Make Restaurants Profitable

How to cut slow shifts in your restaurant using AI: Mo Saad of Fricken connects AI to his Square and timesheet data to find the shifts that aren't paying for themselves.

▶ Book a Profit Finding Session: https://foodiecoaches.co/yt-bac

Which nights cost you more in wages than they bring in? Mo Saad and Tim Kummerfeld show how Fricken uses AI to spot quiet shifts, build a branded dashboard from a few prompts, and work out where ad spend actually pays off, while the owner still makes the final call.

CHAPTERS
0:00 How to...

How to build a high performing restaurant team that runs without you: Mo Saad of Fricken shares how he trains his kitchen from the fries up, hires for attitude, and trusts his managers to make the call.

▶ Book a Profit Finding Session: https://foodiecoaches.co/yt-bac

What do you do when your best managers are making decisions without you? Mo Saad and Tim Kummerfeld break down how Fricken trains for safety and consistency in the kitchen, why front of house starts with attitude, and why Mo skips meetings to keep his team fresh.

CH...

At one point, Tara felt like she had completely lost control—not just of her business, but of who she was. Burnt out, drowning in debt, and facing bankruptcy, she found herself isolating, second-guessing every decision, and questioning everything.

But what she did next changed everything.

This episode is a raw look at what it takes to come back stronger: the brutal self-talk, the wrong advice, the fearless decisions, and the one shift that 5Xed her revenue almost overnight. Tara also shares how she rebuilt her culture, transformed her food costs, and built a...

How to expand a restaurant business to a new city: Mo Saad of Fricken shares what went wrong when they opened on the Gold Coast, from supply chain and food costs to quality control and brand.

▶ Book a Profit Finding Session: https://foodiecoaches.co/yt-bac

Should you build a central kitchen before you open in a new city? Mo Saad and Tim Kummerfeld break down why Fricken nearly bought one and didn't, what outsourcing prep did to food costs and rosters, and how a brand archetype session led to a full rebrand.

CHAPTERS

How to run a profitable restaurant comes down to your numbers, and most restaurant owners are being let down by the people meant to look after them. For restaurant owners, café owners, and anyone in a hospitality business, the right accounting setup is the difference between building wealth and quietly going backwards every week. Tim Niesler is the director of The FC Accounting Co, the accounting firm built specifically to service hospo owners, and he's seen exactly where the industry gets failed.

For years, accountants told hospitality owners not to bother with tax planning because they probably w...

Trading while insolvent isn’t just “having a bad month.” It means your hospitality business can’t pay its bills when they fall due, and if you keep trading without a plan, the consequences can get serious fast.

Book a Gameplan Session → https://foodiecoaches.co/yt-bac

In this episode, Tim Kummerfeld sits down with Timmy Niesler from FC Accounting Co. to break down what insolvency actually looks like in hospitality and why so many owners leave it too late before making a decision.

They cover how to recognise when your business is becoming insolvent...

A hospitality business can look profitable on paper and still hit a financial wall when old debt, repayments and tax obligations start eating the cash.

Book a Gameplan Session → https://foodiecoaches.co/yt-bac

In this episode, Tim sits down with Timmy from FC Accounting to break down what happens when hospitality owners are carrying debt and struggling to keep up with current obligations.

They cover how ATO debt affects cash flow, why your real breakeven may be much higher than you think, and the difference between having a cash flow problem and having a...

A good accountant shouldn’t just help you when business is going well. They should help you plan for what happens when it doesn’t.

Book a Gameplan Session → https://foodiecoaches.co/yt-bac

In this episode, Tim Kummerfeld sits down with Timmy Niesler from FC Accounting Co. to talk about what “planning for the worst” actually looks like for hospitality owners.

They cover how the right business structure can protect your personal assets, why trusts need to be understood properly, and why owners should be planning for GST, PAYG and super before those bills arri...

