The famously long queues that form at each of Lune Croissanterie’s five stores don’t necessarily translate into large profits, owner Kate Reid admitted at the inaugural Good Food symposium.

“Our margins are getting smaller and smaller,” she said. “It’s an incredibly expensive business to run.”

Paper-thin margins for operators of restaurants, cafes and bars was an overriding theme of the hospitality symposium, sponsored by Lightspeed, held at Collingwood Yards on Monday night.

A tight grasp of numbers, a clear identity and business values were three keys to success agreed upon by the panel, which included Melbourne restaurateurs Charlie Carrington and Almay Jordaan, Leon Kennedy, chief executive of Mulberry Group, which owns seven local restaurants, and Reid. They spoke to an audience of 150 hospitality operators, workers and keen diners.

“Hospitality has always been hard,” said Kennedy. “Now it’s just hard with QR codes.” Whether the economic indicators are rosy or rough, Kennedy believes it’s always essential to constantly assess strategy and refine business identity.

He drove an initiative at Mulberry Group, owner of Liminal, Hazel and Lilac Wine, which aggregated online reviews of their venues and analysed them with AI, assessing whether customer keywords matched the vision for each business. The research revealed a big disconnect between the company’s vision for city cafe Liminal and the way diners saw it.

“We had notions of being a hotel without rooms, a concierge of some kind, but the keywords from our customers showed that they valued us for speed and quality,” he said. “And we thought, that’s actually what we do really well. Let’s just do more of that.”

Almay Jordaan used a different type of data to make menu changes at Neighbourhood Wine, her Fitzroy North restaurant.

“We looked closely at the labour associated with making our own chips and realised it didn’t make sense,” she said. “It’s the peeling, the blanching, the frying during service, not to mention the cost of oil, which has spiked. It turned into a very expensive bowl of hand-cut chips, and it had to go. We want a solvent restaurant.”

Staying solvent drives every aspect of Charlie Carrington’s businesses, which span Atlas Dining, a South Yarra tasting menu restaurant, and Atlas Weekly, which delivers meal boxes to consumers.

“When you’re running a million miles an hour and you’ve got so much stuff to do, staying on top of GST, PAYG, and your super can seem very boring, but if you let them spiral out of control, it can turn into a horror story really quickly,” he said. “We pay all those obligations weekly.”

Kate Reid is looking long-term by investing in staff and fostering a positive work culture.

“You cannot place too much importance on culture,” she said. “It’s about understanding employees’ needs and creating a workplace that fulfils them.”

Bosses sometimes lament the work ethics of Gen Z employees, born between 1997 and 2012, but Reid believes this generation can excel when met halfway.

“They expect work-life balance, they rightly expect to be remunerated correctly,” she said. “We have many Gen Z employees at Lune that will have incredible lifelong careers in hospitality and will positively impact the future of it.”

Panellist Patrick Ryan-Parker works with the payment platform Lightspeed. He urged businesses to pass on costs.

“In an industry that is struggling at the moment, it’s funny that businesses wouldn’t surcharge when they’re subject to merchant fees,” he said. “Why should restaurants be paying for people’s frequent flyer points every time they accept a credit card? It would be great if the industry standardised it and it became the norm.”

Five ways to save your business

1. Be clear on your strategy: do your customers perceive your business the same way you do?
2. Don’t compromise on values that will attract and retain staff and engage customers.
3. Data. Spend time with your numbers, analyse them, act on them.
4. Be up-to-date with your obligations. Tax and superannuation can easily spiral out of control if you don’t set money aside.
5. Costs: if you’re paying more (for goods, merchant fees and wages, for example), charge more to recoup those costs.

The next Good Food Symposium, presented by Lightspeed, is on Monday, June 24 in Sydney.