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Take the first step to successfully starting and growing your business.
Join for freePosted: Fri 28th Aug 2026
Most people go into hospitality chasing a dream – their own place, their own kitchen, their name above the door.
What nobody tells them is how much discipline and structure that dream actually requires.
This session is for anyone thinking of opening a café or restaurant, going into partnership, or investing in hospitality – as well as owners already a year or two in, feeling the gap between the dream and the reality.
Drawing on 35 years of running restaurants across the UK, Turkey and South Africa, Murat Yilmaz shares the real, practical signs that separate a business that thrives from one that quietly becomes a trap – and what the first 90 days should actually look like.
The seven things every food and drink business needs in place to run properly
How to spot the early warning signs that a business is heading the wrong way, while there's still time to change course
What the first 90 days should look like
Murat is the founder of Growth Fork, with over 35 years of hospitality leadership across the UK, Turkey and South Africa.
He is an ABM-certified member and Enterprise Nation business mentor and has completed Andy Harrington's gold-level Serve & Sell speaker training.
Murat created the F.O.R.K. System and the P.I.L.O.T. programme, helping independent restaurant and café owners build the systems, leadership and confidence to run a genuinely professional operation.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Caitriona: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn. My name is Caitriona, and I'll be your host today. Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for startups and small businesses.
I'm pleased to introduce Murat Yilmaz, founder of GrowthFork. In this session, Murat shares the practical signs that separate a business that thrives from one that quietly becomes a trap, and what the first 90 days should actually look like.
If you have any questions throughout the webinar, please post them in the chat, and we'll do our best to answer them at the end of the session. Today's webinar will be recorded, and we'll send a follow-up email with the recording and further resources later today. Over to you, Murat.
Murat: Hi, everyone. Welcome. My name is Murat, and I have 35 years of experience in hospitality, working across three countries: Turkey, South Africa and the UK.
I created GrowthFork and its methodology to help the hospitality industry. I always tell people not to buy themselves a headache, because the hospitality business can be really painful.
I see it happen often: people buy a business, open it, go inside, and it's back up for sale again after six months to a year. That's why it's important to know, from the very beginning, what actually needs to be in place to start and run a business properly.
The data on the UK restaurant industry shows a business failure rate of 12.9%, the highest of any sector. At the moment, there are 176,068 hospitality businesses in the UK, and 99% of them are small, independent businesses.
Any business, when people go into it, needs to calculate its numbers from the start. This is where you get your recurring points, your return on investment: how many people need to walk through your door every day, how many people you need to serve, and how much you need to spend to get there.
Obviously, these numbers adjust if your covers increase or your spend per head increases; both bring the target down. Your accountant usually only tells you what you give them, and does the legal filing required; that's their job.
Most business owners I come across don't check what's actually being filed with HMRC. Eventually they come to me and say their accountant never told them, and they didn't know about the losses they were making. That's because accountants are simply doing their job of filing what they're given; it's the restaurant owner's responsibility to check what's going on in the business.
You need to check the business every week: your POS system, your inventory and stock control, your ordering, your menu engineering, your variances and risk controls, onboarding, scheduling, checklists and compliance, and your loyalty and customer data. All of this has to be in place in the restaurant before the system can run properly.
I often come across people who spend their time choosing a tile or a wall colour and deciding what the design is going to look like, instead of spending time on what system and what controls they need to put in place. They only ever go for the first one, because a POS is essential; everyone has a POS.
Sometimes providers offer the POS with inventory control included, but people don't take it, because they think the POS is good enough just to sell the food. But that inventory control has to be part of the restaurant system, so you can check it every week and notice any leakage in the first week, rather than only spotting the variances once things have already gone wrong.
So I also created an application for this. Let me show you how it actually looks in practice. This is a basic checklist application, with a daily checklist: you must have your opening, afternoon and closing checklists, and your prep sheet, and each item needs to be ticked off.
I also built a section for the kitchen, for when environmental health inspectors come in; that gets checked every day. We also have a compliance application: whatever checks are done each day get recorded here, so when the health and environment officer comes, everything is on file and ready to show them.
That way, this becomes your restaurant's ready-made document, and you stay organised on compliance. Everything else, HACCP, COSHH, gets recorded here too, so once it's logged, you're covered on the compliance side.
This checklist helps make sure your organisation is 100% ready for service. Sometimes staff under pressure in the kitchen can't cope because they haven't checked the prep in the fridge or on the radio stations; this happens often because staff do these checks so routinely that they forget to actually go through the list.
