Nicolas Fischer, Michelin-trained chef and founder of Beyond the Pass, on what understaffing really costs a hospitality business, beyond the obvious short-term pressure.
Most operators think of understaffing as a problem they’re managing. A gap in the rota, a busy section covered by one fewer pair of hands, a tough few weeks until the right person turns up. Uncomfortable, but survivable.
The trouble is that the real cost of understaffing almost never shows up where operators are looking for it. It hides in the numbers nobody reconciles, and by the time it’s visible in the P&L, it has usually been costing money for months. Here are the five questions I get asked most, answered honestly from the numbers side.
When operators think about understaffing, what costs do they notice first, and what do they overlook?
The cost they notice first is always the obvious one: the pressure. Longer hours for the existing team, a stressed kitchen, a section stretched thin on a busy night. It’s visible, it’s immediate, and it feels like the whole problem.
The cost they overlook is everything downstream of that pressure, and it’s far larger. When a kitchen runs short, prep gets rushed or skipped, which quietly pushes food cost up through waste and inconsistency. Ticket times stretch, which slows table turns, which costs covers you never see because they simply didn’t get served. Standards slip in small ways that don’t trigger complaints but do erode the repeat custom that actually drives profit.
None of that appears on a rota. All of it costs money.
The obvious cost is the one you feel. The expensive cost is the one you don’t.
What are the first signs a labour gap is already hurting profitability, even while the business seems to be coping?
The business “coping” is exactly what disguises it. A good team will absorb a gap through sheer effort, which makes the problem invisible right up until it isn’t.
The early signs are in the operational numbers, not the mood. Ticket times creeping up during normal service, not just at peak. Covers per available hour drifting down. Waste ticking up as rushed prep gets binned. An increase in small errors and remakes. And the clearest early warning of all: your best people starting to look tired, or starting to leave. When a kitchen is short, the strongest staff carry the most weight, and they are precisely the ones with the most options elsewhere. A resignation from a good chef is often the first time the true cost of a labour gap lands on the owner’s desk, and by then it’s expensive to fix.
How does running short on labour affect standards, consistency and team behaviour?
Consistency is the first casualty, and consistency is what customers actually pay for. A dish that’s brilliant on Tuesday and rushed on Saturday isn’t a brilliant dish, it’s an unreliable one, and unreliability is what stops people coming back.
Behaviourally, a short-staffed team shifts from doing things well to just getting things out. That’s not a criticism of the team, it’s survival under pressure. But the culture of “good enough to get by” is corrosive. It becomes the new normal, standards reset downward, and the pride that made the place good in the first place quietly drains away. The team stops building and starts coping, and a coping team is one bad week away from losing its best member and tipping into a spiral.
Why does trying to save money by avoiding cover or delaying a hire often cost more in the long run?
Because the saving is visible and the cost is hidden, so the maths looks better than it is.
Delaying a hire saves a wage you can see on the payroll. What it costs is spread across lines you don’t attribute to it: the covers lost to slow service, the waste from rushed prep, the repeat customers who quietly drift away, and eventually the recruitment and training cost of replacing the good staff who burned out and left. Replacing a chef who leaves through overwork can cost many thousands of pounds once you count recruitment, training, and the productivity dip while the new person learns the section, far more than the wage you saved by not hiring sooner.
The operator sees a saved wage. The business pays a larger, scattered bill it never traces back to the decision. That’s why understaffing is one of the most expensive false economies in hospitality.
What would you want operators to rethink about staffing costs when deciding whether to invest in cover or solve a gap faster?
I’d want them to stop thinking of labour purely as a cost to minimise and start thinking of it as the thing that protects every other number in the business.
The right question isn’t “what does this hire cost me?” It’s “what is the gap costing me right now, and how much of that am I not measuring?” When you actually add up the lost covers, the rising waste, the slipping consistency, and the risk to your best people, the cost of the gap is almost always higher than the cost of closing it. Cover and faster hiring aren’t expenses that eat your margin. They’re what protect the margin from leaking out everywhere else.
Understaffing feels like the careful choice, the responsible way to control costs in a hard market. Usually, it’s the opposite. The most expensive hire is the one you didn’t make.
Nicolas Fischer is a Michelin-trained chef who writes about the operational economics of hospitality, the kitchen, labour and margin numbers that decide whether a business actually makes money. He publishes Beyond the Pass, a newsletter helping independent operators find the profit hiding in their own numbers, at beyondthepass.org.
