How to Optimize Restaurants for Multi-Location Operations

Multi-location operations: the short answer

Running multi-location operations well takes four moves: standard processes, centralized reporting, a connected tech stack, and a team you trust at each store. Get those right, and every location runs like one business instead of a group of strangers sharing a logo.

Here’s the part most first-time operators miss. Running two or more restaurants differs fundamentally from running one. You can’t be in every dining room at once, so your systems and your people have to carry your standards for you.

The stakes are big, and so is the market you’re growing into. According to the National Restaurant Association’s 2025 industry outlook, the restaurant and foodservice industry was expected to reach $1.5 trillion in sales and add more than 200,000 net new jobs in 2025, bringing total employment to 15.9 million, remaining the nation’s second-largest private-sector employer.

A purpose-built platform ties these four moves together. That’s why many groups run their stores on full-service restaurant software instead of a pile of spreadsheets.

Why running multiple locations is harder than running one

One restaurant fits in your head. You know every server, every regular, and every number without opening a report.

A second location breaks that. Suddenly you’re managing teams you rarely see and problems you hear about a day late.

Four things get harder fast:

• Fragmented teams: Staff at each store build their own habits, and those habits drift apart without a shared standard.
• Inconsistent processes: The way one store preps, opens, and closes stops matching the next one.
• Data silos: Reports from each location arrive in different formats, so you can’t compare them side by side.
• Scaling complexity: Every new store multiplies scheduling, payroll, and compliance work instead of just adding to it.

Tom Schmidt, co-owner of Salt + Smoke BBQ, learned this the hard way. He says the hardest jump wasn’t from a full kitchen to a full calendar. It was from one location to two.

At his second venture, Nico, the team wasn’t ready. In his words, he “didn’t have that team composition down at all, and Nico failed miserably because of that.” You can’t grow past one location without a team you trust to run it without you.

Notice what the hard part wasn’t. It wasn’t the menu, the lease, or the build-out. It came down to people, structure, and trust.

Standardize your processes and SOPs across every location

A standard operating procedure (SOP) is a written, step-by-step guide for a repeatable task. Think of it as the recipe for how work gets done, not just what goes on the plate. When every store follows the same SOP, quality stops depending on who’s working that night.

Start with the tasks that touch guests and food safety most:

• One prep method, with the same measurements and quality bar at every station.
• The same greeting, timing, and table standards in each dining room.
• Identical opening and closing checklists, so nothing gets skipped when you’re away.
• Shared temperature logs and line checks that prove standards were met.

Paper checklists get lost, coffee-stained, and ignored. Digital ones don’t. Move your SOPs into digital task checklists so managers can assign them, track them in real time, and see what got done at each store.

Standardized methods also speed up onboarding. A new manager doesn’t have to guess how your group runs. They follow the same clear steps your best managers already use, which shortens training and protects your standards from day one.

Write your SOPs so a new hire could follow them on a first shift. Keep each step short, name the tool or station, and state the standard you expect. When a guest at store three gets the same experience as store one, your SOPs are doing their job.

Keep your SOPs living, not laminated. When you find a better way at one store, update the master and push it to every other store the same week. That way your whole group improves together instead of drifting apart again.

Centralize inventory management across locations

Inventory is where quiet money leaks out. When each store counts its own way, you can’t see the full picture or catch the waste. Cloud-based tracking fixes that by putting every location’s counts in one place you can open from anywhere.

Centralized inventory gives your group three practical wins:

• Move product between stores with a digital trail, so nothing walks off the books.
• Set what each person sees and edits by role and by location.
• Segment counts by store to spot the exact site that’s over-ordering or wasting product.

Waste costs more than most operators think. Food waste cost data from ReFED shows that in 2024 the food industry generated roughly $240 billion in the value of surplus food, and at the foodservice level about 70% of waste is plate waste, with forecasting errors and improper storage driving much of the operational remainder.

Segmenting inventory by location turns that into a fixable problem. When you can see which store wastes what, you can coach that manager, adjust orders, and stop the same leak at your other sites.

Integrate your tech stack: one system instead of many

Your tech stack is the set of tools you use to run the business. For multi-unit operators, a pile of disconnected tools is a hidden tax. You re-enter the same numbers, chase reports that don’t match, and lose hours stitching it all together.

