Restaurants & Cafes Solutions

Every restaurant owner I’ve consulted with has the same conversation around month three of working together. We’re sitting in their office after the dinner rush, surrounded by vendor invoices, health department checklists, and staff schedule printouts. The conversation goes like this:

“I opened this place because I love food. I wanted to create something special for my community. But I spend maybe 20% of my day on food and service. The other 80%? Scheduling staff who don’t show up. Chasing down suppliers. Logging temperatures for HACCP. Reconciling cash. Responding to Google reviews. Updating menu costs in three different systems when beef prices spike.”

They pause, exhausted.

“This isn’t what I signed up for.”

The 3-5% Margin Reality

Here’s the brutal math of restaurant operations: you’re probably running on a 3-5% net profit margin. Full-service restaurants average 3-5%. Quick-service might hit 6-9% if you’re lucky. Food trucks, cafes—same story.

Your prime cost (food + labor) is eating 55-65% of revenue. Rent, utilities, insurance take another chunk. What’s left? That thin slice of profit that evaporates the moment:

• Your food cost creeps up 2% (that’s 50% of your profit margin gone)
• You overschedule staff by one shift per day (there goes another $15,000 annually)
• You lose a week of revenue to a health code violation from a missed HACCP log

Every inefficiency isn’t just annoying. It’s existential.

The Tool Fragmentation Problem

The restaurant technology ecosystem has exploded over the past decade. You’re probably using:

• Toast or Square for your POS
• 7shifts or Homebase for scheduling
• MarketMan or spreadsheets for inventory
• QuickBooks for accounting
• Gmail and phone calls for supplier ordering
• Paper checklists for HACCP compliance
• Manual processes for review management, catering inquiries, onboarding

Each tool solves one problem. But restaurants don’t run on isolated tasks—they run on workflows that span multiple systems:

• A catering inquiry should trigger quote generation, inventory ordering, staff scheduling, kitchen prep tasks, and follow-up emails.
• A failed temperature check should notify the manager, create a corrective action task, log the incident, and flag it for the next health inspection.
• A negative Google review should trigger a recovery workflow: alert the owner, create a response draft, send an apology offer to the guest, and analyze if this is a recurring complaint.

Nobody automates these cross-system workflows. Toast schedules staff. 7shifts doesn’t talk to your suppliers. MarketMan tracks inventory but doesn’t know about your Friday catering event. Your HACCP logs sit in Jolt, disconnected from your actual operations.

What Makes Independent Restaurants Different

All the restaurant automation content out there assumes you’re a multi-location operation with 20+ employees and dedicated managers for each function. But that’s not the reality for most independent operators:

• You’re a single location with 3-10 employees
• You’re the owner-operator wearing all the hats: chef, manager, scheduler, bookkeeper, marketer
• You work with a mix of major distributors (Sysco, US Foods) and specialty vendors (the farmer you call on Thursdays, the bakery that delivers Tuesday mornings)
• You’re budget-conscious and value-driven—you can’t drop $500/month per tool

You need automation that scales down. Workflows that make sense for a 5-person cafe and a 50-person restaurant.

The Problems We Solve

Over the next 12 pages, I’ll walk you through the automation workflows I’ve built with independent restaurant owners—workflows that saved them 10-15 hours per week and protected their razor-thin margins:

1. Staff scheduling chaos - When the Friday night shift implodes
2. Supplier ordering - Thursday morning calling seven vendors
3. Food safety compliance - HACCP logs when the inspector shows up unannounced
4. Inventory tracking - The 4-hour monthly task managers hate
5. Review management - When a 1-star review sits unanswered
6. Catering workflows - From “can you do 50 people?” to execution
7. Staff onboarding - When your new server quits on day three
8. Cash reconciliation - 30-minute nightly task that never gets easier
9. Health inspection prep - 48 hours to prove you’re always compliant
10. Food cost tracking - When beef prices spike 20% and nobody notices
11. Customer feedback loops - Complaints that go nowhere
12. Menu planning - Seasonal transitions with zero profitability analysis

These aren’t generic automation tips. These are battle-tested workflows from real restaurants operating on real margins in the real world.

Let’s get started.