Coach The Bench

Coaching Someone Whose Numbers Are Wrong

A four-step loop for moving a bad number from your problem to theirs. Own, understand, fix, report. The hardest discipline is not naming the fix yourself.

Kiyong (Eric) Lee·Operations Executive·August 2026·10 min read

The short version

A general manager whose numbers are wrong is not usually a performance problem. They are an ownership problem, and ownership is a specific behavior you can coach.
The loop has four steps: own the number, understand what drives it, name the fix, report the result. Same order every week.
The hardest discipline is not naming the fix yourself. If you name it, they execute your fix and never learn to see the number themselves.
Push past the first two explanations. Both are almost always external. The third or fourth explanation is where the operating decision sits.
Four weeks of the loop tells you whether it is a coaching issue, a system issue, or a person issue. Do not decide before week four.

I have coached a lot of general managers through bad numbers. Labor cost that would not come down. Food cost climbing quarter after quarter. Guest satisfaction scores that started at 4.4 and were sitting at 3.9 six months later. The pattern in almost every case was the same. The number was visible to me and invisible to them, and my instinct was to fix the number for them. Every time I did that, the number came back three months later, sometimes worse.

What I now use is a four-step coaching loop that I run for four weeks minimum before I assess. It is boring on purpose. It moves the number from my problem to theirs, one small step at a time. When it works, the number stays fixed after I stop showing up. When it does not, I know quickly and can move to a different kind of conversation. This is the loop and how to run it.

Why "fix it for them" is the wrong reflex

The temptation, when you look at a bad number, is to walk into the unit, sit down with the general manager, tell them what is causing it, tell them what to do about it, watch them do it, and move on. That works. The number moves. It also teaches the general manager that when a number goes wrong, the person who fixes it is you. So the next number that goes wrong, they wait for you to notice.

Coaching is different from problem solving. Problem solving is a one-time thing you do to a number. Coaching is a repeated thing you do with a person, and the whole goal is that at the end of it the person can see the number and move it without you. That trade, slower fix now for durable ownership later, is the deal you have to keep taking, even when the number is bleeding this week.

If you name the fix, they execute your fix. The number moves. And next quarter the same problem comes back, because they never learned to see it themselves. The delay is the whole point of coaching.

The coaching loop: own, understand, fix, report

Four steps, in this order, run weekly. The loop starts in a one-on-one and lives in the one-on-one. Do not try to do all four steps in a single meeting the first time. Steps one and two are week one. Step three is later in week one or week two. Step four opens the next meeting. The cadence is what does the work.

Fig. 1 · The loop compounds. Week four is when you know.

Step 1: Own the number

Get the general manager to say the number out loud. Not the range. Not "somewhere around 30." The number to a decimal, from memory. If they cannot say it, they do not own it, and everything downstream in the loop is going to fail because you are coaching a person who does not yet see what you see.

The opening question is simple. "What was your labor as a percent of sales last week?" Wait. Do not fill the silence. Do not reach for your own laptop to look it up. Sit in the discomfort. If they cannot say the number, the coaching for this week is just that. "By next Monday I want you to be able to say your labor number and your food cost number to a decimal, from memory, without opening the dashboard. That is your only assignment this week." Then move on.

This step feels like it is doing nothing. It is doing most of the work. A general manager who cannot say their numbers by memory has learned to treat the numbers as your report card on them, not as their own instrument. Reversing that takes about two weeks of gentle insistence. Skip this step and every other step in the loop will drift.

Step 2: Understand what is driving it

Once they can say the number, ask them what is driving it. Not what happened last week. What is driving the pattern. The distinction matters. What happened is a story about last week. What is driving it is a story about the operating system. You want the second one.

The first explanation they offer will almost always be external. Traffic was down. A big table walked out. The dishwasher broke. The second explanation, if you push gently, will also usually be external. Weather. A road closure. A competitor promo. Do not argue with either. Both may be true and both are irrelevant to the coaching, because neither is a thing they can change.

