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Playbooks

One store learns. They all learn.

Every group already has the answer to most of its own problems. It is just sitting in one restaurant, and nobody else knows. A play is one thing a restaurant does measurably better than the rest — more drinks on a check, tighter labor, fewer giveaways — found by comparing your restaurants against each other and against nobody else’s.

This page is the working. Every assumption, every guard, and the sum you can add up yourself. It is here rather than on the front page because a method that long, sat under a number, reads as a defence — and there is nothing here to defend.

How one is found

Four steps, every Tuesday.

01

Three in the morning, once a week.

Syphor takes the last thirty days and compares all your restaurants on seven measures: drinks, starters, desserts, average check, labor, voids and discounts. Thirty days, not last night — one good Friday is not a play.

02

Anything 15% from the middle gets flagged.

Ahead of the group is one to copy. Behind is one to fix. Nothing in between is worth anybody’s morning. That is what turns 31 plays into 18 to copy and 13 to fix.

03

Then it goes looking for the reason.

Six weeks of that restaurant’s logbook, read for what changed. A number on its own is a curiosity; the reason is the thing another manager can actually do on Monday. If it cannot find one, it does not guess — it asks the manager.

04

And it prices it on the others, not on itself.

What the play is worth is what the other restaurants would gain by closing the gap, priced on their own covers and their own sales. The restaurant that already does it gains nothing — it is already doing it.

Two guards

What is thrown out.

A thousand checks, or it cannot set the bar.

A restaurant needs 1,000 checks in the window before it can set a play. A quiet room with fourteen covers can beat everybody on average check and teach nobody anything.

Twice the middle is ignored.

Anything more than twice the group’s middle is thrown out. A restaurant that different is not a lesson, it is a different business — an airport unit, a stadium, a room that only does weddings.

What it is worth

$299,073, a month.
Here is the column.

That is the six biggest plays, not all 31. It is a month, not a year. And it assumes the other restaurants close a quarter of their own gap, not all of it — nothing here assumes a restaurant becomes the best one, only that it moves a little way toward it.

Denver leads on laborNew$96,440
Brooklyn leads on drinksNew$74,468
Miami leads on discountsWatching$44,856
Austin leads on startersWatching$36,407
Manhattan leads on dessertsWatching$28,960
Chicago leads on voidsAdopted$17,942
The six biggest$299,073

Where each one comes from: Denver runs labor under the group’s middle over those thirty days; Brooklyn’s is one more check in twenty carrying a drink at nine dollars; Miami’s is a third of its discount gap. Each is priced on the other restaurants’ own sales and their own checks.

Demonstration data. An invented group of restaurants. The plays, the arithmetic and the way each one is priced are the ones the product returns.

What it is not

Never another business.

A play is your restaurants against each other. It is never a benchmark against somebody else’s group, and it is never a prediction. Nothing in a playbook is a forecast of what next month will do — it is what one of your own rooms did last month, and what the others would have made doing the same.

And it is not a league table. The restaurant at the bottom of a measure is not named to the group; it is sent the play, with the reason.

Playbooks is in the price

There is no bigger plan.

Every restaurant gets all of it on the first morning — $199 a restaurant a month, and a setup charge that happens once.

Or leave your details — somebody calls you inside a working day. Or read a whole morning — one night, eight ways.