Turning Seasonal Slowdown Into Autumnal Optimization

Heading into a quieter period, restaurant operators should take a proactive approach, assessing their needs to better position themselves for the upcoming holiday season. 

Profitability and cash flow are two separate conversations that operators tend to collapse into one according to Jon Jacobs, President of U.S. Operations at SilverChef. He explained that a summer can be genuinely profitable on paper and still leave you cash-poor by October because the profit went straight back out into payroll, inventory and marketing rather than being held back on purpose to support growth plans or function as a rainy-day reserve. 

Fifty-two percent of restaurant operators reported lower customer traffic in September 2025 compared with the year before, up from 42 percent in August, according to the National Restaurant Association data, Meanwhile, the share reporting increased traffic fell from 38 percent in August to 34 percent in September. The wider picture makes that harder than it used to be, Jacobs said, as only 42 percent of operators said their restaurant was profitable last year, with 60 percent seeing softer guest traffic. 

“When the margin is that compressed to begin with, a slow six weeks can threaten your ability to meet obligations that do not slow down alongside your covers. One way to prepare is to set a reserve number before the season turns, move it somewhere you will not casually spend it, and determine which financing tool matches which need before you are under pressure. The worst version of this is a slow month and an equipment failure competing for the same emergency dollars. The money you make in one month is not fully yours until you have decided how much of it needs to survive until months down the line."

A Chance to Run Your Restaurant

A slower season is the first chance all year to actually see your kitchen rather than look at it through the fog of a 200-cover Saturday, and when everything is running, everything feels essential, said Jacobs. 

“A slow season is when the restaurant stops running you and you get a chance to run it. I would start with equipment, which surprises people because it is usually last on the list.  Walk the line and, for each piece, answer two questions honestly: how often did this run in the last month, and what is it costing me in space, power and maintenance to keep it there? Menus drift over the years in a way equipment does not, so most kitchens are carrying at least one unit that made complete sense three menu revisions ago.”

The inverse matters just as much, he said. Somewhere in that kitchen is a bottleneck capping what you can put out on your best nights, and you cannot see it in August. You can see it in October, when there is still time to do something about it before the holidays.

A slow season is when the restaurant stops running you and you get a chance to run it.

Staffing is the next conversation and the one carrying the most cost pressure as labor remains the largest single operating expense, representing a median of 36.5 percent of sales among full-service restaurants, Jacobs suggested. 

“A schedule built on assumptions from the summer season can eat a month of savings or margins. A smarter way to approach staffing is to rebuild the schedule against forecasted sales each week instead of copying from last week, with enough cross-training that a server can run expo or a line cook can move to prep when covers are light.”

If you act early enough, optimizing inventory costs could be the simplest to fix out of the three, Jacobs said. 

“Tighten your periodic automatic replacement (PAR) levels before the traffic drops rather than after, because ordering at summer volume out of habit is exactly how cash ends up rotting in a walk-in instead of sitting in your account, ready to use on a rainy day or support your growth plans.”

Open the Maintenance Window

Additionally, a slower stretch is the most valuable maintenance window a kitchen gets all year, because it is the only time you can take something offline for two hours without a line cook glaring at you across the pass, Jacobs said. 

“The highest-value items in a commercial kitchen tend to be the least interesting ones. Cleaning condenser coils, replacing worn door gaskets on walk-ins and reach-ins, flushing condensate drain lines, calibrating thermostats on ovens and fryers. None of that shows up in a dining room right away, but it puts you in a better position come December when you’re running your equipment at maximum capacity and they’re not breaking down.”

If you are prioritizing for the holidays specifically, work backward from the menu you intend to run and give the technician’s time first to whatever your highest-volume items lean on, Jacobs recommends. An honest inspection sometimes tells you a piece is not going to survive the season, which is a far better problem to find in October than in December. 

Menus drift over the years in a way equipment does not, so most kitchens are carrying at least one unit that made complete sense three menu revisions ago.

Operators must get honest with the numbers first, and not the top-line sales number, he added. Margin by daypart, by menu item, by day of the week. 

“It is very easy to go a full year without ever learning which of your Tuesday lunches actually made money, because when you are slammed, there is never a natural moment to look. The slow season creates that moment, and operators who use it walk into the next busy stretch making informed decisions rather than guesses.”

