BITE-SIZED (what’s inside)
LESSON LEARNED
Busy is not the same as profitable
Last issue I told you about a weekend where we did 4,300 people in an hour.
Here's the part I didn't tell you.
Some of our biggest, most packed days at the Lime Truck — the ones that felt like wins, where the line never stopped and everyone left exhausted and proud — didn't actually make money.
Not because sales were bad. Sales were huge.
Because I put too many people on.
When you know it's going to be busy, the instinct is to overstaff — "better safe than sorry." So you stack the schedule. And the day feels incredible. But three weeks later you look at the P&L and the great weekend quietly cost you.
The number that would've told me the truth in real time is one most operators never actually run: labor as a percentage of sales.
▶️ I built a free worksheet so you can run this on your own numbers in 5 minutes — Get the Labor Cost Worksheet →
THE PLAYBOOK
The 5-minute labor check
It's simpler than it sounds. Three steps.
1. Add up the labor for the shift. Every person's hourly rate × hours worked, for everyone who touched that shift — BOH, FOH, dish, you. Then add ~15-20% on top for payroll taxes and benefits (the part people forget). That's your true labor cost.
2. Divide by sales for that same shift. Labor ÷ sales = your labor %. That's it.
3. Compare it to your target. Most full-service targets land around 28-32%. Here's the gut-punch: a slammed weekend that ran 38% labor when your target is 30% means you were busy losing money — you'd have made more with fewer people and slightly longer waits.
Run it on your best weekend. Then run it on a normal Tuesday. The Tuesday is usually more profitable than you think, and the "great" weekend is usually less.
Three takeaways:
Sales tell you how busy you were. Labor % tells you if it was worth it.
Overstaffing hides inside a good vibe. The P&L finds it three weeks later.
You can't fix in hindsight what you don't measure in real time.
ON THE PASS
The reason I care about this stuff so much: every business I've built — the truck, Snibbs — lives or dies on the boring math nobody wants to run. The magic is real, but the margin is where you survive long enough to make magic again.
THE CHALLENGE
This week: pull one great weekend and one normal weekday. Run labor % on both. I'd bet money the gap surprises you.
▶️ The worksheet does the math for you — Get the Labor Cost Worksheet →
Until next time,
Daniel
P.S. If you know an operator flying blind on their labor — the kind who's always busy but never sure if it's working — forward them this worksheet. It might be the most useful thing they open all month.