About
I built the audit I needed and could never buy.
Twenty-one years in hospitality, almost ten of them owning cafes. Every finding in every Leak audit is read by me before it reaches you, and I am the only person who ever sees your files.
I started in hospitality at thirteen, washing dishes because somebody was short. I never really left. I have run sections, managed venues, and for almost ten years now I have owned cafes, which is a different job entirely and nobody warns you.
The thing nobody warns you about is Monday. You work a fourteen-hour Saturday, the room is full, the coffee is good, your team is flying. Then on Monday you look at the account and the money is not there. Not missing, exactly. Just less than it should be, again, and you cannot say why.
I spent years assuming that was my fault. That a better operator would know. What I eventually worked out is that it was never one big thing I had got wrong. It was a supplier quietly putting cents on the coffee over five months. A roster built for the week I hoped for rather than the week I actually traded. A portion that grew ten grams one winter and never went back. Waste nobody wrote down because writing it down was the eleventh thing on a list of ten.
None of it was bad management. It was arithmetic nobody working a sixty-hour week has time to do.
Why the P&L never showed me
Traditional reporting tells you the money is gone. Not where it went.
This is not a criticism of accountants. It is a description of what the tools are for.
- A P&L is a summary written after the fact, in categories designed for tax, not for operations. Wages is one line. Food is one line. The story that matters is underneath both of them.
- It is monthly or quarterly. A leak that costs $125 a week has already cost you $1,500 by the time it shows up as a percentage moving one point.
- It shows totals, not comparisons against your own history. A supplier charging you 8% more than they used to is invisible in a total. It is obvious against that supplier's own trailing average.
- It cannot see the operational layer at all: which day was over-rostered, which items are carrying the menu, which discounts were never authorised, what a delivery order actually earns after commission.
- And nobody has time to read the layer underneath. Reconciling three months of invoice lines against POS item sales by hand is a week of work that no operator has and no bookkeeper is paid for.
Why independent
Almost everyone offering to help you is selling you something else.
I have sat through the version of this meeting where the free review arrives with a software contract attached.
- Suppliers will happily review your ordering. They also have a price list to protect.
- Software companies give away an audit to sell a subscription. The findings tend to be the ones their product fixes.
- Consultants often arrive with a framework and leave with a retainer, and the diagnosis quietly matches the treatment they sell.
- Leak sells one thing: the audit. No supplier commissions, no referral fees, no rebates, no software licence at the end of it. If a finding says change suppliers, it is because your invoices say so.
- That is also why the price is published. Nobody in Australian hospitality consulting publishes a price, and quoting privately is how the fee ends up being whatever the room looks like it can afford.
Why Leak is different
An operator's judgement, on top of work no operator has time to do.
I have stood where you are standing
I have written the roster at 11pm, taken the delivery that was short, and had the argument with the supplier. That is what tells me which of the findings actually matters on your floor, and which one is technically true and practically useless.
I built the analysis myself
Over the last year I wrote down every profit leak I have seen or been caught by: 109 of them across 12 areas of the business, each with its own detection rule, dollar formula and false-positive test. It is the system I wished existed when I was the one on the floor.
The technology is the tool, not the product
You never log in to it, and it is not for sale. It exists so one person can do, thoroughly and repeatably, work that would otherwise take a week and still miss things. What you buy is the audit.
I would rather lose the sale than pad the report
The guarantee only means something if there is a real chance you get your money back. If your business is already run tightly, the honest answer is that there is not much here. In the sample audit, 8 of the 12 findings carry no dollar figure at all, because the data could not honestly support one.
What I will not do
Four promises, and they are the useful kind.
- I will not tell you your business is in trouble to sell you something. If ten of your fourteen weeks were clean, the report says so, on the first page.
- I will not put a number on something the data cannot support. Those findings go in without a dollar figure, and the report says why.
- I will not show your files to anyone. No team, no subcontractors, no offshore processing, never pooled with another venue and never used to train AI.
- I will not rule on anything I am not qualified to rule on. Where a finding touches tax, award rates or entitlements, it is flagged for you to take to someone who is.
If that sounds like the kind of work you want done on your numbers, read exactly what the audit covers or book the fifteen minute call. It is $1,500 including GST, delivered in 5 business days, and if it does not find more than it cost you, you do not pay for it.
Have a fifteen minute conversation with me.
Tell me about your venue. I will tell you honestly whether an audit is the right thing for you right now, and if it is not, what I would do instead.
Book a Profit Leak Audit