Business coaching for hospitality and cafes in Adelaide

How to read the numbers before anybody quotes them at you

What actually goes wrong in Adelaide hospitality businesses

What a coach works on with a cafe, restaurant or venue

What hospitality coaching doesn't cover

What it costs

How the matching works

Questions venue owners ask

Food and Beverage Services survived at 52.8%. Should that put me off opening?

It's a market observation, not a forecast about your venue, and it's worth reading carefully. The figure describes what happened to a whole division of South Australian businesses over 4 years (ABS business survival data, checked 1 September 2026). It doesn't say which venues closed or why, and the causes run in both directions: thin margins make a bad month expensive, and low barriers to entry mean more people open than in most industries. Read as a reason to be deliberate about costing and rostering, it's useful. Read as a prediction, it isn't.

My food cost and my wage cost have both gone up. Where does a coach start?

Almost always with measurement rather than with the menu board. What each dish costs to put out, what labour costs by trading session, and which sessions are carrying the others. Owners who move prices before they have those numbers tend to move the wrong items by the wrong amount, then have to do it again. Working out the cost picture is a few weeks of unglamorous work and it's the part a regular structured conversation is genuinely useful for.

Can a coach help me write the roster?

Not week by week, and you wouldn't want to pay coaching rates for that. What a coach works on is the layer above it: what the roster gets built from, who owns building it, what happens when a shift is quiet, and how you'd know whether last week's roster was right. The pay side of rostering sits outside coaching entirely, and belongs with a lawyer or a workplace relations adviser.

There's nobody who can run a service without me. Is that fixable?

It's the single most common piece of work in this vertical, and it's slow rather than clever. It usually starts with writing down what you actually do across an opening, a service and a close, deciding which parts a second in charge would own first, and then handing those over one at a time while you're still on site. Whether it works depends on the person you've got and the effort you put in, which is why nobody honest will tell you a timeframe up front.

Does hospitality coaching cover marketing and social media?

Coaches differ on this, so ask before you commit. What most will work on is the commercial side of a promotion rather than the creative side: what it costs to run, which covers it's trying to bring in, whether those are the covers you want on that night, and whether the margin survives the discount. If you need someone to actually produce content or run advertising, that's a different supplier and a coach should tell you so.

I'm thinking about a second site. Is that a coaching conversation?

Yes, and it's often a conversation about whether the first one is ready rather than about the second one. The usual questions are whether the existing venue runs to a standard without you in the room, whether it produces enough cash to carry a fit-out and a quiet opening period, and who would run which site. A coach can help you think it through and hold you to the answer. Any borrowing decision belongs with your accountant and a licensed adviser.

Margins are tight. Is there something cheaper than a monthly retainer?

There are 3 lighter options worth asking about. A single session on a specific decision runs $180 to $280 an hour, ex GST, on Adelaide rates checked September 2026. A monthly rather than fortnightly cadence sits in the $800 to $1,500 a month band. A group programme with other owners runs roughly 22% to 30% of the equivalent 1-to-1 retainer. Tell me what you can spend and I'll only introduce you to coaches whose fee band fits it.