How to Manage Multiple Restaurants and Locations

Learning to manage multiple restaurant locations is a good problem to have. It means guests love your food so much that one spot can’t keep up. You get to serve more customers, generate more revenue, and expand your business.

But to be clear, multi-location restaurant management is challenging. It requires a manager to differentiate concepts, ensure a consistent guest experience, and manage multiple teams across multiple locations.

Whether you’re managing multiple restaurants right now or are thinking about expanding your current business, this guide has everything you need to run more than one restaurant with success. It comes down to four things: consistency, delegation, communication, and clear visibility across every location.

What is multi-unit restaurant management?

Multi-unit restaurant management means running two or more locations at once. You oversee operations, staffing, and financial performance while keeping the guest experience the same at every door.

In practice, it usually means leading through general managers (GMs) instead of standing on every floor yourself. Your job shifts from running one restaurant to building systems that run several.

Operators who’ve made this leap describe the same shift: the habits that made you great at one restaurant have to give way to systems and trust.

“The jump to two was probably the most difficult. When you’re operating one restaurant, the things that got you here aren’t going to get you there. A single-unit operator is very hands-on, very involved in all the decision-making and oversight. As you start to grow, that’s not feasible.”

— Sam Aguilar, Oak & Stone

“With scaling any brand, it’s all about creating repeatable systems and building consistency, while keeping some flexibility in how you execute locally. The system you build today might have to grow and evolve.”

— Lauriena Borstein, WOWorks

Benefits and challenges of running multiple locations

More locations bring more upside and more moving parts. Before you sign a second lease, it helps to see both sides clearly.

The benefits of multi-location restaurant management include:

• More revenue and more customers to serve.
• Stronger brand recognition in your area.
• Better pricing from suppliers when you buy in bulk.
• Faster learning, since a win at one location can spread to the others.

The challenges include:

• Keeping food and service quality consistent at every location.
• Limited real-time view into daily operations.
• Staffing and scheduling across multiple sites.
• Compliance rules that change by city and state.
• Owners and managers spread too thin to lead well.

Should You Choose a New Concept or Replicate an Existing One?

Expanding your place in the food service industry happens in one of two ways — developing a new restaurant concept or replicating an existing one. Each option comes with advantages and disadvantages, which should be considered before breaking ground on a new location.

Whichever way you go, remember that for every new restaurant you open, you’ll need to conduct any necessary market research and document your planning process with a restaurant business plan and a feasibility study.

Developing a New Concept

Starting from scratch with a new restaurant idea can be exciting for the eager restaurateur. Switching from a fast-casual concept to fine dining can allow for a nice change of pace.

You may also benefit from diversification in your market, particularly if you’d like to open your next location close to an existing one. Consumers at-large prefer independent restaurants to chains, so diversifying the types of restaurants under your management can give diners more of what they love.

However, this decision requires more work when it comes to opening and managing the restaurant. You won’t be able to refer to your previous restaurant opening playbook and follow it to the letter.

There’ll be new branding, a new staff, different inventory, and updated forecasting involved. As you operate the restaurant, you’ll also need to prepare for different clientele, budgeting, and staffing needs.

Replicating an Existing Concept

If your restaurant is a number one hit in your area, it may serve you well to open up the exact same concept elsewhere. The benefits of this decision include relying on a proven business model, which will ease the opening and operating process, as you’ll be able to refer to what worked (and what is working) at your original location.

However, it’s important to note that just because a restaurant thrives in one area doesn’t mean it will be as successful in another. You should engage in thorough market research to see if your quick-service pizzeria will work as well in the suburbs of the city you’re in, for example. It’s also worth considering the risk of market saturation here — too much of a good thing can lessen its appeal. Sometimes less is more.

How to create consistency with your restaurant operations

To whatever extent possible, restaurant operations should be consistent across all of your locations. If you’re managing multiple locations of the same concept, you’ll benefit from having a universal approach to hiring, training, suppliers, technology, and the overall guest experience.

Even if you’re managing multiple locations with different concepts, you’ll still be able to develop processes to apply to all of your restaurants to ensure operations meet your stamp of approval.

The backbone of consistency is a set of standard operating procedures (SOPs). Write down how each core task gets done — open, close, food prep, greeting a guest — so every location runs the same way. Some call this standardization.

You don’t need a fancy binder. Film your best closer’s routine on your phone and share the video. That’s an SOP your team will actually use.

Here are the key areas to create a consistent process for in your restaurants.

Hiring

Making the right restaurant hire is more important than ever. There’s just not enough time for restaurants (or the candidates they’re interviewing) to prolong the hiring process, so it must be systematic and efficient — especially for multi-location restaurant businesses.

