Why You Miss the Biggest Hidden Opportunities in Your Restaurants

In this episode of the Restaurant Success Podcast, Matthew Mabel reveals why successful restaurant entrepreneurs often overlook their greatest business opportunities. Drawing from his extensive consulting experience with multi-unit restaurant owners, Matthew explains how focusing solely on problems can blind operators to the untapped potential hiding in the parts of their business that already seem to be working. Through two compelling client examples, he demonstrates how a production-focused culture shift and a food cost correction each led to dramatic profit increases—including one case where profits rose by fifty percent and another where millions of dollars were recovered. This episode challenges restaurant business owners to examine what they take for granted and discover where their greatest returns may be waiting.

Key Topics Covered

• Why restaurant owners instinctively focus on problems instead of opportunities
• How long-term success can become invisible to operators
• Real-world example: Shifting from production-focused to guest-focused culture for a fifty percent profit increase
• Real-world example: Correcting food cost handling and menu pricing to recover millions in lost profit
• Why making strong aspects of your business stronger yields the greatest return
• Questions to ask yourself about untapped upside in your restaurant operation

Links Mentioned

• Restaurateur's Investment that Consistently Out Performs New Units Every Time

Resources Mentioned

• Website: www.surrender.biz
• Free initial consultation available

Connect with Matthew Mabel

Matthew works with owners of successful, independent, multi-unit restaurants to improve:

• Profit growth
• Sales optimization
• Guest count increase
• Unit expansion
• Employee engagement
• Brand loyalty

How to Support the Show

• Subscribe to the Restaurant Success Podcast and Newsletter
• Rate and review the show
• Visit www.surrender.biz for additional resources

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the Restaurant Success Podcast. I'm Matthew Mabel, veteran restaurant advisor, coach, consultant, and speaker devoted to multi-unit independent restaurant unit, profit and revenue growth, internal harmony and ownership freedom and flexibility.

This is your weekly entree of the advice, strategy and tactics that I currently provide to my best clients.

Today we're going to talk about something I see all the time in my work with restaurant owners, and it's one of those things that can genuinely transform your business once you understand it.

We're going to explore why you might be missing the biggest hidden opportunities in your restaurants, and I'm going to share a couple of real examples from my client work that I think will really open your eyes to what's possible.

So let me start with something I hear constantly from clients.

They bring me in to address specific issues, right?

They've got a problem they want solved. And then I start nosing around their restaurants to find other opportunities to address, and you know what they tell me?

"Don't bother to look over there; that's all fine!"

They try to shut me down. They feel like I'm wasting time and effort looking at the parts of their business that seem to be working.

That is, until the yield from the opportunities I find starts to eclipse the challenges they originally brought me in to handle. And let me tell you, that happens more often than you might think.

You see, people tend to gravitate toward addressing problems.

It's human nature, right? We focus on what's broken

But in doing that, we ignore something really important.

The things that are going well in your business could be even better. Sometimes significantly better.

So - why does this happen?

Well, maybe restaurant owners just don't know how much more positive the successful aspects of their business could be.

Maybe they don't have the knowledge internally to see it. Maybe they lack the ability to compare their results to others in the industry.

Or maybe, and this is the one I see most often, after looking at it for so long, they simply don't see it anymore.

It becomes invisible to them.

Let me share two examples of what I call hidden breakthroughs, and I think these will really illustrate what I'm talking about.

One restaurant group called me in to devise a plan to save a concept that was suffering from shocking drops in revenue. And we did fix that, by the way, but that's a story for another day.

So I'm traveling to their location, and I asked to also look at their flagship concept while I was there. And you know what my client told me? "It is going great; don't worry about that." That was the directive.

Well - I persuaded them to let me look at the flagship anyway.

And I immediately uncovered a production-focused culture where managers who had outlived their freshness date were churning through guests. The focus was all wrong. When we pivoted to a guest focus and re-oriented the management team, sales increased and the ensuing profit rose by fifty percent. Fifty percent!

From something they told me was "going great."

Here's another one. Another client, and they were proud of their unique concept, engaged me to create a platform for growth so they could expand it nationwide. Big dreams, right?

So we began to do that work, and then they handed me the P&L.

The first alarmed words out of my mouth came quickly. I said, "OK, let's stop everything now and refocus." I had immediately identified a tragic flaw in the way they handled food costs that was leading them to underprice their menu. They were literally leaving money on the table.

We corrected that issue, and what was the result?

Profits since then have been piling up into the millions. Millions of dollars that had originally been just left on the table because nobody was looking at it with fresh eyes.

Now here's what I want you to understand about these two groups. Both of these owners identify as extremely successful operators.

They were already earning more money than they had ever dreamed about when I started working with them.

They weren't struggling. They were succeeding.

But here's the thing. I can spend all day making something weak stronger, and many days I do. But making something strong even more vigorous? That is significantly easier and gives the greatest return. That's where the real opportunity lies.

So I want you to ask yourself this question. What do you take for granted as a success in your organization that has a huge untapped upside? What are you not looking at because you think it's "going great"? Because I promise you, there's something there. There almost always is.

Now, if you're thinking about growth and expansion, I've written about this topic before and I want to mention a couple of related pieces that tie into what we've been talking about today.

One article I wrote is called "Restaurateur's Investment that Consistently Out Performs New Units Every Time," and it connects directly to that second example I shared, about creating a platform for growth.

In that piece, I talk about why investing in your infrastructure before you expand is actually the smartest investment you can make, and how playing catch-up after units are open will cost you more in the long run.

You can find a link to that in the show notes, and I think it really complements what we've discussed today about finding those hidden opportunities in your existing operations.

Let me tell you about how we might work together. I work with owners of successful, independent, multi-unit restaurants to grow their profit, sales, guest count, and unit count. My unique approach bonds employees and guests to restaurant brands and allows owners to enjoy the freedom and flexibility they have earned.

To schedule a call with me to discuss how to achieve your biggest goals, follow the link in the show notes. The initial consultation is complimentary, and we can discuss which big moves might be right for your operation.

Thanks for listening. If you haven't already subscribed to the Restaurant Success Podcast and Newsletter podcast, please do so, and rate and review the show. Find more information in the show notes at Restaurant Success Podcast dot com.

Also find tons of information you can use in print, audio and video form at my website, www dot surrender dot biz. Thanks again and see you next time.