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Restaurant Leaders’ Biggest Hurdle Isn’t Finding Staff or Pleasing Diners. It’s Time.

Our Most Compelling Data:

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Roughly three in four restaurant leaders indicated they spend more time on every aspect of business operations we asked about than they did a year ago.

60%

of operators said hiring has become easier in the past year.

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More than one third of restaurant owners plan to launch programmes to retain staff.

As hiring gets easier, restaurant leaders spend more time on operations

What stands in the way of restaurant leaders in reaching their goals this year? It always comes down to time.

Take hiring, for example. Finding talent and retaining staff have been huge challenges for operators for years. Thankfully, the majority (60%) said it’s got easier this year. That should feel like a huge relief after years of rising wages and additional labour market abnormalities.

But 73% still say they spend more time on hiring than they did last year, while three in four said they spend more time on business operations and management activities.

Key takeaway:

Those burritos won’t make themselves, and those tables won’t get cleared without a little hustle. Still, there are several areas where restaurant leaders can save time by adding technology, which the majority (72%) told us they’re already looking into. With the pressure of the pandemic mostly in the past, restaurant leaders have an opportunity in 2025 to think about the big-picture future of their businesses. This includes how intuitive ordering technology (like kiosks), all-in-one back-end systems and AI-powered staff scheduling could save their operations time and smooth out a chaotic kitchen environment on even the best days.

Pro tip:

Looking for a place to start testing? Try looking at your staff experience. Tools like Square Shifts help restaurant leaders track hours and accurately pay employees, reducing a significant friction point so everyone can focus more on productivity and customer service.

The name ‘Hermanos’ comes from its founding brothers Victor and Santiago Gamboa. Together with business partner Adnan Millwala, the trio sought to bring their passion for Colombian specialty coffees and traditional roasting practices to the UK market.

At Hermanos, the coffee comes first. The idea that every customer should get the same quality of coffee, regardless of what time of the day they come, is key to the brand’s service ethos. Therefore, the team emphatically states that staff training and having the right equipment are the mechanisms employed to create an outstanding customer experience. Shrewd inventory management is necessary to maintain sufficient levels of stock across multiple coffee shop sites, wholesale and ecommerce operations without producing so much as to invite profit-sapping wastage.

As specialty coffee roasters, our objective is to have fresh coffee across our sites. [Square’s data] helps us to do that. The analytics tools give us an insight as to when to roast and how much coffee we need to roast. So then all the coffee that we have in the shops gets to the shops freshly roasted, and wastage is minimised. The dashboard is my favourite app. That’s one of the things that I check every day before I go to bed and when I wake up in the morning.”

– Victor Gamboa, co-founder of Hermanos, London, United Kingdom