How to design a restaurant that actually makes money is a question most owners never ask until it's too late. For restaurant owners, café owners, and anyone in a hospitality business, the design of your space either sets you up for profit or quietly drags you under. Gerrick Numan has been involved in 500+ venue designs through his studio Millé, owned four of his own venues, and now runs Restaurant Design Academy, teaching hospo owners to take control of the process themselves.

He's seen it both ways. The stunning fit-out sitting empty while a dingy bar next door is...

If your restaurant build costs $1 million, Gerrick Numan believes the venue should be capable of doing around $2 million a year in turnover. Otherwise, the fitout can take too long to pay itself back.

Book a Gameplan Session → https://foodiecoaches.co/yt-bac

In this episode, Gerrick breaks down how to budget a restaurant build without spending money customers will never notice.

You’ll learn how to think about fitout spend versus expected revenue, where hidden build costs usually appear, and why taking over an existing hospitality site can dramatically reduce setup costs.

You’...

Your venue layout doesn’t just affect how the space looks. It affects how fast your team can work, how many customers you can serve, and how much revenue the room can generate.

Book a Discovery Call → https://www.foodiecoaches.com/bac 

In this conversation with Gerrick Numan, he breaks down how venue design impacts the numbers behind the business.

You’ll learn how better kitchen and bar layouts can reduce unnecessary labour and speed up service.

You’ll learn how seating mix and flexibility can help you fit more customers in withou...

Gerrick Numan has designed more than 500 hospitality venues, and his biggest lesson is simple: a beautiful fit out means nothing if the business can’t pay for it.

Book a Discovery Call → https://www.foodiecoaches.com/bac 

In this episode, Gerrick breaks down how to design a venue that looks good, feels right, and still makes commercial sense.

You’ll learn why product comes before design, how to improve street presence, and how your layout affects the guest experience from the moment someone walks in.

If you’re opening, renovating, or rethinkin...

How to run a profitable restaurant starts with knowing your real numbers. For restaurant owners, café owners, and anyone in a hospitality business, weekly bookkeeping is the difference between guessing and knowing. Kylie Patch runs the bookkeeping division at FC Accounting Co, and she's built the reporting rhythm that gives hospo owners accurate numbers every single week.

Most owners are making decisions from numbers that are flat-out wrong. Bank accounts that aren't reconciled. Expenses landing in the wrong week. A P&L pulled on the wrong basis that tells a story that isn't true.

Kylie h...

How to scale a coffee business is one of the hardest questions in hospitality, and few have done it like Flight Coffee. For café owners, roasters, and anyone in a hospitality business, this is a real look at what it takes to grow a brand from a home garage to national distribution. Richard Corney and Nick Clark co-founded Flight Coffee in a garage in Napier back in 2009, and today they supply around 120 cafés across New Zealand plus a growing retail and ready-to-drink range.

The story is anything but smooth. A roaster crammed into the middle of a...

How to use cooking classes, micro-influencers and founder-led content to build a restaurant people fly across the world to visit. The exact marketing strategy Cooper Abercrombie used to turn Bar-A-BBQ from a tent pop-up into a 2025 Texas Monthly Top 50 restaurant — with a line out the door six days a week and customers flying in from Australia and beyond.

Cooper Abercrombie was a sales manager in Texas.

Seven years ago he bought a smoker, made "awful, awful, awful" brisket, and refused to be bad at it.

Today Bar-A-BBQ in Montgomery, Texas is one of th...

How Lucio De Falco built Sydney's most iconic Neapolitan pizzeria from scratch — and the lessons every restaurant owner, café owner or pizza maker needs to hear about consistency, quality and running a hospitality business that lasts. From a 14-year-old kid washing dishes in Naples to one of the best pizza chefs in the world.

Lucio De Falco started washing dishes at his aunt and uncle's pizzeria in Naples when he was 14.

By the time he was 21, he was in Sydney — recruited to help launch the first Neapolitan-style pizzeria in Australia at a time when nobody here...