For restaurants of the same concept, creating a bank of appropriate restaurant interview questions and a default interview structure can save time whenever there’s an open role. Even if your locations don’t share a concept, you can still have a universal mindset around the hiring process — like hiring for fit, instead of skill.

Training

Standardized training across all of your locations unifies all employees to work within the guidelines you’ve created. That way, each restaurant will operate just as efficiently and consistently as the other. You can use an employee training manual template to document these steps in training and share it with each location’s managers and employees (and adjust the document for different concepts).

Recommended Download: Free Restaurant Employee Training Manual Template

Performance Management Across Locations

With more locations come more points of analysis, which in turn helps you determine what your under-performing locations can take away from your top-performing ones.

Say, for example, one of your five same-concept locations didn’t generate as much profit as the other four. You can reference and compare the key restaurant metrics from all of these locations like total revenue, profit margin, inventory variance, etc. to see where that location might be falling short. From there, you can apply the proven methods from top-performing locations to bring your less-profitable unit up to par.

Supplier Sourcing

One of the many benefits of multi-location restaurant management pertains to inventory and ordering. Oftentimes, vendors and suppliers will provide restaurant businesses with a discount when purchasing in bulk, so it’s worth looking into a revised pricing structure when expanding your business, or possibly a larger supplier who is willing to offer better rates.

This benefit also applies to restaurants with different concepts. Chances are there will be some overlap in ingredients between concepts, providing an opportunity to increase your overall margins.

Guest Experiences

A consistent guest experience across all locations largely stems from the criteria outlined above. For restaurants of the same name and look, guests want a nearly identical experience at one location as they would get at another. This requires shared hiring, training, and supplier management. The result is food that tastes the same, served by a polite and efficient staff at every location.

Even if you’re managing multiple locations of a different brand or concept, you can still unify all of your restaurants under the same ideals. One incredible example of this concept in action is in Boston’s Barbara Lynch Collective. Lynch operates seven unique restaurants, but despite their differences, each location emphasizes the importance of storytelling through food. “Hard work, unbridled creativity, a passion for discovery, and a love for genuine human connections” drive the passion for this multi-location restaurant group — and regardless of which spot they go to, guests will experience meals created under these ideals.

Recommended Reading: [Guide] How to Build Restaurant Core Values

Atmosphere

Much like the guest experience, the atmosphere of your restaurants shouldn’t differ too drastically between locations. Through simple choices like lighting levels, playlists, and table setup, you’ll be able to recreate the vibe your guests rely on whenever they sit down at one of your restaurants.

The exception here, of course, is when your restaurant concepts are too dissimilar. An elegant seafood restaurant shouldn’t have the same vibes as a neighborhood gastropub, so switch it up when the situation calls for it.

Delegating Responsibilities

It makes total sense if you’re reading this article and thinking to yourself, “how can I manage all of these requirements and still get some sleep at night?”

One word: delegation.

Normally, with multiple restaurant locations comes resources to help you control operations. As a multi-location restaurant owner, you’re in the position to delegate essential tasks to your restaurant managers, who are on the floor of specific locations more often than you are. You might delegate back-of-house responsibilities to the executive chef at each location, while server scheduling and other front-of-house operations go to the general manager.

As an example, instead of pulling and analyzing sales reports for every location yourself, you might instead instruct managers to generate these reports and add commentary on any areas of the report that are most noteworthy (sales slumps, inventory shortages, etc.). This approach saves you time scouring pages of sales reports looking for trends and gives you the insights you need to reach conclusions and develop necessary action plans. Better yet, using a manager log book can make this process even simpler.

This delegation also frees up time for an owner to look at the business from a bigger picture, like comparing location performance and profitability, finding wins that transfer from one restaurant to another, and even considering further expansion opportunities.

Keep Your Team Connected

Improving employee communication is essential in any restaurant — not just among team members, but also with managers and the owner(s) of a restaurant business. Your employees are the ones interacting with your customers, working in the kitchen, and serving meals the most.

An open line of communication between yourself and your managers and employees is the heartbeat of successful restaurant operation. Not only does it let them know their opinions are valued, but it also gives you a direct outlet to those who know a specific restaurant location better than even you sometimes do — and that’s a good thing!

Some easy ways to foster stronger communication between you and your staff include:

• Ensuring all managers have your phone number and every employee has a way to contact you directly (email, phone number, etc.).
• Set daily, twice-weekly, or thrice-weekly one-on-one check-ins with each manager, as well as regularly scheduled site visits.
• Sending out a weekly or monthly survey for employee ideas, feedback and/or employee Net Promoter Score scores.
• Making a point to attend pre-shift meetings at each location once or twice a month.
• Calling out moments when employees deserve praise, either in a public forum or to the employees directly.

