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 it wasn’t guests trading over. That’s $900 in frosé that never rang. Ask Tom, he opened Tuesday.
Wednesday’s floor is already $98.82 over allowance, and it’s one shift: Juan’s still on the posted schedule for nine hours Wednesday, two weeks after he asked off. Pull it and Wednesday lands right on target. Ask Sally, she built the week.
The numbers
Allowances are your own: 10.5% of projected food for the kitchen, 6.1% 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 the floor ran $84 over allowance. 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.
It's every day, not once
A month-end report tells you what already happened. I stay in the numbers with you morning after morning, so what's sliding gets caught while there's still a shift left to fix it.
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. When you do, the door doesn't close. What's in place stays in place, there's no bill running while you don't need me, and if it starts sliding again, you already know who to call.
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 concept 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
How do you measure success?
Tell me what a good week looks like to you, and how you know when you've had one. Some owners have the number in their head, some go looking for it Friday, some just know by what's in the bank. There's no wrong answer, no form to fill out, no funnel, no discovery call to book. And if something's keeping you up, tell me that too. I read it myself, and I'll tell you straight: whether I can help, and if there's a real job in it, what it would actually take.
Email me →What I learn in your building doesn't go down the street with me. While I'm working with you, if there's a room you'd rather I stayed out of, tell me and I'll stay out of it. I take on a small number of restaurants at a time, because that's what it takes to do it right.