I think about this question a lot because I have lived it more times than I can count. An owner calls because they are struggling. We sit down, I walk the floor, I look at the numbers, I identify the problems clearly. I give specific recommendations. Some of them cost nothing to implement. And then nothing happens.
Why? I believe the answer is almost always ego.
The Profile of the Owner Who Does Not Listen
The pattern I see most consistently involves owners who came to the restaurant industry from another field where they had real success. They built a business. They made money. They retired or semi-retired and decided to open a restaurant because they thought it would be a good investment or a pleasant way to spend their time.
And because they had success in their previous field, they carry into the restaurant the assumption that their general business instincts transfer. That running a restaurant is fundamentally similar to whatever they did before. That their experience and judgment are applicable here.
In most cases, they are not. A restaurant is five-dimensional in a way that almost no other business is. You need to understand the kitchen. You need to understand the bar. You need to understand staffing and scheduling and service culture. And serving tables is genuinely a lost art — the hospitality, the salesmanship, the timing of a great server on a busy Saturday night is a skill that takes years to develop and most people have never had to think about it at all.
What Ego Looks Like in Practice
The ego shows up as resistance to every finding. Whatever the consultant identifies, the certain owner has a reason why it is not really the problem. The food cost is high but that is because of supply chain issues not our ordering practices. The staff is not performing but that is because we cannot find good people not because of our training process. The bar is underperforming but that is because the market does not drink cocktails not because we have not built a proper cocktail program.
Every problem has an external cause. Nothing is within the owner's control to change. And because nothing is within their control to change, nothing changes.
What These Owners Actually Expect
I genuinely believe that a meaningful percentage of restaurant owners who hire consultants secretly want the consultant to tell them everything is fine. That they are doing a good job. That the problems are external and temporary and will resolve themselves. That they just need to keep doing what they are doing.
A good consultant almost never says that. Because it is almost never true. People call consultants because they are struggling, and struggling restaurants are almost always struggling because of specific, identifiable, correctable operational problems — not because of bad luck.
If you hire a consultant and genuinely want to get your money's worth, listen to everything they say. Follow through on the recommendations. Give it sixty days of real implementation. Then evaluate results. That process works. The alternative — paying for advice and ignoring it — helps nobody.
At 5 Loaves Restaurant Consulting, we work with Connecticut restaurant owners who are genuinely ready to hear the truth and act on it. Contact us for a free consultation.
