What is your restaurant’s limitation today? What is your bottleneck?

Give a knee-jerk answer to this question: What is your restaurant’s limitation today? What is your bottleneck? If that one thing were fixed, you would earn more total profit—not simply revenue, but profit. What is that one thing that is not happening?

For example, Let’s say you have a widely high food cost, that if corrected, it would mean you made real money. Then that would be the limitation to profit. If so, what is the reason for it being off? Is your portion control off because staff won’t listen, which relates to lackluster training, lazy hiring practices and a leadership team that doesn’t feel enabled? The core fix of that issue would be inspecting work, incentivizing results and penalizing insubordination.

What if your staff is excellent? Renegotiating with your vendor could be as simple as getting those percentage points back.

Whatever the leak in the house is, you have to go to the source of the leak, which might not be right above you where you see the water leaking. But what is your leak, or, in the truer form, your business bottleneck? Could it be location, i.e., people don’t know where we are, or is it that we’ve angered too many customers over the years and need a whole new approach to gaining new customers who don’t feel burned by our brand?

Knowing the bottleneck to profit means you can undo the potentially multi-knotted rope holding you back. A word of warning, though: the typical thing people will do is reinforce the strongest facet of their restaurant when confronted with the need to reframe. Suppose three legs are holding up a table that represents your restaurant business. In that case, typical restaurant owners look at the leg that they know the best and seek to reinforce it. “Hey, the holdup is this super weak leg over here (marketing),” but then their actions are … “Okay, well, we’ll just reinforce the strong leg better (menu).” This egregious oversight is typical of a chef-driven restaurant with solid food but horrible financials, weak marketing and a lackluster team. And when confronted with all that, they go back to what they know: let’s make the food better and come up with more food items.

I’ll make this even more obvious. There are only two ways to improve profit: get more customers and/or get more out of them. If your current base is saturated, you need new customers, and a new daily special can only pull that off if it’s overtly advertised to non-followers.

The execution of that math equation could go down a thousand different rabbit trails. Finding the rabbit trail that you still need to go down more of is the key, and that means the first question: what is the thing holding you back? Is it leadership, food cost, marketing, customer satisfaction, speed and space for more customers? Your knee-jerk reaction, your gut feeling, and your instinctual knowledge will tell you that first rather than overthinking it. So again, I’ll ask or restate what you already know: what is your bottleneck to profit, and what are you doing about it?