If you’d told 17-year-old me I’d end up as the CFO of multiple restaurant groups, I would have laughed. I fell into this industry completely by accident. I was waiting tables at a hotel restaurant in the UK when the girl in the accounting office quit suddenly. They asked if I wanted to help out. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I said yes, and that one yes set the course for everything that followed.
Decades later, after working in hotels, pubs, and Fast Casual brands in both the UK and the US, I’ve learned that every restaurant business, no matter how polished, runs on a delicate balance of creativity and chaos. My job as a CFO has always been to bring structure to that chaos without crushing what makes the brand special. I like to say the CFO’s job is to keep the magic, add the math. Here’s my playbook for how to do exactly that.
When I’m stepping into a new CFO role, I don’t wait for the first day to get my bearings. I always ask for the past three years of financials before I even walk through the door. I want to see how clean the books are and where the landmines might be hiding.
Everyone’s obsessed with the P&L, but the P&L is only half the story. If your balance sheet isn’t clean, your P&L isn’t either. They’re two sides of the same coin. I’m looking for red flags: accounts that haven’t been reconciled, old liabilities that never cleared, strange adjustments that no one can explain. Those things tell me how deep the mess runs. Sometimes you walk into a business with minor issues, and sometimes you find major earthquakes. Either way, it’s better to know before you start.
Once I’ve got a handle on the basics, I start to dig into the financial health of the business. There’s no one-size-fits-all formula for what your COGS and labor margins should be — every concept has its own nuances. A café shouldn’t have the same COGS profile as a fast-casual Mexican brand, and a full-service restaurant will naturally run higher labor costs because it needs more people.
The key is to make sure your theoretical COGS percentage and base labor model combine to achieve roughly a 45% prime margin or higher. That’s the sign your concept is structurally viable. A 20% store-level EBITDA margin is typically the goal. And if you’re not there yet, that’s okay. What matters is steady, continuous improvement toward those targets.
Once you know where the pain points are, that’s where the real work begins. COGS and labor are where most of the opportunity lives. I start by looking at theoretical COGS, what the numbers should be if everything were running perfectly, and then work backwards to see where reality diverges.
At one concept, we discovered our theoretical COGS should have been 24%, but we were running at 32%. That eight-point gap wasn’t one big mistake; it was death by a thousand cuts. To fix it, I had to close every loop: track waste religiously, align recipes across units, tighten purchasing, and tackle over-portioning. Once we started doing that consistently, the margins followed.
It’s not glamorous work. It’s detective work. But this is where good CFOs earn their keep by finding the invisible leaks and turning gut feelings into measurable improvement.
Your sales, COGS, and labor are a delicate dance. Sometimes your highest-margin dish costs the most in labor to produce. Conversely, lower-margin items can attract upsell opportunities and increase average transaction value. You have to look at sales, COGS, and labor holistically.
The biggest trap is chasing COGS margin in isolation. You can’t look at one side of the model without understanding how it interacts with the others. What you gain in food cost, you might lose in efficiency or customer experience. True margin optimization comes from looking at the full picture, not one line item.
When labor costs start creeping up, the knee-jerk reaction is to start cutting shifts or forcing teams to hit rigid percentage targets. But that kind of short-term thinking almost always backfires.
Labor, COGS, and sales move together. Cutting too deep on labor can create a downward spiral — service quality drops, revenue follows, and suddenly your labor percentage looks worse, not better. Instead of chasing a static labor target, use tools that scale labor models as revenue ebbs and flows. Aim for consistency and sustainability, not cutbacks.
I’ve seen restaurant groups spend thousands on systems that look great on paper but fall apart in practice. They’re usually designed by accountants for accountants, but they’re meant to be used by operators. That’s the disconnect.
Operators are already juggling ten things before 9 a.m., staffing, deliveries, broken equipment, and fifty unread emails from corporate. If the tool you give them adds friction, they won’t use it, and then you’re back to square one.
At one group, we were paying $4,000 a month for an inventory consultant and still getting garbage data. It was bonkers. We needed a system that was simple, visual, and easy for store teams to adopt, something that gave us the right information without slowing anyone down. That’s when I moved us to MarginEdge. It bridged the gap perfectly: intuitive enough for managers to use correctly, powerful enough for finance to trust the numbers.
Bad input equals bad output. The CFO’s job is to make sure the inputs are effortless.
Implementing a new system is never plug-and-play. It’s change management, and that’s one of the hardest parts of the job. When we rolled out MarginEdge, we didn’t do it all at once. We piloted it regionally, starting with two of our strongest managers. They stress tested everything: invoice processing, recipe mapping and inventory counts, and told us exactly what wasn’t working. Only after those pilots were solid did we expand to other markets.
If you try to roll out a system across every location at once, it’s chaos. The business doesn’t stop, so you can implement new software. Promotions still launch, staff still call out, and operations still have to run. The slower you go at first, the faster you scale in the end.
You can’t expect operators to hit targets they don’t understand. Most restaurant managers didn’t come from finance backgrounds; they’re great at running shifts, not reading balance sheets. But they’re smart, and they want to do well. You just have to teach them.
We trained our teams on the basics: what a P&L is, why profit matters, and where that profit goes. Once they realized that profit isn’t going straight into an owner’s pocket, that it’s what funds growth, repays loans, and pays for new equipment, they started to care. Suddenly, they were watching labor more closely, keeping waste logs updated, and brainstorming ways to cut costs without cutting corners. Ownership mentality starts with understanding.
At the end of the day, this job is about balance. You can’t bulldoze the creative chaos that makes a brand special, but you can’t scale on gut feelings alone either. The best CFOs dance between those two worlds, keeping the culture alive while building the structure that lets it grow.
At Maman, part of what made the brand magical was its warmth and creativity. My job was to build systems that supported that magic instead of stifling it. That’s the real art of being a CFO in this industry. You’re not just managing numbers; you’re managing the heartbeat of the business.
Keep the magic. Add the math.
The CFO role in a restaurant group isn’t about sitting in a boardroom. It’s about being close enough to operations to understand the grind, but disciplined enough to keep the financials tight. The magic happens when those two worlds meet.
If you want to put this playbook into practice, I’ve pulled together a Restaurant Group Scalability Scorecard, which helps you uncover disconnects across teams, systems and priorities before they become costly. As restaurant groups grow, gaps between teams, systems and priorities start to widen. This scorecard helps you spot misalignment early so you can scale with confidence.