The Shift I Nearly Missed.

Twenty years ago, I was running a busy lunch service in New York when my general manager handed me a printout. Labour was 4% over. I told him I already knew — I'd felt it on the floor.

That instinct, built over thousands of shifts, is what most operators rely on. And for a long time, it was enough.

It isn't anymore.

Not because operators have lost their edge — but because the business has grown faster than any individual's ability to track it. More sites, more dayparts, more data points than any human brain can hold simultaneously. The instinct is still there. The information it needs to work with has outgrown the format.

I spent years thinking technology was the enemy of that instinct. That dashboards and data tools were for people who couldn't read a room. I was wrong.

The operators I've worked with who are pulling ahead right now aren't the ones who've abandoned their gut feel. They're the ones who've given it better information to work with.

That's what good technology does in a restaurant. It doesn't replace the operator. It brief the operator — faster, more accurately, and across more variables than any morning meeting ever could.

The shift I nearly missed wasn't on the floor that day in New York. It was in how I was thinking about the relationship between experience and data.

Twenty years later, I'm still learning to read the room. I've just got better tools to help me do it.