Michelin is coming to Australia, the surcharge ban deadline is 30 September, and another rate rise is likely before Christmas. Here's what every Australian restaurant owner, café owner or bar owner needs to know this month — and what to do about it before the next round of change hits.

The industry has been handed some broken eggs.

But as Wes puts it — we're much better at making omelets than letting our eggs go bad.

In this month's industry update, Tim sits down with Wes Lambert — CEO of ARCA and the man in Parliament advocating for the...

How to handle restaurant debt, ATO debt, and small business tax problems the legal way — and why every hospitality operator, restaurant owner, café owner or bar owner in Australia needs to hear this conversation. The Small Business Restructure (SBR) framework, explained.

In this episode, Tim sits down with Jono Patch — head of Restaurant Revive (Foodie Coaches' debt restructuring arm) — to talk about the elephant in every hospitality boardroom. Why owners end up in tax debt. Why the shame keeps them stuck. And the exact legal framework — a Small Business Restructure (SBR) — that can wipe most of the debt and le...

How a third-generation Italian restaurant owner nearly killed his first restaurant — and the mistake every new restaurant owner, café owner or bar owner makes when they try to copy a concept that worked elsewhere. The lesson Matteo Galletto learned the hard way after 75 years of family hospitality.

Matteo Galletto grew up around restaurants on two continents.

His grandparents started a family restaurant in Liguria, Italy in the 1950s — the business that pulled the family out of post-war poverty. His father Lucio brought a sliver of that experience to Sydney in 1977 and opened Lucio's in Paddington in 19...

How to scale a hospitality business from one restaurant to twelve, how to build systems that let you run 750 staff across every cuisine imaginable, and the mindset shifts every restaurant owner, café owner or bar owner has to make to break through the multi-venue ceiling. Michael Tassis of the Tassis Group on 16 years of building Brisbane's biggest independent hospitality group.

Michael Tassis started with one seafood restaurant in Brisbane in 2010.

16 years later, the Tassis Group runs 12 restaurants, employs 750 staff, and covers Greek, Italian, French, Spanish, Asian, seafood, steakhouse and modern Australian — with more venues opening at...

How to scale down a hospitality business without losing what you built, why doing less can make you more profitable, and the lessons every restaurant owner, bar owner and café owner needs to hear about growth. For anyone running a venue (or thinking about opening one) who thinks bigger is always better.

Scott Imlach moved from Queenstown, New Zealand to London in 1994 — and ended up running 48 venues across the UK as Operations Manager of the Outback Inn Group.

He's been on the Gold Coast for 20 years. At one point he was running 11-12 venues at onc...

Cash is back, tourism is rebounding and the hospitality acquisition market is heating up. Here's what's coming for hospo this month — for restaurant owners, café owners and bar owners across Australia trying to stay ahead of the changes.

Three big things landed on hospitality this month — and for once, most of them are good news.

In this month's industry update, Tim sits down with Wes Lambert — CEO of ARCA and the man in Parliament advocating for every café and restaurant in Australia — to break down what's happening now, what's coming next, and what you need to be doin...

Brad Fitzgibbons is the fourth generation of Fitzgibbons in the family pub trade.

His parents handed him and his sister Anita the keys to Fitzy's Toowoomba — a 25-year-old iconic Queensland venue with restaurants, bars, gaming and retail across one massive site.

By late 2021 he was running the whole thing into the ground.
Trading was a mess. He was pouring drinks behind the bar to save $30 an hour. He'd hidden the numbers from his own team for so long that when his hotel manager finally found out, he said, "Boss, I didn't realise. We could ha...

How to last 41 years in hospitality, build a career across the world's most iconic restaurants, and learn the lessons every restaurant owner wishes they'd been told earlier. Simon Sandall on consistency, ownership, hospitality and the standards that built one of Australia's most respected culinary careers.

Simon Sandall came to Australia from Rugby, UK, 31 years ago for a six-month working holiday.

He never went home.

