service restaurant — is a distribution that follows a predictable pattern. A relatively small group of guests… Read more

Pricing a restaurant menu is one of the most consequential decisions an operator makes, and it is usually made once — at opening — and then left largely undisturbed until costs have risen enough that the financial pain becomes impossible to ignore. That reactive approach to pricing is one of the more reliable ways to… Read more

Every restaurant has them: guests who came in regularly, then gradually less frequently, then not at all. They did not necessarily have a bad experience. They did not choose a competitor in a deliberate, conscious way. Life changed, habit drifted, a new restaurant opened nearby, they got busy — and gradually your restaurant fell out… Read more

The most consistently underpracticed financial discipline in independent restaurants is raising prices. Operators who have not increased menu prices in 18 to 24 months, in an environment where food costs, labor costs, and occupancy costs have all risen, have effectively given themselves a pay cut. The math is simple and the outcome is inevitable: if… Read more

A restaurant’s P&L typically presents revenue as a single line: net sales. That aggregation is useful for understanding the overall financial picture, but it conceals something important — the margin profile of different revenue streams can vary enormously, and a restaurant that does not understand its profitability by sales channel may be enthusiastically growing its… Read more