What are The “Money Making” Jobs in a Restaurant?

A restaurateur once asked me to visit him to discuss working with us.  He confessed that although everyone thought his business was doing well, it wasn’t. 

He was often called in to work in the kitchen and he wasn’t making anything like the money he deserved or wanted.  Although we discussed some changes he could make, I thought it would be much more valuable for him to attend one of our training days where he could meet other successful restaurateurs and pick their brains while getting lots of ideas from our team too.  We had one coming up the following month.  He seemed relieved at having some help and agreed to come. 

Back at the office I made sure he got an invite and then forgot all about it until a few days before the event.  When looking through the attendees list, I noticed he wasn’t on it.  I rang the restaurant to remind him that the seminar was on.  He picked up the phone in the kitchen while cooking and told me he couldn’t come because he was having to baby sit. 

I understand life balance and how important family is.  I also put my family first before anything.  However, he had had a month to organise a baby sitter and hadn’t prioritised it.  He didn’t see that working on his business was important, so instead of learning how to make money from his business he ended up doing a job he could have paid $25 per hour for someone else to perform. In most cases the “ $25 per hour jobs” are things like chopping vegetables, chasing staff to come in, chasing suppliers, fixing equipment, picking milk up from the shop, going to the post office etc. 

We all do it, it’s an avoidance technique.  We are avoiding doing the things we know we should be doing and we fill our time with “busy-ness” instead of business. If you want to make more money, you have to delegate those avoidance jobs and clear time, every day, to do the one thing that will actually make you money, and that’s marketing! 

For example let’s say you want to personally take home an extra $100,000 this year.  

If you work the traditional 37 hours a week and work 48 weeks a year that would mean you would work 37 x 48 = 1776 hours this year... to earn that $100,000 would mean you would have to be paid $56.30 an hour. Now be really honest.  Of the hours that you work, how many are money making hours ?  How many hours are you part of operations where you are just another pair of hands?  Someone doing cooking, cleaning, office work, maintenance, stocking shelves, inventory, setting tables, manual labour etc – these are operational roles. Typically these jobs are a cost to the business. 

The wages for those who do them comes straight out of gross profit and those people don’t bring money into the business. When you get stuck in operational roles it is often because when you started the business you performed these tasks to keep costs down.  It meant you didn’t have to pay another wage which the business couldn’t afford. However, when you continue to do these jobs, it’s because you have got stuck and no longer see that this is not your role in the business.  In fact you now believe this work is what restaurant owners do. 

You’ve lost sight of what you set out to do which was to own and run a successful and profitable business.  Instead you are now a low paid jack-of-all-trades working in it as opposed to working on it . 

So back to the question... of the hours that you work, how many are money making hours as opposed to “operational” hours? It’s a tough question isn’t it, because it forces the next question... “Well, what are the “money making” jobs in a restaurant?”  My answer to that is, anything and everything that attracts or influences people to spend money with your business. 

Here are some examples:

So if we said you were spending 1/3 of your time doing “money making work”, not operational work, then in order to earn that extra $100,000 you would have to be paid three times that $56.30 an hour.  Your hourly rate needs to be $168.90 (3 x $56.30).  Remember peeling carrots or cleaning bathrooms doesn’t make you money – it only saves you paying someone else $25 to do it. 

It gets worse – to actually take home that extra $100,000 you have to pay tax on your earnings which is going to be somewhere in the region of 40% so your hourly rate would now have to be $236. 46 an hour. 

So if you want to have that extra $100K this year the two most important questions to answer becomes

Which brings me to this statement... Your Job Is To Be The Marketer Of Your Goods And ServicesNot A “Do-Er” In The Business!

By the way, “Do-ers” are the most easily replaced members of the workforce.  They are the lowest paid.  They do most of the physical labour and they work the longest hours!  Not what you envisaged when you opened your business, I am sure! If you now think getting that extra $100,000 is mission impossible, please be reassured it’s not.  You are about to learn strategies that will bring in extra money.  You are also going to see that just one or two of them will easily bring in $100,000 to $200,000 a year each.

But in order to make that happen you must delegate the small stuff, the  $25 per hour jobs and focus on these money making activities. Recently one of our coaches did a “secret shop” on a restaurant on a Friday evening.  His feedback to the client allowed her to put in to place two strategies that increased sales the following Friday by $1,500.  Maybe $1,500 doesn’t sound too much, but that multiplied by 52 Fridays is $78,000 and the strategies work every night of the week.  We just wanted to measure one Friday against another to get an accurate reading of the impact those strategies made.  Across the week those strategies could easily account for an extra $200,000 in sales in the year.

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