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The Install: The Creep Sheet in a Restaurant
This week’s teardown found about nine thousand dollars a month hiding in an auto repair shop’s pricing file. This Install walks The Creep Sheet into a restaurant, where costs arrive with every delivery and the menu price changes once a year, if that.
Your food cost is an average, and an average is where the problem hides. Here is the sheet at work in a kitchen.
A fourteen dollar chicken dish that cost four twenty to plate a year ago costs five oh four today. Same recipe, same portion, same price on the board, and the margin has slid from seventy percent to sixty four without anybody deciding it. A worked example, not a client.
Twenty Dishes, Three Columns
Write down your twenty highest volume dishes, not the whole menu. Column one is what each cost you twelve months ago, from last September’s invoices. Column two is what it costs today. Column three is what you charge. One page, with a date on it.
The Eight Percent Rule
Circle every row where the cost is up more than eight percent and the price has not moved. Below eight percent is normal supplier noise. It is never all twenty. It is three or four rows, and they are almost always the dishes you sell most and would have sworn were fine.
Four Decisions for a Circled Row
Raise the price, and on a fourteen dollar dish the move back is about eighty four cents, not a new menu. Change the portion, because busy kitchens drift. Change the spec, a different cut or supplier. Or take it off, because a dish that cannot carry its own cost is a subsidy. One decision at a time, then let it run a month.
The Creep Sheet is inside the free Small Business MBA.
Twenty rows, three columns and the eight percent rule, as a fillable page in the app, not a download you have to print. It is free, it is not a trial, and every tool this season lands there.
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