Restaurant Labor Home Run

 In 1. David Scott Peters, Labor

Can restaurant labor controls help a restaurant make money? The reality is it’s the small things that add up, such as reducing the cost of cheese by a nickel a pound or reducing the number of garbage pickups a month by one. But every so often, like in a game of baseball, with the bases loaded, you bring up your cleanup hitter to clear the bases with one big swing. In baseball, this is known as a grand slam. If that cleanup hitter is a system, then with that one system, you’ll reap huge savings.

This article is about choosing the restaurant labor controls system that is your cleanup hitter. It’s the one batter who can hit a restaurant profits grand slam for almost any restaurant. You simply need to know how to send him in.

Start with the right equipment

When it comes to controlling your labor cost, you must start with the right tools and equipment. In this case, that includes a labor budget and labor budgeting system.

First, you need to know your target labor cost. That starts with knowing what your prime cost should be. That’s the sum of your total cost of goods sold and your total labor cost. Prime cost for a full-service restaurant needs to be 55 percent, no matter what type of restaurant you are. Please note that it doesn’t matter where how you divide up that 55 percent between cost of goods sold and labor, just so that together they don’t exceed your prime cost target of 55 percent maximum.

You need a good warm up



Swinging the bat

Now that you know what your average hourly wages are by department, average hourly wage for all line employees and the percentage of hours by department, you can now follow my step-by-step labor budgeting system to ensure you hit your target labor cost and ultimately make more money!

  5. Last but not least, based on average hourly wages by department, you’ll be able to allocate every penny each department gets and stay within budget… guaranteed!

Hitting the home run

You should be saying to yourself, “WOW! That’s really easy!” And that’s because this step-by-step labor budgeting system is that easy. Your final step is to give each manager the number of hours they have to schedule for next week and how much money they can spend. Then have them write their department schedules. The attitude here is to schedule to stay within budget, not just to fill shifts.

If you’d like to learn more about how to use these systems in your restaurant, request a free demo of our restaurant management software, SMART Systems Pro.


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