The question that gets to the operating decision is, "What is the internal counterpart to that?" Every external factor has one. Traffic dropped, and the internal counterpart is that we did not scale labor fast enough. A vendor changed pricing, and the internal counterpart is that we did not adjust the spec or the menu price. The counterpart is where the operating decision sits, and where coaching lives. If they cannot name the counterpart, that is a real gap and worth naming out loud: "The external is not something we can fix. The internal is. Let's look for the internal together."

Step 3: Name the fix

Have them name one intervention. Specific, small, this week specific. Not a plan. Not a phase. One action, one owner, one deadline. If the fix they name is larger than one week, ask them to break it down and pick the first piece.

The temptation here is to tell them the fix, especially when you already know what it is. Do not. If you name the fix, they will execute your fix, and next quarter the same number will drift the same way because they never built the muscle of seeing what needs to change. Sit with the discomfort of watching them work through it. It is slower than fixing it yourself. It is also the only thing that compounds.

Write the fix down together in one sentence. "This week I will re-cut the Thursday and Friday schedules to move two hours of prep labor into the front of the shift, and by Monday I will report labor variance for both days." That sentence goes in the shared doc. Both of you have a copy.

Step 4: Report back

Next week, they open the meeting by reporting what they did and what moved. You listen. You do not lead. This is the step most managers skip, and it is the step that turns the loop from a one-time intervention into a habit.

The GM's report is short: what I did, what happened to the number, what I would do differently. If the number moved, celebrate the specific decision that moved it, not the general performance. If the number did not move, ask them what they think happened, and use their answer to loop back into step two for the next round. Either way, the loop starts again.

A one-on-one that turned around a labor number

Fourth month at Zareen's. General manager at one of the Bay Area locations, call her Alina. Labor as a percent of sales sitting at 33.8 percent against a peer benchmark of 27 to 28. She had been on notice about it for two quarters. Every previous coaching had ended with a plan, and the plan had never moved the number.

Week one of the loop, in her office at 3 pm on a Tuesday. I asked her what her labor cost was. She said "around 33." I asked her to say it to a decimal. She had to open the laptop. It was 33.8. I said, "That is your only assignment this week. Next Tuesday, tell me your labor and your food cost numbers from memory to a decimal." She rolled her eyes a little. I did not push.

Week two, she opened the meeting with the numbers by memory. I asked her what was driving the labor. She said traffic had been off, which was true. I let it sit. I asked, "What is the internal counterpart to that?" She looked at me for a long beat. Then she said, out loud, "I have been scheduling like a normal week even when the pre-shift covers are 20 percent below normal." I said nothing. She kept going. She named two specific shifts where she had done exactly that. She named the fix: pull labor from the two shifts based on the day-before cover count, not the four-week average.

Week three, she reported. Labor on those two shifts had dropped 4.2 points. She had also, without being asked, applied the same logic to the Monday and Tuesday shifts. Weekly labor was 29.6. Week four, she opened the meeting with a new observation: prep hours were misallocated across the week. She had already sketched the fix. I said almost nothing for the whole meeting. Two months later, labor was at 27.4 and holding, and she was coaching the same loop with her two assistant managers on food cost.

The general manager who can see the number learns to see the next one too. The general manager whose numbers get fixed by someone else stays exactly where they are, waiting for the next fix.

When the loop is not working

Run the loop cleanly for four to six weeks. If the pattern is not moving by week four, one of three things is happening.

The system is broken, not the GM. The number cannot be moved by the GM alone because a real constraint upstream is preventing it. A minimum labor guarantee from a franchise contract. A supplier cost baked into corporate. If you have run the loop for four weeks and the GM has named good fixes that keep bouncing off a wall you did not put there, the coaching is not the intervention. The wall is.
The GM cannot see the number, no matter how many times they say it. They can recite it by memory but they cannot translate it into an operating decision. That is a skills gap, not a coaching gap, and it needs a structured training plan with someone who knows the specific line, not another round of the same conversation with you.
The GM sees the number and is choosing not to move it. Rare, but real. Usually because they disagree with the target, they do not respect the metric, or they are already looking for another job and have quiet quit. This is a performance conversation, not a coaching one, and it needs the framework you use for a hard executive conversation, not this loop.

