By David Potesta
In my last article, I wrote about a difficult time that happened years ago with my assistant general manager. She was struggling personally and considering leaving, and when I found out, my first thought wasn’t about what she was going through.
My first thought was: What am I going to do? How am I going to replace her? Who is going to cover everything she does? How much more am I going to have to take on?
I wasn’t proud of that reaction when I looked back on it, but it taught me something that has stayed with me. When you’re under enough pressure for long enough, your world starts to get smaller. You see whatever is directly in front of you and whatever feels like the biggest threat at that moment.
What I didn’t realize at the time was how much that affects the way we run our businesses, too. We spend a lot of time looking at numbers in the restaurant business. We have to: Labor goes up, and we look at labor. Sales go down, and we look at sales. Turnover increases, and we start talking about hiring and retention.
But the longer I’ve been around this business, the more I’ve realized that the thing showing up on the report isn’t always the thing that needs to be fixed. Sometimes it’s just where the real problem finally shows itself.
What Is That Number Really Telling You?
I recently heard a story about an operator whose labor was running several points higher than another operator thought it should be. The reaction was immediate: “I could never run my labor that high.”
I understand that reaction. I’ve probably said the same thing at some point in my career. But there was another part of the story that changed everything. The operator with the higher labor was also doing substantially higher sales.
Now you’ve got a different conversation. Instead of immediately asking how they can reduce labor, I want to know why those stores are producing so much more volume. What are they doing differently?
Maybe they’re staffed well enough that the manager can actually manage instead of being stuck on a station all night. Maybe customers are getting better service. Maybe new employees are getting more attention instead of being thrown into a shift before they’re ready. Maybe the team isn’t constantly running as if they’re one call away from a disaster.
Or maybe it’s none of those things. The point is that I want to understand what’s happening before I decide that the labor number is the problem.
I’m not suggesting that operators should ignore labor or just start adding people to the schedule. I’ve spent too many years staring at P&Ls to say anything like that. I’m saying that cutting labor simply because the percentage looks high can be just as shortsighted as ignoring it. You can improve the labor number and hurt the restaurant at the same time.
Can a “Dedicated Employee” Actually Hurt Your Business?
Think about the GM who works 60 hours a week. They’re always there. They cover call-offs. They handle every difficult customer. When the kitchen gets buried, they’re the first person on the line. If something goes wrong on their day off, everybody calls them.
For years, I would have looked at that person and thought, “That’s a dedicated manager.” And they probably are. But today I’d want to know something else: What happens when they’re not there?
If the restaurant starts falling apart the minute the GM walks out the door, we don’t just have an overworked manager. We have a restaurant that has learned to depend on one person.
The GM may think they’re helping their people every time they jump in and take over. That’s certainly the intention. But if it happens often enough, nobody else has to become capable of handling those situations.
The manager keeps getting better at solving problems, and everybody keeps bringing their problems to the manager. Eventually, you have a GM who can’t take a day off and a team that can’t operate without them. Nobody planned it that way. It just developed over time.
The Limits of “Unlimited” Training
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about training lately. We have more ways to train people today than we ever did when I started in restaurants: videos, online learning, checklists, testing, certifications and entire platforms designed around training.
There is tremendous value in that. But I also think we have to be careful about confusing completing training with actually learning something.
You can show somebody a video of how to stretch dough. You can show them exactly how much sauce goes on a pizza. They can take a test afterward and get every question right.
Then put them on the line at 7:00 on Friday night. That’s when you find out what they know. There are things in this business that people learn because somebody with experience is standing next to them, saying things like:
“That’s too much sauce.”
“Try it again.”
“Don’t fight the dough.”
“Watch what I’m doing.”
“Now you do it.”
Then you watch them do it again.
I’m not arguing against technology. Good training systems are incredibly valuable, especially when you’re trying to create consistency across multiple locations. But the purpose of training isn’t to get somebody through the training—it’s to prepare them to do the job.
Those sound like the same thing. They aren’t always.
The Farther Away You Get, the Harder This Becomes
When you’re standing inside a restaurant, you don’t need a report to tell you everything. You can see when the kitchen is getting buried. You can watch somebody struggle on a station. You know when a manager is overwhelmed. You can feel when a restaurant is understaffed.
The farther away you get from the operation, the more you have to rely on information to tell you what’s happening. That’s unavoidable.
You need labor reports. You need sales numbers. You need turnover data, guest scores and training reports. If you’re responsible for 20, 100 or 1,000 restaurants, you can’t stand in every kitchen.
But the danger comes when we start believing that the information we’re looking at tells us the whole story. It doesn’t.
As I’ve mentioned, a report might tell you that labor cost is too high. It can’t tell you what happens to service when you cut it. A dashboard might tell you that someone completed training. It can’t tell you whether they can handle their station when the restaurant gets slammed. A turnover report can tell you how many people left. It can’t tell you what it feels like to work in that restaurant every day.
That’s where I think leaders have to be careful. The numbers may be completely accurate, and we can still come to the wrong conclusion.
Sometimes You Have to Get Closer
After 35 years in restaurants, I’ve become much less interested in immediately having the answer. Instead, it’s about asking the right questions:
Labor is high. Why?
The GM is overwhelmed. Why?
People keep quitting. Why?
Employees aren’t performing. Why?
Sometimes you get to the answer quickly. Other times, you have to keep looking. That’s what I didn’t do years ago with my assistant general manager. I saw the problem that her leaving was going to create for me before I saw the person standing in front of me. My field of vision had gotten too narrow.
I think the same thing can happen to an entire organization. We get focused on the number, the system or the immediate problem and start trying to fix it before we understand what we’re actually looking at.
So when something on the dashboard tells you there’s a problem, pay attention to it. Just don’t assume it’s telling you what the problem is. Get curious. Get closer. Ask another question.
Because sometimes the problem you’re trying so hard to solve isn’t the real problem at all. It’s just the part you can see.
David Potesta spent 35 years operating restaurants, including the family pizzeria his father opened in 1975, still in business today after 51 years. He spent more than a decade as a corporate trainer, working with leadership teams across the country. He now works with restaurant operators and franchise groups to build high-performing workplace cultures.