Using technology to run multiple locations

Delegation and open communication get you far. But when you’re running two to five locations, the right tools do the work you can’t do in person. Good software keeps your approach consistent across every restaurant, wherever you can’t be.

You could buy a separate tool for each job. But you’ve already got your hands full with multiple locations. A restaurant management software platform like 7shifts brings scheduling, reporting, and team data into one place, so you’re not stitching systems together.

Hiring

Restaurants are no stranger to hiring woes, but hiring software tends to make the process more positive and effective. You can use it to post roles online, review candidates, and easily track applicants in one place.

This tool is beneficial for multi-unit restaurant businesses because of the ability to retain applicants for future availability. If you own several restaurants in the same area, roles will pop up left and right. Hiring software enables you to reconnect with a qualified applicant to get them hired faster.

Restaurant Dashboards

Reporting is a necessary and recurring task for restaurateurs. It holds owners accountable and identifies opportunities for improving the business. Restaurant reporting also pinpoints areas where wasteful spending can be reduced — particularly for labor.

When you do choose a software for reporting, make sure there’s a dashboard feature so that you can quickly get a bird’s eye view of performance across all locations.

Multi-Location Restaurant Scheduling & Time Clocking

Restaurant employee scheduling tools is a staple in a restaurant’s tech stack, but there are important features in a software built for multi-location businesses — namely, compliance with local labor laws. After all, your employees are still eligible for overtime pay even if they split their hours between locations in your restaurant group. You can also cut down on payroll errors and time theft with time clocking software.

Online Employee Communication

Restaurant communication tools make it possible for you to share important documents with any or all of your employees from the locations. These tools open up the door for employees to communicate with each other regarding approved shift trades, saving managers from a potential headache over rescheduling.

Manager Log Book

You can’t be everywhere at once, and that’s why manager log book tools are so important in multi-location restaurant management. This tool allows general managers to take down instantly-accessible notes on staffing issues, operations performance, and more so owners can be alerted immediately. It’s a quick and reliable way to document and refer to need-to-know information.

POS System

Last (but certainly not least) is a restaurant POS system that’s equipped for multiple locations. Your POS should allow for easily-accessible sales data and key performance metrics for any and all of your restaurant locations. This spares you from the alternative of having to source reports from each of your locations and means you can act on any learnings sooner rather than later. Your POS should also integrate with the rest of your tech stack, so data flows freely between them.

Monitor performance across all your locations

Here’s the problem with running two to five restaurants: you can’t watch them all at once. Most owners log into each location’s system one by one, then wait until Friday for end-of-week reports. By then, a bad week is already over.

A restaurant operations dashboard fixes that. It pulls sales, labor, and time-punch data from every location into one view. You spot a struggling store on Tuesday, not the following Monday.

This matters most for labor. When staff split shifts across locations, overtime creeps in fast and quiet. One screen showing who’s near overtime at all your locations lets you fix the schedule before the extra pay hits.

Some operators build that daily read right into their routine. Here’s how Tom Schmidt keeps a finger on his locations from his desk:

“We review the log books from 7shifts to see what’s going on at the store level, and what issues we need to plug into. One of the KPIs we report to everybody on Thursdays is shift feedback. As we started to grow, we were afraid we couldn’t tell what was happening in stores we weren’t in. We weren’t seeing every little thing that happened.”

— Tom Schmidt, Salt + Smoke

Frequently asked questions

What tools help restaurant owners monitor all locations?

Real-time dashboards and reporting tools do this best. They pull sales, labor, and scheduling data from every location into one screen. You skip logging into five systems to see how the day went.

How do mid-market restaurants manage back-of-house operations across locations?

They standardize recipes and prep steps, share inventory and ordering processes, and hand day-to-day back-of-house work to each location’s chef. Centralized reporting keeps the owner in the loop without micromanaging.

How many locations before you hire a multi-unit manager?

There’s no hard rule, but many operators add one around three to five locations. That’s typically when no single person can be on every floor.

How do you keep food quality consistent across locations?

Standardized recipes, written SOPs, and shared suppliers. When every location follows the same steps and uses the same ingredients, the plate looks and tastes the same.

What software do multi-location restaurants use?

Most use a connected stack: a POS, scheduling, and reporting tools that share data. The goal is one source of truth, not five disconnected apps.

How to manage multiple restaurant locations, one system at a time

Running more than one restaurant comes down to four things: consistency, delegation, communication, and clear visibility across every location. You don’t have to fix all four this month.

Pick one. Standardize your closing routine, or put your labor reports on a single dashboard. Get that working across every location, then move to the next.

When you’re ready to pull scheduling and reporting into one place, start a free trial and see how it fits your locations.