A short YouTube coaching monologue by Donald Burns about restaurant "prime cost" (food + labor). The speaker (45 years in industry, 17 years coaching) argues restaurants must choose whether to fight labor or food costs; when labor reductions are constrained (as with clients Mark and Ruth), focus on lowering turnover and retention. He also challenges common belief systems about the minimum achievable food-cost percentages (mentions a prior belief of ~18%).
Chapters
There's a common thing we talk about in restaurant coaching. It's called prime cost. Prime cost is your food cost. Labor cost. Yeah. And I would say, like, you got to pick which battle. If you can't fight the labor battle like Mark and Ruth have, I mean, their hands are kind of tied because the government has a very, very lot of rules, a lot of regulations out there. So they realize, like, we can't really fight the labor battle too much. What the best thing we do is, like, keep the staff retention, you know, as, you know, as much as possible, turnover low as possible, so we don't have to keep retraining people and spending money on training hours. The food cost is another area that I will tell you right now. I've been in this game 45 years. I've been coaching 17 years. And like a lot of people, there's certain, what we call a belief system. Belief systems are things that are, like, you just, like, little set rules or little barriers that you think it's like, that's the bottom. That's the. That's the lowest you can go. So for a long time before I met Mark and Ruth, I thought like, 8, 18%. I've had clients like, 18% fuka. That's the lowest. No one can ever beat late team.
