For a while, the staffing worked.
My partner ran the kitchen with a kitchenhand and two other chefs. I had two baristas and two waitresses on the floor. Set shifts, predictable roster and when someone needed a day off they swapped with a colleague as long as the shift was covered.
It was not a perfect system but it was a functioning one. Until covid hit and everything went out the window.
Staff disappeared overnight. Shifts that had run reliably for months fell apart. The informal swap system that had worked fine in normal conditions had nothing to fall back on when normal conditions no longer existed. What looked like a stable team turned out to be a stable team in a stable environment. Remove the stability and the vulnerability was everywhere.
That is the first thing covid taught us about our staffing model. The second thing came later, and it was harder to sit with.
My partner was in the kitchen seven days a week.
Not because we planned it that way. Because the kitchen needed him and there was never a clean moment to step back. He knew every supplier relationship, every recipe, every standard, every quirk of the equipment. The kitchen ran because he was in it.
When he hurt his back and I was standing at the pass alone trying to decide whether to cook or run food, that was not just an operational problem. That was a preview of what a buyer would be inheriting.
A business where the head chef is there seven days a week is a business that depends on that person being there seven days a week. If he left, or in our case if we sold, what goes with him is not just a set of hands. It is the reputation, the consistency, the relationships with the regulars who came back because they liked what he made and potentially the loyalty of the team that worked alongside him.
A buyer walking into that situation on day one is not buying a kitchen. They are buying a problem they do not yet know how to solve.
In hospitality, staff dependency is not unusual. It is the nature of the work.
The business depends on people. People have personalities, relationships, histories with the place. Regulars build loyalty to the barista who remembers their order, the chef whose food they trust, the owner who always says hello. That is not a flaw in the model. It is how good hospitality works.
But there is a version of this problem that goes beyond the day to day. And it is worth understanding even if selling is the last thing on your mind right now.
When a serious buyer evaluates a hospitality business they are thinking about what happens to the staff after settlement. Not because they want to replace everyone. Because they need to know who will stay, who might leave and what the business looks like if the wrong person walks out.
The questions they are asking, even if they do not ask them out loud, are these.
Would the head chef stay under new ownership or did they only stay because of their relationship with the current owner? Would the regulars follow the food or follow the person who made it? Would the front of house team stay or did they work there because of the culture the current owner built?
If the honest answer to any of those is uncertain, that uncertainty has a cost. It affects what the business is worth, how easy it is to step back from and whether anyone else could ever run it without you.
There is a version of this that is worse than uncertainty.
It is when the key person is the owner's partner, family member, or close friend. Someone whose loyalty to the business is tied entirely to their loyalty to the person selling it.
That is not a criticism. It is extremely common in small hospitality. Couples build cafes together. Families run restaurants together. It works because of the trust and the shared investment in making it succeed.
But when it comes time to sell, a buyer has to ask the hard question. Will that person stay for someone they do not know, on terms they did not negotiate, in a business that no longer belongs to the person they came to work for?
Sometimes yes. Often no. And a buyer who cannot answer that question with confidence will either walk away or offer significantly less to account for the risk.
The way to reduce this risk is not to fire your best people or replace your partner in the kitchen.
It is to build the business so that it does not collapse if any one person leaves.
Document the recipes, the standards, the supplier relationships. Cross-train wherever possible so that more than one person can do the critical jobs. Build the culture around the business rather than around an individual. Make the role bigger than the person in it.
None of that happens overnight. But every step you take toward it is a step toward a business that a buyer can actually see themselves running without the previous owner standing next to them.
The goal is not a business without people. It is a business where the people are supported by systems strong enough to survive any individual leaving.
Including you.
Next edition: what a buyer is actually looking for in the first 90 days of ownership.
If your business depends heavily on one person right now, hit reply. It is more common than you think and more fixable than it feels.