This is how your mornings should start.
Sample · every figure illustrativeLast night
Tuesday did $26,430. Level with the same Tuesday last year.
Covers say what dollars don’t: 661 against 696, down 5.0%. Lunch is all of it, down 13.3%. Dinner ran 2.3% ahead. Before you cut a lunch shift: morning prep clocks in under lunch and feeds dinner. I don’t count it against lunch.
What I’d fix today
Frosé sold 36 against a normal 108, nothing between 10am and 6pm. Rosé by the glass held at 62 against a normal 61, same wine without the machine, so those guests didn’t switch. They left. That is $900. Ask Tom, he opened Tuesday.
The floor ran $583 over allowance Tuesday. Wednesday is bigger, projected $31,000, and already posted $568 over. Ask Sally to walk the week against projection.
The numbers
Allowances are your own: 10.5% of projected food for the kitchen, 8% of the projected day for the floor.
Talk soon,
Mario
Your POS can tell you Tuesday did $26,430. It cannot tell you lunch is where the covers went, or that $900 of frosé never happened. A month-end report gets there in three weeks, when all you can do is explain it.
I'm not coming in to tell you everything you're doing wrong.
I don't arrive with a plan
I want to see what you've already tried, where it failed, and where you think it's bleeding. A diagnosis I wrote before I met you would be about me, not your restaurant.
Your staff has a hand in it
They've watched people come and go before, so they're the hardest room to win and the one that matters. Changes they helped build are the ones still standing a year later.
Then you stop needing me
Every read comes with a move: a call to make, an order to change, a schedule to fix. Let's see how quick you can fire me.
I've sat where you're sitting. Every job in the building.
I'm Mario McNally. I spent the first fifteen years of my career here on 30A, doing the same work every time: walk into a room that isn't working and rebuild it from the floor up. I opened a farm to table waterfront restaurant and ended up running four of them, three hundred staff between them. I ran daily operations on a 44,000 square foot property, six restaurants and two bars. I wrote the order guides, the par levels, the schedules and the standards those rooms ran on.
Then I owned one. A fast casual of my own, where I took six points out of the food cost, and every one of those points was my own money. Advising an owner and being one are not the same job. I've done both.
Then I left for Phoenix to grow. A restaurant group out there, and the job was whatever the room in front of me needed. One concept losing money that had to be rebuilt from the brand down. One that needed its standards and its training built from scratch. One launched from nothing. After that I consulted on my own for sixteen months, taking a new place from the recipes and the costs down to the opening and closing duties.
New Orleans came after that, and then the other side of the table entirely. Two and a half years selling for foodservice distributors, negotiating the pricing deviations and rebates that decide what your invoice actually says. I know that side because I worked it.
Then I came back, because this is where I wanted to work. Salt Prep is where all of it goes now, one restaurant at a time, on this coast. I know where the money leaks, because I've worked every spot it leaks from.
Santa Rosa Beach, FL
Tell me what's keeping you up. The number, or the reason.
No form, no funnel, no discovery call to book. Tell me where you think it's bleeding and what you've already tried. A sentence on each is plenty, and I'll tell you straight whether I can help.
Email me →Your numbers stay yours. I read what you already have, your POS and your invoices and your punches. Nobody on your staff hears anything from me, I don't work your competitors, and I take on a small number of restaurants at a time.