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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.”
First came stock
The first thing they focused on was their cost of goods. Steve started using Loaded’s stock module to see what was actually driving profitability.
“When you open the report, it shows you your top-selling items first. You instantly know what to focus on. Like, don’t waste time fixing something that makes you $200 a week - fix the thing that makes you $4,000 and has a margin problem.”
That shift alone saved them over $60,000 in one year.
“Same turnover, $60K less in food purchases. My accountant was confused. He thought we must have changed suppliers or stopped selling something. But it was just about knowing where to focus. We had a $60k problem, and we’d fixed it.”
The team now does a full stocktake every month. When they see a variance on a key item, they pick it apart. One example: mushrooms. They were losing nearly 40 kilos a month - about $500 in value.
“Could be over-portioning, could be POS misalignment, could be the recipe setup. But just focusing on that one item could save us six grand a year.”
Multiply that by ten items, and you’re suddenly tuning real profit back into the business. And all of that happens in one module of Loaded.
They then started building strong systems into every part of their operation. Purchase orders are generated for every supplier. Deliveries are checked and scanned by the kitchen team into Google Drive. Loaded’s AI-powered invoice processing pulls everything in automatically.
“We have a Google Drive folder - the team scans to the folder, then we use technology that automatically uploads that to Loaded. At the end of the week I just cross check it all. What used to take five minutes per invoice now takes thirty seconds. We do 50 to 60 invoices a week. That’s hours back every single week. Probably a full month of working time, every year.”
That shift in time has changed Steve’s role completely.
“I used to work 80 hours a week in the business, across two venues. Now I spend maybe 10. The rest is strategy, coaching the team, planning what we’re going to improve next. I’m still working, but it’s a different kind of work.”
Next up, a rostering system the whole team bought into
One of the biggest changes came when they shifted from Deputy and Tanda to using Loaded’s time module.
“Those are great platforms, but they’re not built specifically for hospitality. Loaded does what we need, and it’s in the same system as everything else.”
Now they build rosters based on real data - order volume segmented by 30-minute blocks, sales trends from the same week last year, and a clear labour target. They aim for 35%. If the team hits the sales target, they share in the win.
“Sometimes it’s an extra $1.50 an hour. Everyone sees the target, sees how we’re tracking, and it keeps them focused.”
They also use the budget module to forecast the week ahead, compare it against last year, and set sales targets the team actually buys into.
“We screenshot the forecast, feed it into AI, ask it to distribute the sales with a 35% labour cost, and build everything around that. Then if we hit it, we bonus the team. It works really well.”
Loaded has been a hospitality advice partner, not just software
For Steve, Loaded has been like a roadmap to get to where he and his family wanted to go. “You watch Loaded’s trainings, you follow their playbooks, and everything just starts to make sense. It’s not rocket science. But once you understand it, you can’t unsee it. The way we run our venues now is literally bulletproof thanks to Loaded and the systems that Rich and the guys have taught.”
And they’re not done yet. A third venue is on the cards, but only when the systems are rock solid.
“I wouldn’t open another place until I can look at the data and say: COGS are here, labour’s here, profit’s predictable. I need to see that week in and week out. If the systems aren’t working, you’ll just replicate the problem.”
A word they once new well, but have long since moved past. From $60K in the red to over 20% net profit in both venues. From not knowing their numbers to coaching their team with them. And at every step, Loaded has been central.
“Honestly? If we hadn’t made the shift to Loaded, I don’t think we’d still be running today.”
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See how Loaded can work for your business
If you’ve never seen Loaded in action, jump over and book a demo with us. 30 minutes is all we’ll need to show you the magic!
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Season 2: Spring Bootcamp for a Money-Making Summer
We've poured our 100+ combined years of hospitality experience into a series of live and recorded webinars that will be your bootcamp for a money-making summer.
