Anyone who watched The Profit knows the speech. Marcus Lemonis walks into a struggling business and says the same thing every time: success takes great people, a great product, and a great process.

Most restaurants and hotels have the first two. The team cares, and the food or the rooms are good. Process is the part that gets skipped, because owners assume that talented people making a great product will work out the process on their own.

They won’t. People are creatures of habit, and a little lazy, which isn’t all bad. Laziness invents shortcuts, and good habits become discipline. The trouble starts when there’s no process to point those habits in the right direction. Then every shift runs on memory and heroics, and it works until the one person who remembers everything takes a week off.

Five tests for any process

These apply to an opening checklist, a receiving routine, a line check, a room turn, or how the month-end books get closed.

Clear. It doesn’t have to be short, but every step has to be understood the same way by everyone. “Check the walk-in” is not a step. “Walk-in is 38 degrees or colder, write the number down” is.

Memorable. Each step is small enough to remember. If people forget the process, they won’t follow the process.

Repeatable. It can be done every day, by whoever is on, without wearing people out. A closing list that takes 90 minutes will be done properly for about a week.

Durable. A process that’s too strict turns fragile. The day a step can’t be done the way the page says, people improvise, and soon the improvised version is the real one. Build it so it survives a short-staffed Tuesday without being rewritten.

Flexible. Related to durable. It has to handle what real service throws at it, and it has to be easy to update when the menu, the season, or the building changes. A laminated sheet from two chefs ago fails this test.

Ask those five questions about any routine in your business. Wherever the answer is no, you’ve found the reason it isn’t getting done.

Where the process lives matters

A process on a clipboard in the office gets followed when the owner is watching. One that lives where the work happens, shows what’s done and what isn’t, and takes ten seconds to check off gets followed by everyone. At Lucky Hare and Night Train Pizza, moving the opening and closing checklists into an app raised compliance 97% across the team. The steps barely changed. What changed was that the list became clear, easy to reach, and visible.

Ideas need a process too

The same thinking applies to new ideas. Every operator has a stack of them: a brunch service, a loyalty program, a new reservations system, a second location. Ideas are worth nothing until they’re carried out, and if they all start at zero, you need a way to decide which ones deserve time and money.

People get stuck because they treat building something as a straight line, one step after the next. It’s a loop. You switch between a creative frame of mind, where you come up with the idea and sketch a cheap version, and an analytical one, where you try it, watch what happens, and measure. Then you go around again. Test Your Ideas Before You Bet on Them shows what that looks like in a restaurant, and it’s the method behind the book Loops.

Whichever method you choose, use the same one every time. Judging each new idea by the same steps and the same measures is what lets you compare them. Without that, every decision is a gut call with extra paperwork, and the risk goes up instead of down.

Great people and a great product get you open. Process is what lets you take a day off.