The second thing is investing in the team beyond the schedule, because this is the only period where you can genuinely train somebody rather than throwing them onto a Friday dinner service and hoping the muscle memory arrives, Jacobs added. 

“Given what labor costs now, making your existing people more capable returns far more than hiring your way out of a coverage gap later.”

The third is working the equipment list you have been carrying in your head because every operator has one, Jacobs said. 

“The oven that is not quite holding temperature, the point-of-sale that is five years behind, the piece you know is going to fail eventually. A slowdown is when that list can become an actionable plan with dates and numbers attached, allowing you to fully prepare before the next busy season.”

Read the Room with Rewards

The instinct when traffic softens is to hunt for new customers, but the more efficient play is holding the ones you already earned over the summer, Jacobs said. 

“Just seven percent of a business’ guest base are repeat visitors, yet this cohort could generate up to 50 percent of the total order volume.  Loyalty also increases return likelihood by four times. Moving a guest into a loyalty program shifts their return rate from a seven-percent baseline to nearly 30 percent.”

What Jacobs finds more useful is to consider what kind of reward works where. For casual, high-frequency concepts like pizzerias and cafes, straightforward cashback drove the strongest 90-day retention at 24-26 percent. But in fine dining, a five-percent rebate can feel transactional as many of those guests may prefer an experience vs. a discount. An item-based reward such as a complimentary course drove a 20 percent retention rate in fine dining, compared to the 13 percent driven by cashback in that same segment. 

“So the answer is not that you should have a program. It is that the reward has to match the room. The part that will land with anyone who has run a floor is the human connection: nearly half (48 percent) of diners say being remembered is what makes them feel most valued. When I ran my own place, personalization meant remembering that a regular’s kid had a birthday coming up. While the tools have changed, the instinct behind it has not changed at all. It all comes down to knowing your customers deeply to connect with them.”

Build Offers Around Execution

Jacobs challenges the common advice to use promotions to drive revenue on slow days, noting that this treats a production problem as a marketing one.

“A slow Tuesday is not really a demand issue in isolation. It is a day where you are paying rent, paying a crew and running equipment that is barely earning its keep, and the promotion that works is the one that puts that idle capacity to use rather than the one that simply lowers a price.”

So before deciding what to discount, he suggests looking at what the kitchen can produce well when it is quiet. For example, note which stations are sitting cold at four o’clock, which equipment is running at a fraction of capacity, and what could come off those without adding labor. 

“Build the offer around that slack, and the margin math looks completely different from a straight discount on your signature dish, which is the item you should almost never be discounting because it is already selling itself.”

The discipline after that is mostly about not training your own regulars to wait, he said. 

The money you make in one month is not fully yours until you have decided how much of it needs to survive until months down the line.

“Keep the window genuinely narrow and genuinely slow, because if the offer bleeds into a period you were going to fill anyway, you have simply moved your full-price guests onto a cheaper ticket and told them the old price was never real.”

Give people something to plan around rather than something to react to, Jaobs suggested. A recurring night that runs consistently for a couple of months will build a habit, where three scattered one-off offers never live long enough for anybody to remember them.  And be honest with yourself about what happens if it works, he said. 

“When I was running my own place, the promotions that hurt were not the ones nobody came to. They were the ones where a crowd showed up and my kitchen could not produce fast enough to keep them, and a guest who waits fifty minutes for a discounted plate does not come back at full price. Know your ceiling before you go looking for the volume.”

An Eye Toward the Future

Looking forward, operators should begin to explore new opportunities for catering, events, or holiday bookings, but only if makes sense and is executable, Jacobs said. For example, corporate catering has emerged as one of the top growth engines in the industry, driven largely by return-to-office mandates, with employers using food to bring people in and reinforce culture. That produces recurring workplace meals and event volume running on an entirely different calendar to your weekend dinner service, which is precisely why it can offset a soft patch rather than compete with one, he added.

“Getting into it because you have built a specific plan is sensible. But getting into it because you assume the tide will carry you is not.”

The practical mistake Jacobs sees most often is treating catering as the same food in larger quantities, when it is a different cost structure, a different labor pattern, and a different set of ways to fail. It also frequently demands equipment your dining room service never asked for, whether that is holding capacity, transport equipment or simply volume you do not have on the line. 

“Working out that equipment question before you take the booking rather than after is the difference between catering becoming a second revenue stream and catering becoming an expensive lesson.”