From $60k in the red to a 20% net profit operation

Steve didn’t set out to run a multi-venue hospitality business. He was running an acupuncture clinic. His wife, who had owned a small restaurant years earlier, was looking for something new. So they opened one together - a family operation in every sense. His wife took the kitchen, his son worked beside her. Steve was out front with their daughter, plus a handful of juniors. And together, they built something great.

“We didn’t even cost recipes,” Steve says. “It just worked. The kitchen was tight because my wife’s sharp, and the floor worked because it was us and a few good juniors.”

That first venue filled quickly. By winter, people were queuing from the counter, down the stairs, and onto the footpath. So when a large café space came up for sale nearby, they jumped at it. The idea was to shift their restaurant into the bigger space while keeping the café running too.

But taking on that second site changed everything.

“We inherited 27 staff and significantly higher turnover,” Steve says. “And suddenly, I wasn’t managing a tight little family unit anymore - I was trying to run two venues, and one of them was chaos.”

The $60,000 problem

The systems they inherited were non-existent. Stock counts were done on printed sheets. Staff would run to the supermarket mid-service. Coffee dockets were getting ripped in half because cold drinks and hot drinks were printing to the same station. Even with high volume, it was hard to keep up. But nothing hit as hard as the accountant’s words after a full winter of trade.

“He goes, ‘Do you want the good news or the bad?’ I said start with the bad. He told me we’d lost $60,000.”

That was the moment it all shifted. Steve sat the family down. “I said, we can’t keep doing this. Do we sell it and go back to what we know, or do we figure it out?” The answer was unanimous - they were going to make it work.

There was just one problem.

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” Steve says. “My background isn’t hospo. I’ve spent 25 years in Chinese medicine. I know how to look after people, but I had no idea how to run a venue properly. So I got a coach.”

The first conversation laid it bare. What are your labour costs? No idea. What’s your food cost percentage? No idea. What’s your average transaction value? No idea. 

“They just looked at me and said, well, no wonder you're in a mess.”

From there, he started tracking in spreadsheets. Costing recipes. Trying to understand where the money was going. And slowly, things got better. But it wasn’t until he started working with James O’Connell from The Hospitality Company - someone who specialises in turning hospitality operations around - that everything stepped up. And it started with James telling him to switch to Loaded.

“We’d used another software before, but James recommended Loaded and it was the best decision we made. It’s the way the reports are laid out. It’s all so…obvious. You can just feel it’s built by people who’ve actually run venues.”