The Restaurant Prosperity Formula

Jesi Cline is a restaurant owner who started her business as a bakery specializing in cupcakes and custom wedding cakes. While she found success, she was working endless hours to keep up with orders and had no time to be strategic with her business. When COVID hit, she needed to pivot and rebranded as Rosé Café, a fast casual breakfast, lunch and dessert cafe. And recently, she expanded her restau...

What might be second nature to a seasoned chef, a manager or owner with decades of experience can be a revelation to someone just embarking on their restaurant journey. It's essential to remember that our industry, with its vast array of roles and responsibilities, doesn't have a universal baseline of “common sense.” In the restaurant industry, “common sense” is a relative term. For some veterans,...

As a restaurant owner and the leader of your business, it is common to feel as if it’s the universe’s job to throw roadblocks in your way to discourage you and impede your progress. I’m here to encourage you and point you toward practical, actionable solutions that will help you overcome these obstacles. In this episode of my podcast, The Restaurant Prosperity Formula, I explore three distinct seg...

Restaurant Owner Success Depends on This Person --- Before a restaurant owner can join my coaching program, they must have a right-hand person who can help them. I call this person an implementer. This person will learn with you, as the owner, but implement and do the work. This a requirement because as the restaurant owner, your attention can often be required in many other areas of the restauran...

My favorite podcast episodes are those with restaurant owners who have transformed their restaurants and their lives. The transformation these restaurant owners made is going to blow you away. Joshua Powell and Joseph Vericella are owners of Clay’s Cafe in Hebron, Ohio. Clay opened its doors in 1934 and it has been a local staple for generations. Powell is a real estate agent turned investor, turn...

Our guest today is Josh Kopel, a restaurateur, entrepreneur and coach. This is Josh’s second time on the podcast, and he’s back to talk to us about restaurant marketing and what it really means for your business. Throughout his 20-year career, he’s managed venues ranging from casual dining concepts to Hollywood nightclubs, bars and ultra-lounges. He also opened his own Michelin-rated fine dining c...

Today I want to talk about a silent morale and profit-killer in your restaurant that is often overlooked. That killer is decision-making waste. Decision-making waste in your restaurant is a silent profit killer that can slowly erode margins without restaurant owners even noticing. For example, there are decisions that take too long to be made that are like a leaky faucet. That little drip, drip, d...

In the restaurant industry it’s important to focus on numbers and performance because those numbers tell you the health of your business. As a coach, I teach restaurant owners how to use budgets and set goals and then measure them. When hiring managers, it’s important to find those who are high performers so they can help you meet those goals. But being a good manager and finding good managers isn...

If you have been following me for any length of time you have heard me say the following statement: The two most important systems any restaurant should have in place are budgets and recipe costing cards. Why are these two systems so important? They move you from a reactive form of management to a proactive form of management, which is essential to controlling costs and planning for restaurant pro...

Hiring in any business is a challenge, but the restaurant and hospitality industries are especially hard. There isn’t an entrepreneur who hasn’t been duped by a smooth-talking go-getter, a server who says they have experience, or that manager with chain experience who you think is going to take your restaurant to the next level. It happens to the best of us! How can you limit those hires? Tune int...

I’m putting a flag in the ground: your restaurant is not a food business. It’s a hospitality business. If you tell people you are in the food business, then you’re telling them you provide the same thing as a gas station, which also sells food. Restaurants have the privilege to create memories in their customers’ lives. Your job is to create memories for your guests and keep them coming back time...

Your prosperity is my goal. Prosperity is at the core of what I coach restaurant owners, like you, to achieve. Prosperity is freedom from your restaurant when you want it, confidence in your business, confidence in your restaurant’s numbers, the ability to have a life outside the restaurant and, finally, financial freedom. In this episode of The Restaurant Prosperity Formula, I am going to focus o...

