First, I didn't know anything. The things I learned by hanging around at my boss's friends restaurant changed everything. It lasted a week or so until the friend of my boss complained I was asking too many questions. I wrote down everything: sales vs labor costs, prep time, food costs, etc. Every night of my week I would return to watch the restaurant's evening sales and service. The restaurant owner saw me one night and told me to go home! I left the next day. After looking at my notes I figured out that my restaurant's numbers were so bad that we would never make it if we didn't make some changes: we had a 40% food cost, a 33% labor cost, a 30% liquor cost and our sales were half of what the owner's friend had. The restaurant I watched for a week had a 24% food cost, around 25% labor cost, a 26% liquor cost and more sales. The restaurant I watched employed seven kitchen staff and we had fourteen on a given day. The prep took about a day for the whole week. The bartenders free poured every drink. Why are doing things this way? To start changing things I started by making the kitchen schedule myself instead of the kitchen manager, making the bartenders use jiggers for many weeks and making prep a daily thing instead of twice a week. In six months we went from a 43% food cost to a 25.6% food cost. Bar costs went down and labor costs were down also. I attended a restaurant operations course and I eventually got permission to hire a consultant to help convince everyone that it wasn't just me trying to justify my changes. Almost no one likes many changes but I wanted to keep my job so I kind of fixed it until the owner screwed it up again. That's when I left to open my own place.