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Where Restaurant Groups Lose Money — Free Checklist · ElevexMedia
US restaurants & groups · 1–10 locations · owners & operators
Free checklist · no call required

Sales are up. Profit isn't. Here is where the money usually goes.

A 25-point checklist you run yourself, on your own numbers, in about an evening. It doesn't tell you that restaurants lose money — you know that. It shows you the specific places a restaurant leaks it, what the number should look like, and how to tell which leak is yours.

Written by someone who ran the restaurants No call, no pitch Works on the reports you already have
Send me the checklist See what's inside ↓

12 pages. No email sequence hiding inside it.

What's inside

Money leaves a restaurant in five places

Every one is checkable against reports you already have — your P&L, your invoices, your POS. None of them requires new software, a consultant in the building, or a single additional meeting. Each check in the PDF carries what the number should look like and the first thing to do when it doesn't.

REVENUE IN WHAT'S LEFT ACost of goods BPurchasing CLabor DCash control EConsistency
Five zones, 25 checks — the checklist walks them left to right, in the order money leaves.
A

Where the money actually goes

5 checks
  1. Prime cost per location, per week — not a group average, not monthly. The average hides the store carrying the loss.
  2. Theoretical vs. actual food cost — what the recipes say you spent against what you spent. The gap has a dollar value.
  3. Margin per menu item, not price — your best seller can be your worst earner.
  4. Waste log — whether it's kept, and whether anyone reads it after it's kept.
  5. Recipe cards and portion specs — whether they exist, and whether they match what actually leaves the pass.
B

Purchasing and receiving

5 checks
  1. Price creep on your top 20 items — nobody approved these increases; they were simply never checked.
  2. Same item, three prices — across locations, in the same week.
  3. Substitutions accepted at the back door — different product, same invoice line.
  4. Is anything weighed on receipt — invoice against what physically arrived.
  5. Vendor count per category — how many suppliers you carry, and what consolidation is worth.
C

Labor

5 checks
  1. Schedule against your own hourly sales curve — not against habit.
  2. Labor by daypart, not by week — overstaffed mornings and understaffed peaks cancel out on a weekly report.
  3. Overtime concentrated in the same few people — usually a scheduling defect, not a demand spike.
  4. Cost of turnover per position — calculated once, honestly, including the training weeks.
  5. Manager hours spent on tasks an hourly employee could do — the most expensive labor line nobody tracks.
D

Cash and revenue control

5 checks
  1. Comps and voids by employee, weekly — the pattern matters more than the total: same person, same shift, same reason code.
  2. Who can zero out a check — who has the authority, and who actually uses it.
  3. Items deleted after payment — the single most common way cash leaves without a broken lock.
  4. Deposits against POS totals — daily, by location, reconciled by someone who didn't handle the cash.
  5. Third-party delivery reconciliation — commissions, refunds and chargebacks against what actually landed in your account.
E

Consistency and dependency

5 checks
  1. The spread between locations — same menu, same brand, materially different margin.
  2. SOPs written vs. SOPs followed — a spot check settles this in one shift.
  3. Opening and closing checklists — signed, or signed in a batch on Friday.
  4. Decisions only you are allowed to make — list them; the list is the finding.
  5. What breaks if you're unreachable for two weeks — the honest test of everything above.
→

And what the checklist won't do

  1. It won't tell you which of the 25 findings to fix first in your specific business — that depends on your size, your market and your month, and it's the part that needs a person. That's what the free Express Audit is for, and it's the next section.

Five zones · 25 checks · roughly an evening with your own reports.

What a finding actually looks like
Say you own four restaurants under one brand. Same menu, same suppliers, same prices. Here is check 1 of 25 — food plus labor as a share of sales, one week, one restaurant at a time.
Restaurant 161.0%
Restaurant 262.4%
Restaurant 371.2%
Restaurant 460.3%
Averaged across all four, that's 63.7% — a number that looks survivable and hides everything. Restaurant 3 is the finding: on the same menu it keeps nine cents less of every dollar than the restaurant down the road. The checklist takes you from noticing that gap to the four questions that tell you whether it's portioning, purchasing, scheduling or the register.

Illustrative example, not a client. It exists to show the shape of a finding — your numbers will be your own.

Two different things

The checklist finds. The Express Audit decides.

Both are free, and they are not the same product. The difference is who does the work and whether anything is specific to you.

The checklist · this page

You run it

What it is
A 25-point PDF you work through yourself.
Who does the work
You, with your own reports. About an evening.
What you end up with
A list of the places you're leaking, in your own numbers.
What we see
Nothing. Your findings never leave your desk.
Wait
None. It's the same file for everyone.
Best when you want to know whether you have a problem at all — without talking to anyone.
The Express Audit · next step

A specialist reads yours

What it is
A written diagnosis of your situation, by a named person.
Who does the work
Tatyana. You send your findings or your numbers; an NDA if you want one.
What you end up with
Which two or three things to fix first, in what order, and why the rest can wait.
What we see
What you choose to send. Confidential either way.
Wait
Limited slots — it's real work by one person, not a generated report.
Request the free Express Audit →

In plain terms: the checklist tells you what's wrong. The Express Audit tells you what to do about it in your business. Paid work is when you'd rather we did it.

Fair questions

Before you give us your email

"Couldn't I just ask an AI for this list?"

Yes. In ten seconds, and it will be longer than ours. That's exactly why the list isn't where the value is — and we'd rather say so than pretend otherwise.

