Short YouTube advice from Donald Burns advising restaurant owners to focus on profit (what you keep) rather than sales (a ‘vanity metric’). Burns contrasts two models — a $3M restaurant at 2% profit vs. a $1M restaurant at 20% profit — and argues the latter is preferable; he emphasizes prioritization: 'If everything is important, nothing is important.'
A lot of restaurant owners get off track because they focus on the wrong things. The wrong things are they start looking at sales. Sales, to me, is a vanity metric. So many restaurant owners get so caught up on the sales numbers, it's not what you make, it's what you keep. Would you rather have a $3 million restaurant doing 2% profit, or would you rather have a $1 million restaurant doing 20% profit? I don't know about you. I'll take the 20% model every single day. If everything is important, nothing is important. To remember this stuff, you got to focus on the right things.
If your restaurant only works because you work 80 hours a week, it doesn't work.