The fix is to connect your point of sale (POS), scheduling, labor tracking, and reporting so they share one source of truth.

When your POS feeds your scheduling tool, your forecasts get sharp. 7shifts delivers 95% accurate sales forecasts through its POS integration. Managers can then staff to real demand instead of a gut guess.

Here’s the difference in plain terms:

What you do	Siloed tools	One integrated platform
Data entry	Type the same numbers into several apps	Enter once, and it flows everywhere
Reporting	Merge mismatched exports by hand	See group-wide numbers in one view
Scheduling accuracy	Guess demand from memory	Build schedules from POS sales forecasts
Manager time	Hours lost switching between tools	More time on the floor with the team

One connected system doesn’t just save clicks. It gives every store the same numbers, so a decision you make for the group actually lands the same way at each site.

Payroll is where this pays off fastest. Instead of pulling hours from a separate spreadsheet for each store, you run one clean set of numbers from one system. That saves your back office hours every pay period and cuts the errors that creep in when you copy data by hand.

Schedule your teams across locations without the guesswork

Good multi-location scheduling starts with demand, not habit. When your schedule is built from sales forecasts, you put the right number of people on at the right times. That protects service on busy nights and keeps you from paying for slow ones.

The features that matter most for a growing group:

• Match staffing to expected sales at each store with forecast-driven scheduling.
• Let managers build and edit schedules from their phones, on-site or off.
• Watch labor as it happens with real-time reporting, instead of after payroll.
• See and manage staff who work across your stores in one view.
• Reuse proven schedule templates by role, season, and location.
• Let staff pick up open shifts from a shift pool, with manager approval.

Staff who float between stores add another wrinkle. Without one view, a manager can double-book someone or miss that they’ve already hit overtime across two sites. A shared scheduling system shows every shift a person works, so covering a gap takes minutes, not a round of phone calls.

If your method still lives in spreadsheets or group texts, restaurant scheduling software is the upgrade that makes the rest possible.

Control labor costs across every location

Labor is usually your largest controllable cost, so small improvements at each store add up fast. The goal is simple. Staff to demand, and watch the number in real time so you can act before a shift runs long.

A few controls keep costs in line across the group:

• Align staffing to demand: Use forecasts so you’re not overstaffed at 3 p.m. or slammed at 7.
• Prevent overtime and understaffing: Get alerts before someone tips into overtime or a shift goes bare.
• Track labor as a percentage of sales per site: Compare each store on the same yardstick.
• Set local labor rules per location: Match break, overtime, and scheduling rules to each store’s laws.

The payoff is real. Restaurants that use 7shifts to tighten their operations cut labor costs by up to 3%. That savings drops straight to the bottom line at every store you run.

Benchmarks tell you if your number is healthy. NRA labor cost benchmarks show that among fullservice respondents to the NRA’s 2025 Restaurant Operations Data Abstract, salaries and wages (including benefits) represented a median of 36.5% of sales in 2024; profitable operators held labor to a median of 34.2%, while operators who reported a loss ran a median of 42.9%.

Today’s numbers also run high by past standards. Historical labor cost trends show full-service labor ran a median of 36.5% of sales and limited-service 31.7% in 2024, elevated compared with the roughly 33% (full-service) and 28% (limited-service) averages in the NRA’s 2010, 2013, and 2016 editions.

As you add stores in new cities or states, the rules multiply too. Handling per-location labor compliance in one system keeps each site on the right side of local law without a spreadsheet for every jurisdiction.

Give each general manager a labor target they own, then let the system hold the line. When a schedule pushes past the set percentage, the tool flags it before the shift is published. That turns a weekly reminder into an automatic guardrail, and it frees you from policing every store by hand.

See every location clearly with centralized reporting

You can’t fix what you can’t see. Centralized reporting pulls every store’s numbers into one place, so you spend your time deciding instead of hunting for data. That’s the difference between managing a group and reacting to it.

Strong group reporting lets you:

• Break out sales, labor, and traffic for each store.
• Track sales, labor, and sales per labor hour (SPLH) across the group in one dashboard.
• Compare top and low performers to see what your best store does differently.