Three things it won't do. It won't tell you which two of twenty-five matter for a four-location group in your market this quarter — it doesn't know, so it hedges and gives you all of them. It will state benchmark numbers with total confidence, including the ones it invented; every threshold in our PDF says where it came from, and the ones that come from operating practice rather than published data are labelled as such. And it has never had to tell a general manager on a Tuesday that the comps are stopping — which is where most of these fixes actually die.

The honest summary: the method isn't scarce, and we don't charge for it. Doing it every week, in every location, without you personally holding it together — that's the scarce part.

"What do you get out of giving this away?"

Two things, and both are worth naming. Some readers will find something, fix it themselves and never contact us — that's a fair trade for us being the ones who told them. Some will find something they'd rather not fix alone, and we're the obvious people to ask. We'd rather earn that by being useful first than by promising results we can't show you yet.

"Am I going to get called?"

No. There's no phone number on this page for a reason: everything we do runs in writing, at your pace. If you reply, a person replies — not a sequence, not a bot.

Honest fit

This is written for one kind of reader

It's free either way. But it's built for a specific situation, and it's fair to say which.

Probably not for you if
  • You already track theoretical food cost weekly by store; you're past this document
  • You're looking for a growth or marketing playbook — this is about margin you already earned
  • You want someone to run it for you rather than run it yourself. That's a different conversation, and the checklist will tell you honestly if you're in it
Written for you if
  • You run one restaurant or several in the US, and revenue is growing faster than profit
  • Your bookkeeper can tell you the money left, but not why
  • If you have more than one location — one performs and the others don't, and the reason isn't obvious
  • The systems that hold the business together are mostly in your head
  • You're opening a restaurant and want it set up right from day one — the same checks read forward, so you're not paying later to undo what was built wrong
  • You'd rather read something and check it yourself than sit through a presentation
Who wrote it

Tatyana Mikheenkova

25+ years in restaurant operations — starting in 2000, trained in the McDonald's system, later responsible for networks up to 24 locations.

2000
Starts in the kitchenTrained inside the McDonald's operating system — where the checklists came from in the first place.
Then
Multi-unit responsibilityCost structure, SOPs and KPIs across networks — including a 24-location operation.
Later
Franchise packagingTurning an operation that works into one someone else can run to the same standard.
Now
Kitchen ArchitectsThe same method, applied to US restaurants and groups of up to 10 locations — and revised every year it's been used. Delivery platforms, labor costs and supplier behaviour have all changed since 2000; a checklist that hadn't changed with them would be worth nothing.

This checklist isn't a distillation of industry articles. It's the sequence she actually walks when she opens a restaurant's numbers for the first time — the same order, the same questions, the same thresholds.

It has been rewritten many times since. The order of the five zones has barely moved in twenty-five years, because that's the order money leaves a restaurant. The individual checks and their thresholds have changed a great deal: third-party delivery didn't exist as a line item, labor didn't cost what it costs now, and neither did the software most groups run on. What you get is the current version, not an old one reprinted.

It's published as-is because the method isn't the scarce part. Doing it every week, in every location, without the owner holding it together personally — that's the scarce part.

Kitchen Architects is the restaurant operations practice at ElevexMedia. Not design, not branding, not construction — cost structure, SOPs, KPIs, and consistency between locations.

What this document is and isn't. It's a diagnostic checklist based on experience running restaurants and groups of them. It is not accounting, tax or legal advice, and it doesn't promise a financial result — what you find depends on your business, and so does what it's worth.

Where the numbers come from. Wherever this checklist gives a range or a threshold, it comes from published industry data or from operating practice, and it says which.

Your data. Your email is used to send you this file and, if you consent, occasional material on restaurant operations — never more than once a week. We use no bulk-email platform, we don't sell or share personal information, and a single reply ends it. See our Privacy Policy and Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information.

Get the checklist

Send me the 25 checks

Free, no call, and a real person on the other end of the reply.

1
25 checks across 5 zonesOrdered by how much money they move, not by how easy they are to explain.
2
What "normal" looks likeFor each check — the range a healthy operation sits in, so a number means something.
3
What to do about itThe first corrective step for each finding. Several cost nothing but attention.
Our rule about your inbox
  • No mailing platform, no automation, no sequence running in the background
  • Your address goes to no one — never sold, never rented, never shared
  • A person writes it and a person sends it
  • One line back and it stops — there was never a list running you

Why give the method away? It's twenty-five years of practice, and handing it over costs us nothing but the pride of keeping it secret. If it helps and we never hear from you, that's a fair outcome. If one day you'd rather someone did this work with you, you'll already know how we operate.

Send me the 25 checks
Get the checklist
Free, no call, and a real person on the other end of the reply.
25 checks across 5 zones
Ordered by how much money they move, not by how easy they are to explain.
What "normal" looks like
For each check — the range a healthy group sits in, so a number means something.
What to do about it
The first corrective step for each finding. Several cost nothing but attention.
1
3
Our rule about your inbox
  • No mailing platform, no automation, no sequence running in the background
  • Your address goes to no one — never sold, never rented, never shared
  • A person writes it and a person sends it
  • One line back and it stops — there was never a list running you

Why give the method away? It's twenty-five years of practice, and handing it over costs us nothing but the pride of keeping it secret. If it helps and we never hear from you, that's a fair outcome. If one day you'd rather someone did this work with you, you'll already know how we operate.
2