The habits that make the loop actually work

Three habits separate the operators who run this loop well from the ones who quietly abandon it in week three.

Silence. The loop is 70 percent silence. Silence after you ask what the number is. Silence after you ask what is driving it. Silence while they name the fix. Most operators cannot sit through the silence and fill it themselves. If you fill the silence, you took the ownership back.

Same order, every week. Own, understand, fix, report. Do not innovate on the order. Do not skip a step because the GM already covered it. The order is what turns the loop from a good meeting into a repeatable habit that the GM will run on themselves after you leave.

Celebrate the decision, not the outcome. When the number moves, do not celebrate that it moved. Celebrate the specific decision the GM made that moved it. "The call to pull two hours of prep labor from Thursday and Friday was the right call, and it is what got you to 29.6." That is what teaches the GM to make more calls like it.

The point

Coaching a bad number is a discipline in patience. The reflex to fix it yourself is strong. The number bleeds while you sit through the loop. It feels inefficient. It is not. It is the difference between paying to fix a number once and building a general manager who will spot and fix the next twelve numbers on their own.

Own, understand, fix, report. Four weeks minimum. Do not name the fix yourself. Sit in the silence. Celebrate the decision, not the outcome. Then, when the number moves, the person moved with it, and the next number will be theirs to catch before you ever see it in the dashboard.

That is what coaching is supposed to buy you.

Coaching a bench through hard numbers?

I work with a small number of multi-unit operators each year on the coaching cadence that makes performance stick. If you have a general manager whose numbers are not moving and you are not sure whether it is a coaching, system, or person issue, I would trade notes.

Get in touch

Questions people ask

How do you coach a general manager whose numbers are bad?

Run a four-step loop over four weeks. Own: get them to say the specific number out loud. Understand: push past the first two explanations to the operating decision underneath. Fix: name one specific intervention for this week. Report: they open the next meeting reporting what they did and what moved. The point of the loop is to move the number from your problem to theirs, not to punish them for it being wrong in the first place.

What is the first sign a general manager does not own their number?

They cannot say the number from memory to a decimal. If you ask "what was your labor cost last week" and they say "somewhere around 30" or reach for the dashboard, they have not internalized the number. Everything else in the coaching flow depends on them owning the number by memory. Fix that first before you try to fix the number itself.

How do you handle a general manager who blames external factors for bad numbers?

Let them say the external reasons out loud. Do not argue. Then ask, "What is the operating decision inside that we can change?" Every external factor has an internal counterpart. Traffic dropped, so we should have scaled labor faster. A vendor changed pricing, so we should have adjusted the spec. The counterpart is where coaching lives. Blame the counterpart, not the external.

How many weeks should you run the coaching loop?

Four weeks minimum before you assess. The loop compounds. Week one is uncomfortable. Week two is honest. Week three the GM starts arriving with the number and the fix already prepared. Week four is when you know if the coaching is going to work or not. If the pattern is not visible by week four, the issue is not coaching, it is either a system problem or a person problem, and both require a different move.

What if the general manager gets defensive during the coaching conversation?

Slow down and go back a step. Defensiveness usually means they experienced the last question as an accusation, not a coaching question. Acknowledge that, name it, and re-ask the question with different language. "I am not asking who is at fault. I am asking what one thing you would change if you had a do-over." You almost never need to escalate. You do need to reset the frame.

When does coaching stop working and it becomes a performance issue?

When you have run the full loop for four to six weeks, the general manager has named the fix each week, and the number has not moved. That combination means either they cannot see the number they said they see, or they cannot execute the fix they said they would. Either way, the next conversation is a performance conversation, not a coaching one, and it needs a written development plan with a specific timeline.

Should you tell a general manager exactly what to do to fix a bad number?

No, and this is the single hardest discipline in coaching. If you name the fix, the GM will execute your fix, the number will move, and next quarter the same problem will come back because they never learned to see it themselves. Coaching means sitting through the discomfort of them thinking through the answer, even when you already know it. The delay is the whole point. It is what builds the muscle.