Your restaurant is losing money — and the P&L won't tell you where.
A crisis in a restaurant rarely looks like falling sales. More often the room is full, the reviews are fine, and the money still disappears — into food cost, waste, scheduling and portions nobody is watching. While you're putting out fires, the leaks run every single service.
Tatyana Mikheenkova Six signs a restaurant is already in trouble
None of these show up as a bad month. They show up as a year that ends with less money than it should have.
Revenue holds — profit doesn't
The top line looks the same as last year. What reaches you at the end of the month keeps shrinking, and nobody can point to the reason.
Prime cost past 65%
Food and labor together have crossed into the danger zone. Every point above it comes straight out of your profit.
The reports look tidy
The numbers you're shown are clean and calm. The inventory count, the waste log and the voids tell a different story — if anyone reads them.
The business depends on one manager's mood
When your GM is on, the shift runs. When they're off, it doesn't. Standards live in one person's head, so quality leaves with them.
You're firefighting instead of owning
Suppliers, turnover, guest complaints — every day is triage. There's no week where you work on the business rather than in it.
The menu is carrying dead weight
Dishes that sell well but earn nothing, recipes that drift from the costing card, portions that grow quietly at the pass.
A crisis is not always falling revenue
More often it's a set of small, invisible failures repeated a few hundred times a day. Nobody steals anything. Nobody makes an obvious mistake. The money simply never arrives — it leaves through the walk-in, the scale, the schedule and the register.
Illustrative structure, not a specific client result. Move prime cost a few points and the last segment changes more than anything else on the chart.
Five things that stop the losses
Not a report with recommendations. A written operating system your team runs — built in the order that returns money fastest.
Head-to-toe audit
Everything that touches margin gets read — not summarized for me, but read in the raw.
- P&L, food cost, labor cost, prime cost
- Waste, spoilage and write-offs
- Inventory counts and variance
- Voids, comps and discounts at the register
- Service flow and menu profitability
Cost of goods and the menu
The fastest money on the table, and the part most operations have never systematically checked.
- Recipe costing cards rebuilt and matched against what the kitchen actually plates
- Menu engineering — the dishes that sell well and earn nothing get fixed, repriced or cut
- Portion control at the pass, so the costing card stays true after week two
- Supplier terms and logistics reviewed — price, drop schedule, minimum orders
- Bar and beverage control: pour standards, variance, inventory by bottle
A system instead of a manager's memory
The point is simple: the business stops depending on who happens to be working today.
- SOPs for kitchen, front of house and back of house
- Job descriptions with the decisions each role owns
- Checklists for opening, service and close
- KPIs and a bonus structure tied to margin, not to activity
- HACCP module and internal audit routine
Accounting and control you can trust
So that what you see is the real picture, not the version prepared for the owner.
- Inventory procedure with a defined count cadence and responsibility
- Weekly reporting your managers produce in a fixed format
- Variance tracking — theoretical versus actual food cost
- A green / yellow / red view of the week you can read in two minutes
Documentation that stays after the engagement
Everything is written. Your managers train from it, new hires start from it, and it doesn't leave when a key person does.
- Training materials and standards, in writing, owned by you
- Train-the-Trainer handoff to your own managers
- Live documents — updated as the operation changes
- Readiness base for a second location or a franchise package, if that's where you're heading
Delivery is remote and written: video walkthroughs recorded by your team on an ordinary day, POS exports, structured questionnaires, and a local mystery guest. Training of your line staff is done by your managers from the materials I build — why remote works better here ↗
What changes, and roughly when
Cost control moves first because it's arithmetic. Behaviour and standards take longer, because people have to live with them.
Diagnosis
Written report: the three biggest leaks and where to start.
Cost stops bleeding
Purchasing, portions, waste and costing cards — the first visible change in food cost.
Standards hold
SOPs and checklists in daily use; the shift runs the same whoever opens it.
Numbers become visible
Weekly reporting and KPIs your managers produce without being chased.
It runs without me
And without your hourly control. From here, growth is a decision rather than a risk.
Timelines are typical, not guaranteed. Everything here depends on your team executing the changes — that is the part I cannot do for you, and I'd rather say so before you pay for anything.
Tatyana Mikheenkova
Twenty-five years running restaurant operations — carrying the P&L herself, not advising from the outside.
- Prime cost brought down from 71% to 66%
- Food waste cut in half — 8% to 4% of food sales
- Four franchise formats packaged from scratch — all still trading
What I will not promise you
A restaurant in trouble is exactly the situation where people get sold guarantees. Here is what you will not hear from me.
Not on offer
- A guaranteed profit number, a percentage, or a date by which you will hit it.
- A turnaround done for you while you stay out of it — your managers execute, I build and verify.
- Someone flying in to run your restaurant for a season.
- Measurable results in 30 days on a problem that took three years to build.
- Live training of your line staff, or calls with your team — this practice is written and remote.
What you do get
- A written diagnosis of where the money is going, free, before any commitment.
- An honest read — including “this part of your operation is fine, leave it alone.”
- A scope and a price sized to your situation, not a package you squeeze into.
- Documents that stay yours: SOPs, costing cards, checklists, KPIs.
- A system that keeps working after the engagement ends.
If the audit finds nothing serious, I say so
Some things in your restaurant are fine. Some are not. Telling you which is which is the whole job — a diagnosis that always finds a crisis is not a diagnosis, it is a sales call.
FAQ
If yours is not here, add it to the request form — I answer in writing.
Find out where the money is going — before the next quarter
Send the request. Fiorella replies within 24 hours on business days with a short written intake, and I come back with a read of your numbers. Free, remote, no obligation, and no call unless you ask for one.
Your information stays confidential; an NDA is available before we start, and I do not work with your direct competitors. Results depend on your team's execution — no business result is guaranteed. This is general information, not financial or legal advice.
The three or four places your profit is actually going, in order of size.
The correction that pays back fastest — and what can safely wait a quarter.
If the audit finds nothing serious, I say so. That answer is worth having too.