You can't rely on human memory. When I walk into a restaurant as a consultant and see an item left untouched, I know straightaway that somebody hasn't gone through the checklist.
This checklist matters, but it needs to cover everything. If something is done every day, step by step, that same structure needs to be used for staff training too, so everyone knows exactly what "good" looks like.
We've also created a staff onboarding system, with its own dashboard. When someone new joins, they sign in and go through the training process, starting with the foundation: what needs to be done in the restaurant, step by step, including a seven-day training plan and your menu.
Staff need to know every process, and you can add videos for them to watch. When they walk through the door, they need to know your culture and what's expected of them; they shouldn't bring their own habits, but do things the way your business requires.
Even experienced people can arrive with bad habits, so proper training still needs to happen, and everything can be recorded. With a training dashboard, you can track progress and adjust settings; whenever anything is updated in the restaurant, you send it to staff, they acknowledge it, and from then on everyone knows what's required.
Now, we also have a roster and scheduling system, and I want to show you our core system: the inventory system. This is the dashboard you'd see every day, and every week, because your sales come in here directly.
You list all your suppliers, ingredients and recipes, and this needs to be set up from the very beginning. You set par levels and record any allergens against your ingredients, so when you build a recipe, the allergens are pulled through automatically for that menu item.
As soon as the price of an ingredient changes, you can see your gross profit change immediately on this bar. That price change is recorded against the ingredient itself.
Say the price of a sauce increases, and that sauce is used in two menu items; the increase affects both of those items. Some ingredients might be used across four, five or six dishes, and any price increase shows up here immediately, affecting all of them.
You can review everything on the dashboard: your food cost and your labour cost. Labour cost pulls directly from the roster system; when you build your roster each week, you set your budget, and you can see your projected spend against your targeted weekly turnover before the week even starts.
We've also built in AI here. Say your weekly turnover is around 15,000 and you want your labour cost to stay below 28%. Because you train the AI with your staff, your rules and who works where, it can generate a full roster for you, targeted to hit that labour cost before the week starts.
We can move on to the core system: menu engineering. Each week it shows you which items are your stars, which are underperforming, and which are your top sellers, so you know what to remove from the menu.
All of this comes from reporting your sales against your stock. Most independent owners don't account for their stock properly; the only time you need to spend on this is when you close your stock and enter it, once a week.
Once you log your stock each week, the system tells you how much to order and creates an automatic order sheet by supplier, because you've already set your par levels. For example, if you need 20 units of almond milk before the week starts, as soon as you log your current stock, the system calculates exactly how much to order.
This also prevents overordering; sometimes people overorder around guest bookings, don't rotate stock properly, and end up throwing it away or forgetting about it. On variances, you can see immediately what should be in stock against what is actually in stock, and exactly where the difference lies.
You need every transaction recorded properly. I was consulting for a company in Oxford where guests would eat and drink, and staff never recorded any of it; I told them everything needs to go through the till, even your own coffee, so you always know your true cost.
I've also built in fixed costs: things like insurance, licences, grants and card transaction fees that don't change often. Once these are logged, your dashboard shows you exactly how the week has gone.
As I said earlier, most restaurant owners only discover problems three to six months later, and blame their accountant for not telling them; but that isn't the accountant's job. Their job is filing whatever document you give them; it's the restaurant owner's job to check the business tightly, every week.
Menu engineering is a very good tool for this: if something isn't selling, change the recipe or move its place on the menu; it needs to be controlled every day. Let me show you one more example.
I was helping a cafe in Oxford that was selling around 50 to 60 slices of cake to customers, who would take their slice and sit down to eat it, without ever being asked if they wanted ice cream with it. So I set the system to force whoever was serving, cashier or waiter, to ask every customer that question, since they couldn't complete the order without it.
That one small change increased sales by 15 to 20 scoops of ice cream a day, creating over 10,000 extra a year, just from that one upselling exercise. You need to notice which menu items pair well together, even ones that aren't selling well on their own, so you can combine them with something else to sell more.
This needs to be monitored by the owner, or by a manager who's been properly trained to do it; monitoring your restaurant lets you see immediately where things are breaking down and what needs fixing. In the POS system, every item can be set up to prompt an upsell, so staff are always asked to offer something extra, like asking if a customer wants their breakfast with a side.