In the demanding restaurant industry, it's easy to find yourself consumed by the day-to-day operations of your restaurant. There is so much to do every day from the small tasks like opening the restaurant and pulling the cash drawers to big tasks like hiring employees and calculating dollars per labor hour worked. It can be hard to prioritize your personal life and remember there is a world outsid...

If you’re ready to use systems to improve your restaurant’s operations, service and profits, there is one person you must identify now – your implementer. This is your right-hand person when it comes to implementing systems in your restaurant. Your implementer is someone who buys into your business, into your dream and you. They're excited to learn, and they are organized and able start and finish...

Since the pandemic many restaurants are telling me tales of some of the most difficult customers I've ever heard. The frustration and impatience directed toward restaurant staff seems to be at a whole new level. But the truth is difficult customers have been around forever. The problem today is difficult restaurant customers can do a lot of damage if your team isn’t prepared to handle them because...

One of the goals I have for restaurant owners is to get them to a place in their business where they work on bigger strategic projects, such as restaurant marketing, and to do it in a strategic and thoughtful way. Since in my work with restaurant owners, I focus on systems for operations, I like to leave restaurant marketing to the experts. One such expert is on this episode of my podcast, The Res...

The restaurant business is full of daily distractions that make it easy to avoid working strategically. Sometimes it feels like it takes more work to be strategic than it does to just get the work done. And what does working strategically even mean? In this episode of my podcast, The Restaurant Prosperity Formula, I talk about what it really means to work strategically on your restaurant business...

Just about every week during my group coaching calls with restaurant owners someone asks for tips on finding and hiring great employees. Restaurant owners share their successes with things like how to write job descriptions to attract employees who want to work in a great culture, suggestions for where to place those job descriptions, how much to pay their employees in their different roles and wh...

I am sure you’ve been told you need to calculate your food cost. Heck, you’ve probably heard from several experts that your food cost target is a 34% food cost, or that you’re supposed to mark up each of your food items on your menu 3 times. Well, neither of these methods are correct. Flush them from your mind because they are total BS. In this episode of The Restaurant Prosperity Formula, I will...

I love what I do! I get to help restaurant owners change their lives. I get to help most of them make more money than they've ever made before in their restaurant. To date I've worked with literally thousands of restaurant pros, so I've seen a lot, including a lot of restaurant owners who don't pay themselves. There are a lot of reasons these owners don’t take a regular paycheck, but what so many...

Labor costs are a real challenge for restaurants that want to make money. Restaurant owners have to battle with a lot of variables to control their labor cost and create success from things that are out of their control. For example, there is rising minimum wage – going as high as $22/hour in some places, labor laws that require a set number of hours for staff, a fear of working people so hard the...

These past three years have led many restaurant owners and managers toward restaurant burnout. As a restaurant owner, it’s easy to have a feeling of despair that has been almost impossible to shake. Between group coaching calls, one-on-one coaching calls and discovery calls, I talk with a lot of restaurant owners just like you. I can tell you that I hear you and feel your pain. While challenges in...

Every couple of months I like to invite a restaurant owner who has benefited from my restaurant coaching program onto podcast. It’s a great chance for the restaurant owner to reflect on all the work they’ve done and the results of their work. It’s also a chance for me to take a minute to remind myself in the hustle and bustle of every day that what I teach works. That reinforces my motivation and...

Hiring a restaurant manager is a challenge, but there’s no greater challenge than finding the right kitchen manager. A lot of restaurant owners look to chefs as an ideal manager in the kitchen. After all, they are people destined to help create an experience in a restaurant that results in pleasure and lasting memories. But often a chef is unprepared to lead the restaurant because the higher the p...

It doesn’t matter if you're brand new to the restaurant business or you’re a seasoned veteran, food cost challenges will plague you. From regular price increases on a variety of products to natural disasters that drive prices up on commodities like chicken and oranges. Here’s the deal, though. You can count on the prices you’re paying for food to fluctuate and to increase dramatically without much...