Diagnose your F&B business in 90 minutes. Six dimensions, one prioritised action list, the right playbook to run next.
Most F&B operators spend more time treating symptoms than identifying root causes. Sales feel soft, so a discount goes out. Staff turnover spikes, so wages get bumped. Margin slips, so a supplier gets squeezed. The Business Health Checks toolkit is the structured way to step back, take stock across the whole business, and pick the one thing that will move the needle most.
The diagnostic covers six dimensions: financial health, operational discipline, team and culture, customer and brand, compliance and risk, and growth readiness. Each takes 15 minutes. End of the session you have a prioritised list of issues, a recommended playbook to start with, and the kit to pair with it.
The Business Health Checks toolkit is the entry point to the rest of the Vault. Use it like this:
The discipline that matters: running the diagnostic without acting on it is theatre. The deliverable is not the score. The deliverable is the next 30 days of work it points to.
The six dimensions of the Business Health Checks diagnostic:
Prime Cost trend, EBITDA margin, rent percentage, cash runway, and unit economics. The numbers that determine whether the business can survive a soft quarter.
SOP coverage, waste tracking, scheduling against demand, kitchen workflow, supplier reliability. The operational basics that determine whether the financial numbers are sustainable.
Turnover rate, onboarding quality, performance management cadence, work pass compliance, leadership pipeline. The team factors that quietly determine whether your operational discipline holds up over time.
Online review trends, social presence, repeat customer rate, brand distinctiveness. The brand signals that determine whether you can hold pricing and grow share.
Food safety logs, HR documentation, licence renewals, insurance coverage, data protection. The defensive layer that turns a business-ending event into a manageable one.
Replicability of the model, second outlet readiness, leadership bench strength, capital structure. Whether you have built a business that can scale or just a job that pays.
Each dimension surfaces specific problems. Each problem has a specific Vault resource that addresses it:
| If the diagnostic flags | Go to |
|---|---|
| Prime Cost above 70% | Cost Control — Reduce Prime Cost in 30 Days (Operational Playbooks) |
| Rent above 20% of revenue | Lease Negotiation Pack (Negotiation & Commercial Packs) |
| Labour above 35% with overstaffed slow shifts | Labour Scheduler + SPLH Tracker (Templates & Tools) |
| Food safety logs incomplete or inconsistent | Food Safety Logs Pack (Compliance & Risk Kits) |
| Turnover above 60% annually | Staff Retention Playbook (Operational Playbooks) |
| Falling reviews or no review response system | Review Response + Crisis Comms Pack (Negotiation & Commercial Packs) |
| Outlet trending toward losses | 90-Day Turnaround Action Planner (Operational Playbooks) |
| Multiple risk areas weak | Compliance & Risk Kits library entry point |
| Strong unit economics but no growth plan | Industry Benchmarks + advanced P&L frameworks |
Pick one. The temptation is to start three playbooks because three dimensions scored Critical. Resist it. One playbook, finished, beats three playbooks half-finished every time.
The Business Health Checks toolkit is the most important resource in the Members Vault. It is the diagnostic that prevents you from running the wrong playbook, fixing the wrong problem, or treating a symptom while the underlying issue compounds.
Members get the full Business Health Checks toolkit including: the 90 minute structured diagnostic across six dimensions, a scoring rubric with Singapore F&B-calibrated thresholds, a prioritisation matrix that ranks issues by severity and addressability, direct routing to the recommended playbooks and kits, a quarterly comparison sheet to track movement, and an annual rolling review template that surfaces patterns across four quarters of diagnostics.
Health check support: if you have run the diagnostic and want a second pair of eyes on the results before deciding what to act on, write to info@ras.org.sg with the subject line "Health check review". The RAS secretariat can route the conversation to the relevant expert in our network.
Not yet a member? RAS membership unlocks the full Business Health Checks toolkit alongside the rest of the Members Vault. Learn more about RAS membership.
Diagnostics work when they happen on a schedule. The cadence:
| Frequency | What to do |
|---|---|
| Quarterly (90 minutes) | Full diagnostic across all six dimensions. Pick one playbook. Pair with one kit. |
| Monthly (15 minutes) | Spot-check the dimension that scored Critical last quarter. Has it moved? |
| Annually (2 hours) | Roll up four quarters of diagnostics. Identify the patterns. Plan the year ahead. |
| Ad-hoc | Run the relevant single-dimension check when a problem emerges between quarterly cycles |
The compounding effect: four diagnostics a year, each surfacing one playbook to run, equals four playbooks per year. That is the rhythm that transforms F&B businesses. Skip the diagnostic and you risk running playbooks against the wrong problems.
The most common ways operators undermine their own diagnostic:
Filling in the diagnostic from memory produces a diagnostic of your memory, not the business. Pull the actual data first. It takes 30 minutes and changes the answers.
Scoring Healthy when honestly it is Watch, or Watch when honestly it is Critical, defeats the entire point. Be brutal. The diagnostic is private.
Critical-rated dimensions get priority over Watch-rated ones, even if the Watch playbook feels more comfortable. Importance beats comfort.
If three dimensions scored Critical, the answer is one playbook per quarter, not three at once. Otherwise none get finished.
Running it once is a snapshot. Running it quarterly is a system. The patterns only become visible after three to four cycles.
Business Health Checks is the diagnostic. Everything else in the Members Vault is the prescription. The map:
Pattern to notice: diagnose. Prescribe. Run. Re-diagnose. The cycle is the system. Most operators skip step one and wonder why the prescriptions do not stick.