For 41 years he's been in hospitality. 17 of those as Matt Moran's Group Executive Chef — running Aria Sydney, Aria Brisbane, Chiswick, Chiswick at the Gallery, Opera Bar, North Bondi Fish, Ri...

How to build world-class hospitality, train a restaurant or bar team that wins awards, and run a hospitality business that gets onto The World's 50 Best Bars list. If you're a restaurant owner, café owner or bar owner who wants to understand what separates the best in the world from everyone else — this is the episode.

Maybe Sammy isn't just one of the best bars in Sydney.

It's one of the best bars on the planet.

Seven years running on The World's 50 Best Bars list. Five-time winner of Best Bar in Australasia. The inaugural win...

How to handle restaurant owner burnout, modernise a family restaurant business without losing what made it special, and raise your prices when you're scared people won't pay them. Four real restaurant owners. Four totally different problems. Honest answers, fast.

You asked. Tim answered.

In this Q&A special, four owners from around the world wrote in with the kind of problems that don't show up on the P&L — but quietly eat away at the business and the operator behind it.

If you've ever told yourself the numbers are "fine" while privately falling ou...

How a second-generation restaurant owner took over a 25-year family business with 18 venues across Sydney and refuses to let it go corporate. Daniel Drakopoulos on running SRG Hospitality, scaling without losing the heart, and what most family businesses get wrong.

Daniel Drakopoulos didn't choose hospitality. He was born into it.
He was polishing cutlery at 13 in the family's first restaurant — Aqua Dining at Milsons Point — opened by his parents Bill and Kathleen in 2000. 26 years later, he's just stepped up as co-Managing Director of SRG Hospitality alongside his brother Perry, with his dad finally easing back after a qu...

What's coming for hospo in June: the 4.75% award wage hike confirmed, payday super landing on 1 July, and the looming trust tax changes that could double-tax small business owners. If you're a restaurant owner, café owner or bar owner in Australia, here's exactly what's coming and what to do about it.

Three things landed on hospitality this month, and all three need action.

In this month's industry update, Tim sits down with Wes Lambert — CEO of ARCA and the man in Parliament advocating for every café and restaurant in Australia — to break down the confirmed 4.75% award wage r...

James "Jimmy" Hurlston was studying intellectual property law when he decided he'd had enough.

So he quit, ate over 800 burgers in a year, wrote The Burger Book, and three years later opened Easey's — the now-iconic Collingwood burger joint with a train carriage on the roof, graffiti walls, and a rotating cast of Melbourne's hospitality and street art scene.

Eleven years on, Easey's is still standing. But James says he wouldn't open a burger shop today.

In this episode, he sits down with Tim to talk about how Easey's actually survived, the failed Sydney ex...

Rob Comiskey runs one of the biggest hospitality groups in Australia.

8 venues. 1,000+ staff. And another 6-7 venues under construction, including a $250 million expansion at Sandstone Point that will bring the area's first 5-star resort.

The Comiskey Group's portfolio reads like a who's who of iconic Queensland venues — Eatons Hill Hotel (where Prince, Ice Cube and Post Malone have all played), Sandstone Point Hotel, the BIG4 holiday resort that's the highest selling in Australia, plus the Dakabin, Mundy, Samford, Doonan and Eumundi.

But the real story isn't the scale. It's what Rob, his brother an...

Cam Henderson and his wife Jill opened The Winey Cow in Mornington, Victoria in 2014.

For nearly a decade it became one of the Mornington Peninsula's most loved cafés — Cafe of the Year, Best Breakfast Restaurant Victoria, the lot.
Then COVID happened. Three years of opening, closing, opening, closing. By the end of it, Cam was mentally beat up. So he turned to Jill and said: "I think we need to move."

Two weeks of quarantine in Cairns later, they landed on the Gold Coast — into a house they'd never seen, a school they'd never...

You asked. Tim answered.

Four real owners. Four totally different problems. And the kind of straight-up answers that come from someone who's worked with over 2,000 venues across the world.

