How to Control Labour Costs Across Multiple Venues (Before They Sink You)

There is a specific thing that happens to most operators when they grow past three venues. It is rarely that all your sites are running slightly over on labour. What usually happens is more concentrated than that — one or two venues are managing their labour well, and one or two are a complete blowout. Those blowout sites don't just have a labour problem. They consume the margin that your well-run venues are generating and drag the profitability of the entire group down with them. By the time some sort of review surfaces it, months of margin have already gone, and it's not like you can just fix it overnight.

The problem is almost never the GMs. The problem is that each GM is making independent rostering and shift management decisions with no shared framework, no common target, and no visibility into how their site compares to the rest of the group. They're not making bad decisions, they're just making uninformed ones. And without a system that surfaces the poor results while there's still time to act, the blowout keeps running — and the rest of the group keeps paying for it.

This guide covers why labour management breaks down at scale, what the operational fix looks like across a group, and what the weekly discipline looks like when it works.

Why Labour Gets Harder With Every Venue You Add

At one venue, the person building the roster is usually you, or someone you've trained closely enough that their decisions reflect yours. There is a direct line between the labour target, the person scheduling the shifts, and what you actually pay.

At three venues, you have three GMs (or similar) building three rosters, each working from their own instincts, their own reading of the coming week, and whatever approach they developed before they joined your group. One might be naturally conservative with staffing and almost always comes in under target. Another tends to over-roster on quiet midweeks. A third calls in extra casuals during busy services rather than building a roster that anticipates the demand.

None of these approaches is obviously wrong. The problem is that they're all different, and without a shared framework and shared visibility, there's no way to compare what each site is actually doing or course-correct each day as the real world plays out.

The weekly labour cost report, if it exists, typically arrives on Monday morning and covers last week. By the time a site that ran 4% over its labour target is flagged, the shifts are paid, the week is closed, and the only remaining question is whether you have time to investigate before the next week unfolds in exactly the same way.

Where Most Groups Go Wrong

No sales budgets or labour targets before the roster is built

The most common failure in multi-venue labour management is that each GM builds their roster without a clear understanding of what the sales target for that day is, and what the trend of sales is likely to look like across the day. They're building the roster based on their own intuition, rather than leveraging the smarts of the information that already exists across the business.

When the roster cost "is what it is" you have no lever. The roster is already locked in and the staff have it in their hands before anyone has checked whether the labour percentage is acceptable. You end up managing labour reactively — reviewing what was spent rather than shaping what gets spent.

Labour reviewed monthly rather than daily

Monthly averages hide the day-to-day and week-to-week variance that actually tells you what's happening. A month where three weeks are fine and one week is a disaster averages out to "a bit over." The same month looked at daily and weekly shows you exactly which days and weeks broke the pattern.

No group-level comparison between sites

Reviewing each site's labour in isolation means you're always interpreting absolute numbers — "$14,000 on labour this week" — without context. Labour as a percentage of revenue, compared across all sites simultaneously, is the number that actually tells you something. A site running at 34% when your group average is 28% is a signal. Buried in its own report, it's invisible.

What Good Labour Management Looks Like Across a Group

1. A weekly sales target and labour budget before any roster is built

Every GM receives a labour cost target, expressed as a percentage of forecast revenue, within their rostering platform. This converts labour management from reactive to proactive.

The target is calculated from the venue's forecast revenue for the week, adjusted for any known factors — a public holiday, a private function, a historically quiet period. Most high performing venues in Australia and New Zealand target labour between 25–32% of revenue depending on their format. The target is set before the roster is built. The GM's job is to build a schedule that delivers the service the venue needs inside that target.

2. A daily accountability loop during the week

At the end of each shift, the GM or shift manager answers two questions. Were sales ahead or behind the day's revenue forecast? Did labour run over or under the roster?

The rule that works across all formats: if sales are ahead of forecast, aim to bring labour in under the percentage target. If sales are behind forecast, aim to bring labour in under the dollar value of the planned roster. This gives managers a practical framework without requiring head office involvement in every shift decision. Pairing this with a management incentive structure gives GMs a personal stake in hitting the target every week, not just when it's easy.

When every site is running this discipline, problems surface on the day they happen. A site running 3% over on a Tuesday is something a GM can help to fix with good management on Wednesday. A site that has been running 3% over for four weeks shows up in a monthly report as a problem nobody can do anything about.

