The founder's week off

The most useful audit a small restaurant will ever get costs nothing and takes a week. The founder goes on holiday.

Not a long weekend with the phone on. A week, on a beach, with the replies off and somebody else holding the keys.

I sit with small operators, burgers, coffee, pizza, and the pattern is the same in every one. The founder does the rota, places the orders, answers the reviews, knows which supplier is late and which server cannot be trusted with the till on a Friday. The business runs on a person, the person is very good, and everyone is grateful.

Then July comes and the founder does not go. They have not been away for three summers. The reason given is always that it is a bad time. The truth is that they already know what the week would show.

Because the week is a test, and it has two results.

If sales hold while the founder is on the beach, there is a business. The systems are real, the second in command is real, the place can be sold, franchised, or simply lived alongside. That is worth more than any month of trading it will ever have.

If sales fall, the founder learns that they own a job with staff attached. Every riyal of margin was theirs personally, earned by being on the floor, and it stops when they do. Without them in it, the place is worth roughly the value of the chairs.

Both results are useful. Only one is pleasant, and the founder can usually guess which one they will get, which is why the week keeps getting postponed.

Nobody measures what a business does when its owner is absent, because the owner is never absent. The audit is free, and it has not been run because nobody wants the result.