Leverage Points in Restaurant Operations
Applying Meadows' framework to hospitality systems
Most restaurant consulting focuses on the wrong things. Labor percentage, food cost, ticket times—these are all parameters (leverage point 12, the weakest).
Where Real Leverage Lives
Information Flows (Level 6)
Who knows what, and when? A line cook who can see ticket patterns in real-time makes better prep decisions than one who gets a printout at the end of the day.
Toast POS becomes a leverage tool not because of its features, but because of how it surfaces information to decision-makers.
Rules (Level 5)
The unwritten rules of a restaurant determine everything. “We don’t 86 items until they’re actually gone” vs “We 86 when we hit 3 portions” fundamentally changes behavior.
Goals (Level 3)
A restaurant optimizing for covers behaves differently than one optimizing for guest experience. Both can be profitable—but the systems that emerge are radically different.
The Chatham Squire Lessons
Six years taught me that the difference between good shifts and bad shifts rarely came down to staffing levels. It came down to:
- Whether the right information reached the right people
- Whether the implicit rules were aligned with the explicit goals
- Whether the team understood why certain patterns worked
Meadows’ framework gives language to what experienced operators feel intuitively.
Questions I’m Still Exploring
- How do you shift paradigms in a restaurant with 30+ years of history?
- Where does the collective concept fit in this framework?