You’re Asking the Wrong Question About Staff

It was never about how many people you have. It’s about how much each one can get done.

When wage costs go up, nearly every operator asks the same thing: how many staff do we really need? It sounds like the sensible, hard-nosed question. But it’s the wrong one.

Here’s why; cutting a shift saves you money on wages, which you can see straight away on the rota. But it also costs you all the work those people would have done: the drinks not carried, the tables not turned and importantly the customers not looked after. You’ve trimmed the cost and trimmed the takings right along with it. The better question, the one the operators pulling ahead are asking, is a completely different one: how much can each person we’ve already got actually get done on a shift?

Those two questions sound similar. They lead to opposite places. The first has you hiring fewer, cheaper people and running on empty. The second has you giving the people you’ve already got the tools to do far more. 

One good waiter, three who are struggling

Picture the difference on the floor. One person who can put an order through in under a minute, knows the menu inside out, doesn’t need to fetch a manager every time someone wants to add a bottle of wine, and can keep an eye on the bar and the tables at the same time. Now picture three people fighting a slow, fiddly system, no clear idea what’s on special tonight, all of them a step behind.

The first person is worth more than the other three put together, and costs you a third as much in wages. That’s the whole point in a sentence. When you’ve got big bills to cover every month whether you’re busy or not, the thing that makes you money is simply serving more people well. Cut the staff who do that, and you almost always lose more than you save, because you’ve shrunk the very thing that fills the room and turns the tables. The problem was never how many people you’ve got. It’s how much each one can get done before something slow gets in the way.

The question worth flipping on its head

Most operators size up a new system by asking “can we afford it?” That already puts it in the wrong box: a cost, something to squeeze into a tight budget, put off when money’s tight, treat with suspicion. The operators whose profits are growing ask it the other way round. Not “can we afford to do this?” but “what’s it costing us every month that we haven’t done it?”

That flip changes everything, because now you’re looking at both sides. If a system helps one member of staff comfortably do the work it used to take one and a half people to manage, it isn’t really a cost at all. It pays for itself, and you can work out roughly how quickly. It stops being another bill to keep down and becomes a way of bringing more money in, which is what it should have been all along.

Four questions that tell you the truth

Running your staffing on gut feel gets expensive fast. You don’t need a finance degree to stay on top of it, though. You just need to ask yourself four simple questions, and keep an eye on the answers over time. They’ll warn you that your wage bill and your takings are drifting apart long before it shows up in the monthly accounts review.

For every hour of staff time you pay for, how much are you taking? That’s the clearest single sign of whether your staffing and your sales are in step. How long does it take to put an order through the till? Shave that down and the same team can serve more people, with nobody extra scheduled on. How many times does a table turn on your busiest night? Once your bills for the day are covered, every extra seat is close to pure profit. And does your stock actually match what the system says you should have? The gap between the two is the clearest sign of waste and sloppy habits.

As a rough guide, wages usually eat up somewhere between a third and just over a third of what a hospitality venue takes. If yours is creeping up while the amount you take per staff hour stays flat, that’s your early warning. Far better to catch it on a Tuesday than to find out three months later when the accounts land.

When cutting really is the right call

This isn’t a claim that cutting is always wrong, and it’d be dishonest to pretend otherwise. If you’re a single site that isn’t yet covering its costs, spending on new kit before you’ve fixed the basics is putting the cart before the horse. Work out why the sums don’t add up first, whether that’s your prices, your numbers through the door or what you sell. And if you’re a genuinely quiet place with few customers, a new system might cost more than the extra it helps you earn. Be honest with yourself about that.

But cutting on its own – the reaction again and again every time wages rise - is almost never enough. For most established venues that are comfortably covering their costs, the honest answer holds: the way through rising wages isn’t fewer people doing less. It’s the same good people, set free to do far more.

At Truli we start with your numbers, not a sales demo: what each customer is really worth to you, and where your team’s time is quietly leaking away.

That’s the honest place to begin. truli.co.uk  |  01580 231 880