In this Q&A special, Tim breaks down what's actually broken — and exactly what to do about it.

This episode covers:

00:00 – How do you build consistent revenue when your fixed location is unpredictable?
05:00 – How do you manage labour cost during quiet periods without gutting service?
09:00 – What do you do when your team doesn't care anymore?
12:00 – How do you measure true profi...

The federal budget just dropped. The surcharge ban is creeping closer. And the next round of wage rises is about to land.

In this month's industry update, Tim sits down with Wes Lambert — CEO of ARCA and the man in Parliament advocating for every café and restaurant in Australia — to break down what's just happened, what's coming, and what you need to be doing about it right now.

It's the most direct conversation we've had yet.

If you're already break-even, you need to hear this.

You'll hear:

00:00 – Wes is back fr...

Rabih Yanni has spent 33 years in hospitality.

Nine venues across nine different postcodes. Currently runs Botanical Hotel in South Yarra — the iconic Melbourne pub he's brought back to life since 2019. Founded South Yarra Deli during COVID and took it national.

He's the kind of operator who can walk into a venue, look around, and tell you in five minutes what's broken and how to fix it.

But the line that stopped Tim in this conversation was this:
"You never own a business. The community does. Your role is to navigate that community ex...

Julian Cincotta grew up cooking at his family's café in Western Sydney.

He went on to train under Neil Perry at Rockpool, won Young Chef of the Year, staged at some of the best restaurants in the world — and then opened a fried chicken and champagne bar in Surry Hills with a sneaker wall and a Wu-Tang soundtrack.

Two weeks after they opened, Wu-Tang Clan walked in.

That was ten years ago.

In this episode, Julian sits down with Tim to talk through the whole decade — the concept nobody believed in, the t...

Dylan and Katrina started King of the Wings from a little food trailer in 2013.

They were among the first food trucks doing wings in Australia. No blueprint. No safety net. Just a gap in the market and a bet on themselves.

Thirteen years later they're running a restaurant, a food truck, popups and an interstate operation. But the road there was anything but straight.

A collab that went sideways on opening day. A food court concept that COVID killed two weeks in. A Commonwealth Games that turned Surfers Paradise into a ghost town...

Martin Lange has opened eight bars in Brisbane since 2006.

He currently runs four. Takes three and a half months off a year. And has trained bartenders now working in some of the best bars in Paris and London.

He didn't do it by cutting corners or chasing trends.

He did it by committing to a 10-year minimum on every lease, never taking over another venue's location, spending hundreds of thousands on R&D, and building a team culture so strong that the staff who leave for bigger money keep coming back.

...

John Rivera spent his twenties in fine dining kitchens.

Working every Saturday. Missing birthdays. Missing weddings.

Then he opened his own restaurant — and found himself video-calling his kids from the pass just to see them awake.

Something had to change.

In this episode, John — chef and owner of Ascal Restaurant, Inman bar, and Filipino gelato concept Carton — talks about the decision that shifted everything. The boundaries he set, the systems he built, and how he went from working every day on the tools to dropping his kids at kinder before heading into w...

You asked. Tim answered.

In this Q&A special, four real owners share the exact problems keeping them up at night — and Tim gets into the specifics of each one.  

No fluff. No theory. Just honest, practical answers to the questions most hospo owners are too afraid to say out loud.

This episode covers:
00:00 – Is handmade baking even financially viable anymore or should I just switch to frozen?
07:00 – Standards are slipping. How do I fix it without becoming the boss everyone hates?
14:00 – Delivery apps are 45% of my sales. I have no idea i...

On the 31st of March, two major blows landed on the hospitality industry.

And most owners didn't see them coming.

In this month's industry update, Tim sits down with Wes Lambert — CEO of ARCA and the man in Parliament having these conversations on behalf of every café and restaurant owner in Australia — to break down exactly what's changed, what's coming, and what you need to do about it right now

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This isn't doom and gloom for the sake of it. It's the information you need to make the right...