When times are tight, where do you start cutting restaurant costs? The natural inclination for many restaurateurs is to look at your two biggest expenses — staff and COGS (cost of goods sold) — and slash from the top down, until you can make ends meet. But a savvy restaurateur knows there’s more than one
Cost Control: Managing Your Restaurant’s Inventory and Food Waste
When trying to exert cost control in your restaurant, it can be easy to assume you need to make sweeping changes and that quality will be necessarily lowered in the process. However, saving on or eliminating expenses altogether could simply be a matter of consistency in use and limiting food waste, and there’s no better
A Truly American Service Industry: Veteran-owned Restaurants
According to the National Restaurant Association, there are over 250,000 American military veterans working throughout the food industry, and about 14% of veterans working in restaurants hold supervisor positions. The role of veterans in the industry is essential, and many transitioning from service to civilian life are choosing to take on the great adventure — that
Falling into the GAAP: Generally Accepted Accounting Principles
A good amount of restaurant owners and managers don’t come from strong financial backgrounds. Maybe you started off cooking. Maybe you’re more about the bigger picture brand concept. Maybe you’re all about interpersonal employee communication. But even if you come into the job without a lot of accounting experience, learning how to handle your finances
Practical Magic: How to Navigate Your Restaurant’s Charitable Giving
Bell ringers. Kids going door to door. Countless envelopes arriving in the mail daily asking for your end of the year donations. Even customers and staff get in on the ask. They all want your charitable donation. They probably all represent excellent causes that deserve your support. But you can’t do it all, can you? With
Pro Bonus: How Your Restaurant Can Handle Holiday Bonuses
Money, money, money. It’s part of what makes the holiday season so challenging and fraught with anxiety for so many people — small business owners and restaurateurs especially. Even if you’ve just had the best year of business yet, profit margins are small and the coming months are looking unpredictable. And then there’s bonuses. A
Second Life: How to Start Planning for Your First Restaurant Expansion
Whenever a restaurant finds success and a solid customer base at its original location, the idea of expansion usually starts creeping into the restaurant owner’s mind. Expanding into a second location has its pros and cons, depending on the health of your business right now and the strength of the market at large. Opening a
How to Avoid Clashing with Your Restaurant Business Partner
Somewhere in-between “Two heads are better than one” and “Too many cooks spoil the broth” is the secret to a perfect restaurant partnership. As owners, it can be frustrating at times to have to deal with not just employees, vendors, and customers, but also the demands of a partner to whom you owe your loyalty
Buy or Lease? How to Know What’s Right for Your Restaurant
It’s not controversial to say that owning a restaurant is a very expensive proposition. There is an enormous amount of expense and a very thin profit margin — often as little as 5 percent — so managing every cost down to the penny is critical for success. This is especially true for restaurants just starting
Open Book: Building an Open Culture for Your Restaurant Employees
Who wants to talk money? Often enough, the answer is nobody. Especially not when it comes to profit and loss at someone’s restaurant. But the reality is, so many of the decisions you make every day as a restaurant operator comes down to how that choice will impact the financial success or failure of the