Scale is not a barrier here. As Clay Geyer, chief operating officer of Black Rock Coffee Bar, puts it: “7shifts enables us to monitor all 135 locations from one convenient platform, ensuring compliance with state regulations wherever we operate.”

You don’t need 135 stores to get the same benefit. An operations overview dashboard gives a 3-store group the same clarity, and real-time labor reporting lets you catch a costly shift while it’s still happening.

Comparing stores is where the real value shows up. Line them up on sales per labor hour and labor percentage, and your best performer becomes a teaching tool. Find what that manager does differently, write it into your SOPs, and lift the whole group toward that bar.

Reporting isn’t only about numbers. A shared manager log book lets you read shift notes and issues from every store in one place. You can catch a recurring problem at one location and coach it early, without driving across town to hear about it.

Build a team and culture that stay consistent across stores

Every system in this guide runs on people. Your standards only travel to a new store if the team there believes in them. So the real work of growth is building a team and culture that hold up when you’re not in the room.

Three habits keep culture consistent as you add locations:

• Use the same clear onboarding steps for every new hire and manager.
• Repeat the same values and standards until they’re second nature at each store.
• Meet on a set rhythm so news reaches every store the same week.

Tom Schmidt runs a weekly cascade any group can copy. His corporate team meets Wednesday, the all-GM meeting is Thursday, and the executive chef meeting is Friday. Store-level meetings then happen over the weekend, when everyone is on-site.

Delegation is the other half. Tom’s advice is to get honest with yourself and ask, “What am I good at? What am I not?” Then resist the urge to hire people who think exactly like you, because a team of copies can’t cover your blind spots.

Give that cadence a home so it doesn’t live in scattered texts. A single team communication tool keeps announcements, shift notes, and questions in one thread per store. New hires can scroll back to catch up, and nothing important gets buried in someone’s phone.

Growth also gives your best people room to move. Opening location number two created two general manager chairs and two executive chef chairs. That kind of expansion builds a stronger support structure and lets top performers step up.

You’ll need that runway, because hiring stays competitive. BLS staffing projections from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics estimate about 1,078,500 openings for food and beverage serving and related workers each year, on average, over the decade, with many resulting from workers leaving the occupation.

Know when (and how) to open your next location

The right time to expand is when your current model works without you. If one store still needs your daily rescue, a second one will only spread that stress across two rooms. Fix the model first, then copy it.

Opening well comes down to a few disciplines:

• Copy what already works instead of reinventing at the new site.
• Get your SOPs, tech stack, and management bench ready before day one.
• Say no to shiny new concepts until the core is solid.

Tom Schmidt is candid about the pull of new ideas, and why he turns them down. In his words, “It’s so hard to get what we’re doing right just in one store, now trying to get it right at eight stores.” The takeaway is steady and simple. Get it right in one store first, then let that proven model earn your next location.

A quick gut check helps before you sign a new lease. Can your current stores run a strong week without you on-site, and do the numbers hold up store to store? If yes, you’re copying success; if no, you’re copying problems.

Related watch: Tom Schmidt’s journey on expanding locations

Frequently asked questions

How do you track inventory across multiple restaurant locations?

Use cloud-based tracking that stores every location’s counts in one place, with permissions by role and location. That lets you log inter-location transfers, segment data by store, and spot waste before it spreads.

How does a shift planner help control labor costs?

A shift planner builds schedules from sales forecasts and flags overtime before it happens, so you staff to real demand. It also shows labor as a percentage of sales per store, which makes overspending easy to catch and fix.

What is a good labor cost percentage for a restaurant?

It varies by service model, but many profitable full service operators keep total labor in the mid-30% of sales range. Watching that number for each location helps you keep every store healthy.

How often should restaurant schedules be created?

Most restaurants build schedules weekly, using sales forecasts and reusable templates to speed the work. A steady weekly rhythm gives staff advance notice and gives managers time to adjust before the week starts.

Can employees access their schedules from their phones?

Yes. Employees check schedules, update availability, trade shifts, and grab open shifts from a mobile app, so managers field far fewer calls and texts when restaurants run on platforms like 7shifts.

Ready to run every location like one business?

Standard processes, connected tools, clear reporting, and a team you trust turn a group of restaurants into one smooth operation. You don’t have to build it all at once, so start with the systems that give you back the most time.

Ready to make your next location easier? Start a free trial.