The Real Numbers You Should Be Looking At Are Based on the Strength of Your Team

Food cost is up. Labor cost is up. Traffic is down.
Every operator I talk to right now is staring at the same P&L and asking the same question: where do I cut? And most of them have already cut — labor hours trimmed, cheaper hires, fewer managers on the floor.
The margins are still wrong.
That’s not a coincidence. It’s a diagnosis error. The costs are the symptom. The problem lives somewhere else.

When I took over an interim assignment running a struggling district in the Chicago suburbs, while I was still managing the Potbelly neighborhood stores, the financial picture was the same one most operators are looking at right now. Higher labor costs. Higher food costs. Lower margins. Lower sales growth.

The pressure from leadership was immediate and conventional: trim labor hours, get food cost in line, fix any service issues and push key responsibilities back to the GMs. Ok, I got the message, but I saw something else.

I didn’t believe that was the full picture. So I went to work on understanding why the suburban stores were under performing, not what to cut, but what was actually causing the problem.

What I found wasn’t surprising once I saw it. These locations were newer, and suburban stores traditionally can be more challenging to staff than city locations. However, it was about making a clear connection. The suburban stores had higher turnover, shorter employee tenure, staff with less training, and missing leadership positions at key levels. And every one of those conditions correlated directly with the financial results.

The city stores,  I was already running,  had longer tenure, deeper cross-training, stronger bench coverage at every level. And they were consistently more profitable.

So, the problem wasn’t just the market. It wasn’t inflation. It wasn’t wage pressure. It was the team infrastructure. The suburban stores didn’t have the bench to perform consistently, so they couldn’t hold their costs or their sales.

What Gets Measured Is What Gets Managed — Except That’s Not What Drucker Said

“What gets measured gets managed.” You’ve heard it. Possibly quoted it. Peter Drucker never actually said it.

The warning traces back to a 1956 management paper by V.F. Ridgway. H. Thomas Johnson put it more sharply: “What you measure is all you’ll get.” People don’t just manage what’s measured,  they optimize for it and ignore everything else.

If you’re measuring turnover percentage, you’re watching a lagging indicator. The problem already happened. Turnover tells you that something broke, it doesn’t tell you what broke or what’s about to break next.

To make my case to leadership, I needed a leading indicator. Something that showed the condition, not just the outcome. That’s what the Bench Strength Index was built to do.

What the Bench Strength Index Actually Measures

Four indices. One score.

•  Fully Staffed Index: Ideal staffing against actual, adjusted for weekly sales volume. Score drops 5% per person short of ideal. You know if you’re running short — but do you know by how much, against a benchmark that adjusts to your store’s volume?

•  Leadership Index: Managers and certified trainers against required coverage. If you don’t have the right leadership in the building, your standards can’t travel without you.

•  Cross Trained Index: Trained positions divided by total possible positions. This is almost always the weakest number — and it’s the one that makes the schedule fragile.

•  Team Quality Index: A=100%, B=80%, C=70%, weighted average. Your A players are what makes your standard visible to every guest. Your C employees cost you more than their wages.

The overall score is the average of all four. The threshold is 85%.

Stores consistently below 85% showed negative sales growth of 3–5% and margin compression of 1–3%. Every time. I discovered the correlation at Potbelly. I saw it replicate at Roti when I built the same framework there.

What Happened When I Published the Scores

When I started publishing bench strength scores across both districts, city stores alongside suburban stores, two things happened almost immediately.

First, the conversation with leadership changed. When you can show the financial correlation between bench strength and P&L performance, “invest in the team” stops being an opinion and starts being a strategy. The picture was clear: factoring out, any larger difference in sales volume, the  stores were more profitable because their teams were built better. The path forward in the suburbs wasn’t to cut, — it was to build.

Second, the competitive visibility did its own work. Managers could see their store’s score. They could see every other store’s score. Cross-training conversations started happening without prompting. Certification conversations came up in daily huddles. Nobody wanted to be the lowest number on the board.

No new training program. No new initiative. Just visibility, and the scores improved.

The Career Path Connection

The other thing the bench score unlocks is a real development conversation.

“You’re doing great” isn’t a development plan. “You’re at B on 4 stations. To be considered for shift lead, you need A on 6. Here’s how we track it and what the timeline looks like.” That’s a plan.

The score gives you something to point to. Without it, development conversations stay vague. And vague development conversations are how you lose your best people,  not because they didn’t see a future, but because they couldn’t see a specific, credible path to it.

If You’re Below 85%, You Already Know What’s Coming

Run your stores. Get your number.

If you’re below 85%, the P&L is already telling you what the bench score will confirm. The question isn’t whether you have a problem, it’s whether you’re measuring the right thing to fix it.

The store Bench Strength isn’t something you can just download, it is built based on your restaurants specific set of stations, but the overall model is always the same.  If you our curious and want to build your own, send me a message and I can give you the details.

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