3. A weekly group-level view that compares every site

Once each site is building rosters against a target and tracking actuals daily, the weekly group report becomes the management tool it should be. Labour cost as a percentage of revenue, tracked by site, for the same period, on the same basis. You can see instantly which sites are performing and which aren't.

A site running at 34% labour when your group average is 28% is telling you something specific. It might be a rostering discipline issue. It might be a revenue problem making the percentage look worse than the dollar spend warrants. You won't know until you investigate — but you can only investigate when the report surfaces the variance in the first place.

We built this discipline across our 12-venue group and the daily accountability habit recovered roughly $50,000 a year in labour margin for every $1 million in revenue. Across the group over time, that number was significant. For a framework showing how labour sits alongside your other key cost lines, our hospitality group P&L template is worth a look.

How Technology Supports Group-Level Labour Management

The systems above require data to flow from every site to a central view. When each venue is running its rostering and timeclock separately, assembling a group-level labour view is a manual exercise — pulling numbers from multiple sources, converting to percentages, building a comparison table. It takes time, it's usually slightly wrong, and by the time it's done the decisions it should inform have already been made.

Dane Wall runs two venues — Swann and Commons — in New Zealand. When he opened his second site he quickly found himself working 70-hour weeks and unable to explain where the money was going. For three weeks straight, both venues were sitting at close to 50% labour cost. "I was writing careful rosters and then watching thousands of dollars vanish when it came time to process pay. I had zero idea where it was going."

The turning point was connecting his timeclock data to his roster in real time. Once he could see when people were actually starting and finishing — not just when they were rostered — the picture became clear. "We'd write the roster, but people just wouldn't stick to it. Once we had real-time clock-ins, we could say to a manager, 'Hey, this person was rostered for seven hours, but worked ten.' And anyone who's dealt with chefs knows exactly what I'm talking about." Swann is now running at 33–35% labour cost. The gap between his two sites has been useful too — it's surfaced operational blind spots at Commons that would otherwise have been invisible.

Loaded connects rostering, timeclock, and revenue reporting across all your venues in one platform. GMs build rosters against a live labour cost target before the week starts. Timeclock data flows against the roster automatically so actual versus planned is visible in real time. The weekly group report shows every site's labour cost percentage side by side without anyone having to compile it.

If you're running three or more venues and your GMs are building rosters without a shared weekly target, or your labour review happens after the payroll run rather than during the week, it is worth seeing how a connected platform changes the workflow.

Book a chat with our hospitality team — they've all run venues like yours.

For the single-venue fundamentals: How to Reduce Labour Costs in a Restaurant or Bar.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you manage labour costs across multiple restaurant venues?

The three disciplines that matter most are: a weekly labour budget expressed as a percentage of forecast revenue, set before any roster is built; a daily accountability loop where GMs track actuals against the roster; and a weekly group report that shows labour cost percentage by site on the same basis. Groups that run all three find that the variance between sites narrows significantly within two to three months.

What is a good labour cost percentage for a hospitality group in Australia?

Most full-service restaurants and bars in Australia and New Zealand target labour between 25–32% of revenue. Quick-service venues typically run 20–25%; fine dining at the higher end. For a multi-venue group, the more useful number is the variance between sites — a group where every venue is hitting 30% is in better shape than one where the average is 28% but individual sites range from 22% to 38%.

How often should a hospitality group review labour costs?

Weekly is the minimum. Monthly review tells you what happened four weeks ago. Daily tracking during the week catches problems while there is still time to act. For a group, the weekly cross-site report reviewed on Monday morning is the right cadence.

Why does labour management get harder with more venues?

Because the number of independent decision-makers increases faster than the oversight capacity. At one venue, the roster builder is accountable directly to the owner. At three venues, three GMs are making independent decisions with their own instincts, with limited visibility to each other or to head office until after the week is done.

Multi-Venue Operations Series

This guide is part of Loaded's multi-venue hospitality management series for operators in Australia and New Zealand.

• How to manage multiple hospitality venues: the complete guide
• How to maintain consistency across multiple restaurant venues
• Multi-venue stock control
• How to Reduce Labour Costs in a Restaurant or Bar
• How to compare performance across multiple restaurant venues