Hospitality Isn’t Failing Because the Vibe Is Wrong

It’s Failing Because the Maths Is Shit

There’s a sentence I hear so often in this trade it should be printed on the back of every apron.

We’re busy every week. Flat out. Still skint.

That sentence alone tells you everything you need to know, if you’re prepared to listen to it properly. Because busy is not a financial metric. Busy is a feeling. Maths doesn’t care how it feels.

I’m standing in a bar not long ago. Good one. Proper one. Beer’s right, staff know their jobs, place has a pulse. They’re turning over about thirteen and a half grand a week. Not hypothetical money. Real tills. Real pints. Real cash.

Then we look at labour. Just over five grand a week. Call it five-one. That’s thirty-eight percent of turnover gone before you’ve paid rent, rates, power, music, insurance, repairs, broken glass, or the endless parade of “small” costs that quietly eat you alive.

For a wet-led bar, thirty-eight percent isn’t a wobble. It’s a structural problem.

They tell me their target is thirty percent. Everyone says thirty percent. It’s the number people say when they know they should be in control. So we do the simplest bit of maths in the world.

If you keep spending five-one a week on labour and you want that to be thirty percent, you need to be turning over just over seventeen grand. Not once. Not on a sunny bank holiday. Every week. That’s an extra three and a half grand appearing out of thin air. Three and a half grand a week because the rota’s too fat.

The other side of that equation is less glamorous but much more achievable. Thirty percent of thirteen and a half grand is just over four grand. Four-oh-five. Which means they’re overspending roughly a grand a week on labour. Not on growth. Not on improving service. Just on standing around because it feels safer.

A grand a week doesn’t sound dramatic until you multiply it by fifty-two. Then you’re staring at more than fifty grand a year leaking out through the rota. Fifty grand that never shows up as a line item. It just vanishes and everyone shrugs.

Nobody wanted to fire anyone. Nobody needed to. One midweek shift that barely scraped two grand went from five staff to three. Opens stopped starting ninety minutes before trade because that’s how it’s always been done. Closes stopped involving half the bar on a Wednesday night when there were four people left drinking water.

They didn’t even chase perfection. Labour came back to around four-three a week. Thirty-two percent. Still not textbook, but suddenly the place is saving about eight hundred quid a week. That’s forty-odd grand a year. Same staff. Same service. Same bar. The only casualty was denial.

This is where most places get it wrong. They think failure comes from bad cooking, warm beer, or the wrong font on the menu. Sometimes that matters. Most of the time it doesn’t. What kills businesses is rotas built on fear instead of facts. Staffing for the worst day you ever had instead of the average day you actually live in.

Percentages get people into trouble too. You can stare at a labour percentage all day and still miss the point. What matters is what each hour earns. If you’re paying fifteen quid an hour and that hour is only generating forty quid in sales, you’re working for practice. If it costs you four quid in labour every time someone spends fifteen at the bar, your margin’s already on life support.

The most dangerous number of all is the one no one knows. Break-even. Not annually. Not when summer hits. This week. The number that covers rent, rates, utilities, core staff, and all the boring stuff you can’t switch off. If you don’t know that number, you’re not running a business. You’re gambling.

People resist this because hospitality is emotional. Because you don’t want to be the bad guy. Because sending someone home early feels personal. Because everyone remembers the one Friday when they were short and it was carnage. So they overcorrect forever and quietly bleed instead.

Here’s the part no one likes hearing. Being too soft with the rota doesn’t protect your team. It puts them at risk. Because when the numbers finally break, they break hard. And they don’t care how nice you were.

You can be busy and broke. You can be popular and insolvent. You can be packed to the rafters and still going backwards at eight hundred quid a week without noticing.

Hospitality doesn’t reward effort. It rewards control.

If this feels uncomfortably familiar, that’s a good thing. It means the problem is probably fixable. You don’t need a rebrand. You don’t need a new concept. You don’t need a consultant with a podcast voice and a deck full of arrows.

You need a calculator. You need your last eight weeks of numbers. And you need the nerve to stop pretending it’ll all sort itself out.

This isn’t a romance. It’s not a calling. It’s not a vibe.

It’s a blood sport.

And the maths always wins.