Andrew R. Scott - OwnerShift Restaurant Coaching

If you were the CEO of a big tech company, would you spend your days writing all the code? 💻

If you were the Head of major car company, would you spend your whole day building engines?

If you were the head of an international bank, would you spend your time taking 10$ deposits at the branch?

Of course not. That wouldn’t make sense. The CEO should be running the business!

So why do you spend most of your time on the front line of your restaurant?

Here’s the difference between those big companies and you. They have systems in place to make sure that the right things happen in the company. They have leadership and management in place to make sure the systems are executed. And they have great people in place to do the work on the front lines.

So if you want to be the CEO and spend your days growing the business, guess what you have to do? Create the systems, and hire the right people. Because my guess would be that the biggest companies out there today wouldn’t have gotten that way if the founder never stopped doing work that other people could do. It’s time to think bigger! 🚀

Monty ran his restaurant for 6 years without making a single dollar in profit… and his restaurant was never the problem.

Like many struggling restaurants, the food was great…

His restaurant was popular, with roughly $150,000 coming through the door each month…

And he had 4.8 stars on Google.

But things were so bad that one year he lost $300,000.

Then, as if by magic, Monty turned things around…

And in just 90 days his restaurant had made $40,000 profit in a single month.

In this week's podcast episode, Monty is sharing exactly how he did it…

And how you can increase your profit margins too. Tune in to hear:

✅ The one thing in his labor he'd never looked at, sitting right there in his POS the whole time (check yours NOW)

✅ Why his sales going up made his losses worse instead of better

✅ What he stood up and told his whole team before any of it turned around

✅ The number his coach showed him that he now shows other people

✅ Why he'd have been $108,000 deeper in the hole by summer if he'd kept going alone

Look, Monty is the first to admit he’s not a genius…

And he doesn’t have a special advantage.

Instead, he followed a system that works.

🎧 Listen now on Apple or Spotify
📺 Watch now on YouTube

** Link in comments 👇👇

Did anyone not see my training on the Truth about merchant service loans and how to get out of them?

Profit vs cashflow – what’s the difference as a restaurant owner? 💰

When you look at your profit and loss statement every month (you ARE getting one of those every month right?) you’ll notice either a profit or loss at the bottom.

At the end of the year you show up to sign some paperwork with your accountant and they tell you “yay you made money!”. This is where most restaurant owners have a puzzled look on their face and ask “then there is it?”. 🤔

This is the difference between profit and cashflow. Profit is on the books, but what it doesn’t factor in are things like debt repayment, capital purchases (like equipment). So let’s say you made $30,000 for the year, but you paid $30,000 in principal repayments on your loan, the effectively you would have 0 left over. So you had 0 cash flow in total.

As a business – we NEED cash flow which is profit above and beyond all loan repayments and any other payments.

Most restaurant owners though keep telling themselves every year “as soon as the loan is paid off everything is going to be great!”. The only problem is that when the loan is done, your equipment will need to be replaced, you’ll need renovations etc.

So the truth of owning a restaurant business is that if you don’t have CASH FLOW, there’s a problem in your business. Otherwise you’re just staying the same and never actually getting ahead. 🚀

I regret opening my fourth location. Most people are surprised by this, and let’s face it – I was too.

There’s a few lessons I learned during that time that have shaped my views on the restaurant business (which all seem common sense looking back at them, but are harder to see when you’re in the middle of it)

1. Plan for the unexpected. I knew opening my fourth location was a gamble because I couldn’t get the traditional bank financing I was used to (having just went through a divorce). So the financing I got had repayments triple what I was used to. Not an issue if things went really well, but a major issue if they didn’t

2. Don’t take on more than your management team can handle. When I signed the lease I had the management numbers that made sense, but we had management turnover that quickly turned things upside down where we were spread too thin and it took everything we had just to survive operationally. Taking risks and ‘figuring it out’ had always been strengths of mine, until I got to the point where I jeopardized everything by pushing faster than we were ready for

3. Don’t let FOMO get the best of you. I was worried that if we didn’t open this new location, we’d miss out on an amazing opportunity. But I didn’t realize that that fear of missing our almost lead me to losing all of my locations.

The truth is – the location I opened was too close to an existing location of mine, and instead of doubling revenue (to match our doubled expenses), the new location actually took sales from our other location. This, combined with turnover in our management team and debt repayments that were 3 times the size of what was normal for us quickly lead us down a path that we almost never recovered from.

So what’s the point of all of this? Make sure before you open more locations – ensure you have your bases covered and are defensive in your thinking. Owning 3 and 4 locations is vastly different than owning 1 or 2, so if you’re going to do it – make sure you’re doing it right.

It’s weird – most of us get into business to make more money and work less, but most restaurant owners buy themselves a job and retire broke. That’s why I do this – because I don’t want you to be one of them.

If you’re tired of working hard and not seeing the results in your bank account at the end of the month, let’s talk. 💭

Most owners don’t need more ideas.

They need follow-through.

That’s the difference between knowing and winning.

If you want to learn how to fix this, check out the link in the comments.