The difference between restaurants that survive and restaurants that thrive

Picture this - Your restaurant is busy, the reviews are solid, and your food has legitimate buzz. Sales have improved year over year and you’ve started to build a great community of regular customers. From an outside perspective, you’re doing everything right. But you still feel like you’re losing ground. Margins are razor thin and the stress is constant. You and your team are grinding, working hard every day, but something still feels off. 

Sound familiar? You’re running into a very common - and fortunately very solvable problem. Restaurant managers are constantly bombarded with problems that need to be solved. Your attention is being pulled this way and that, and the resulting tasks pile up unabated

24/7/365. If you take too long to make a decision, you start drowning. This results in most restaurant managers operating more on feel and instinct than hard information. You make decisions fast and you make things work on the fly. You’re hesitant to draw up concrete plans because things change so quickly. This can work for a time, but in the long term it will cause problems, and they will compound. 

Let’s look at two operators, the surviving manager and the thriving manager. The surviving manager opens his laptop on Monday morning and looks at the numbers from the weekend. They look at revenue, maybe labor or prime cost % (if they have them). Their attention quickly shifts to the upcoming week’s events and schedule. They check their phone and have two calls from vendors and two texts from employees. Before they can start responding, the chef walks in and puts more problems on their desk. They’re already fighting to stay above water. 

The thriving operator does one thing differently - she takes twenty minutes where she won’t be disturbed, looks at a handful of numbers, identifies one specific thing the data is flagging, and makes a decision and a plan to improve it before Friday. That’s it. Maybe she tracks revPASH per hour and sees a consistently underperforming last hour and decides to implement a new seating strategy at the host stand. Or she sees COGS% rising, along with poor check averages from servers and a food mix heavily skewed away from entrees and high margin items, and starts a training and incentive program in the FOH to reverse the negative trend. 

If you have an intentional and deliberate relationship with the data, and use it regularly to solve real problems, you will build a habit that will compound over months and give you a tremendous advantage over the restaurant that’s just surviving. Most managers and operators use the data like a report card, a grade on what already happened with little mechanism to change it. Thriving operators understand what the numbers are telling them and what they can do about it by Thursday. 

The restaurant industry naturally selects and rewards people who can move and act quickly and efficiently, who can make decisions on the fly and who lead by presence and example. These are great skills, but they’re not the skills that make sitting down in front of a spreadsheet easy. It’s natural for the floor and the staff and the endless stream of problems to win your attention. Building that habit and using the data to improve every week allows you to more easily push past the noise and affect real change. 

Thriving restaurants are not necessarily busier, or better located. They don’t always have the smartest owners and managers, or the best staff. Often they just have better information, and operators who have built the habit to use it to their advantage.