Staff will always forget to ask on their own, so you build a system that forces the cashier or waiter to ask every time. This same discipline needs to be built into training too, repeated weekly, so everyone knows what needs to be sold and how customers should be treated.
Your POS reports should also show you how your staff are performing: who's upselling the most, whose turnover is lower, and what that tells you about how to coach them and grow the business. Going back to return on investment: if 28 people come in and only spend a small amount per head, over several months you can see the shortfall and work to close it.
Increase footfall, increase spend per head, without being pushy; customers generally appreciate a good suggestion and enjoy trying something new, and that's how you grow your numbers. Think about it: every shop, Aldi, Lidl or Waitrose, offers you something at every step until you reach the till.
That's the selling strategy every business uses, but in a busy restaurant, staff often stop asking. You have to build a system that keeps prompting them to ask, so your dashboard always shows your true gross profit, revenue, and which items are and aren't selling; think of it like your business bible, checked constantly.
Back to the roster: the AI creates the shift pattern for you, at a targeted labour cost, showing exactly who's working and when. You review it, accept and apply it, and everything is done: whoever needs to work, whenever, it's all set out clearly, so you can't go wrong, though you can still adjust it if someone comes in a little later or earlier.
We also have a clocking system, so when staff clock in and out, it reflects immediately here in real time. From that, the system can also generate payslips, including any additional hours or deductions, such as staff meals, and email them out to everyone individually as soon as the roster and shifts are done.
All of this creates automation so you don't spend too much time on admin, and can spend it instead on growing the business. That's the main issue for most owners: mixing up activity with progress.
When I visit owner-operated restaurants, I often see the owner busy clearing tables and washing dishes; that is real work, but it means they're not spending time on progress. I once told an owner exactly that, and when he asked what I meant, I said: sit down, look at your numbers, what needs to be checked, what needs to sell, how you increase sales and income, and how you improve staff training and quality; that's the real progress a business needs.
If you have a manager, let them handle the day-to-day activity during busy periods, and focus your own time on designing how the restaurant runs. Every big operation puts its systems in place first, before the restaurant even opens, and builds the restaurant around those systems.
People coming into hospitality without experience tend to focus more on how the business will look and what it will be called; that matters, but the real brain of the business is its operating system. Look at McDonald's or KFC: these businesses run on a big system that everybody follows.
If you design your menu and recipes properly and record everything in the kitchen, then when a new chef comes in, they can simply pick up the file: here's the menu, here's the recipe, here's the method, and follow the checklist, knowing exactly what to do. You still need to train your staff, but you're not training them from scratch, because the system is already there, and it stops each person from making the same mistakes going forward.
Caitriona: We had one question in the chat: they're asking whether you need different software to cover all these different aspects.
Murat: Sorry, sorry, I'm not catching that clearly. My sound doesn't seem clear on my end; is there an echo?
Caitriona: No, the audio is fine on my side. Somebody's just asking about the different software you've been sharing: do you need all of that software?
Murat: Ah, okay, yes. The software is available; this is all my own software, which I designed for my clients, but it's available to everybody.
You can also get separate hospitality software from other providers; there are plenty of companies selling their own systems. But this particular one belongs to my company, it's called the GrowthFork ecosystem, and everything in it connects together.
I built it this way on purpose. For example, compliance and allergen information pulls straight through from your menu, showing you exactly what allergens are on each item, so you can print it and hang it in the kitchen for everyone to see.
The roster works the same way: as soon as you build it, it reflects immediately on your dashboard. Everything in the ecosystem links together this way: your sales pull straight through to the dashboard, your labour costs reflect there too, and your checklist compliance feeds into the compliance department automatically.
So you only spend around one hour a week doing your stock check, and the system gives you the full picture: whether you're making money, and where you need to improve. That one hour gives you a clear view of your business.
Caitriona: We're just coming to the end of the session now, but we can take one final question: do you have any recommended software for food manufacturing?
Murat: For food manufacturing, you'd want something that works from the recipe itself: as you put in your ingredients, it shows you exactly what's used, your food cost, and your profit.
If it's more like a factory manufacturing process rather than a kitchen, the principle is the same: any recipe-based system that tracks ingredients will give you that same visibility into cost and profit.
Caitriona: Thank you. We've just come to the end of the session now, but thank you so much, Murat, for joining us today. We'll be sharing the recording and further resources in a follow-up email this afternoon.
Murat: Thank you.
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