Hamed Mazrouei: Thin Margins Are a Lie

What if the thin margins crushing your restaurant aren’t the industry’s fault at all?

Hamed Mazrouei came into restaurants as a total outsider. He built Vivant, the managed network company that keeps thousands of restaurants online, and he refuses to accept the beliefs operators treat as gospel.

In this conversation, we get into why the thin margins operators blame on the industry actually come down to volume, why guest retention is the highest-leverage metric almost nobody fixes, and why simplification is the one trait every successful founder shares.

If you’ve been blaming the business for numbers you have the power to change, this one will make you rethink everything you assumed was fixed.

That’s Hamed Mazrouei. To learn more about Vivant, visit vivantcorp.com.

The Playbook Takeaways

1. Thin margins are a volume problem, not an industry problem. Hamed came into restaurants as a total outsider, and he refuses to accept the margin math operators treat as gospel. The numbers most owners blame on the industry come down to volume they have the power to change.
2. Guest retention is the highest-leverage metric almost nobody fixes. It sits upstream of nearly every other number in the business, and it is still the thing operators are least likely to actually work on.
3. Simplification is the trait every successful founder shares. Across the thousands of restaurants Vivant keeps online, the operators who win are the ones who strip the business down rather than add to it.

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About the Author: Josh Kopel is a Michelin-awarded restaurateur, coach, and host of the FULL COMP podcast. More about Josh · the podcast · learn with Josh.