I’m Josh Kopel, a Michelin-awarded restaurateur and the creator of the Restaurant Scaling System. I’ve spent decades in the industry, building, scaling, and coaching restaurants to become more profitable and sustainable. On this show, I cut through the noise to give you real, actionable strategies that help independent restaurant owners run smarter, more successful businesses.

In this episode, I dig into the importance of identifying and solving the recurring problems we face in restaurant operations. I talk about the need to move away from constant firefighting and start getting to the root causes of our issues. I also share how we can leverage AI to document our processes and build systems that prevent these problems from popping up again. This conversation is packed with actionable strategies to help restaurateurs boost efficiency, drive profitability, and ultimately create a more sustainable business model.

Takeaways:

Money makes every other problem a minor inconvenience.
If your to-do list looks the same week after week, you have a pattern.
Most restaurants fail due to a thousand tiny cuts, not one big issue.
Track the top five recurring frustrations weekly to identify patterns.
Use AI to catalog breakdowns and cluster them into themes.
Document solutions to problems to create self-correcting systems.
Leadership involves delegating playbooks, not problems.
Regularly review and improve your systems to avoid being trapped in them.
Solving patterns leads to freedom in restaurant management.
Engage in a weekly sync to log recurring issues and solutions.

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction to Restaurant Profitability
02:06 Identifying and Solving Recurring Problems
06:02 Leveraging AI for Operational Efficiency
07:01 Building Sustainable Systems for Growth

If you’ve got a marketing or profitability related question for me, email me directly at josh@joshkopel.com and include Office Hours in the subject line. If you'd like to scale the profitability of your restaurant in only 5 days, sign up for our FREE 5 Day Restaurant Profitability Challenge by visiting https://joshkopel.com.

The core of my vocation