Nothing out there actually did this.
There was no real software that did what I needed. There are plenty of offerings on the internet, but a lot of them don't seem like they come from people who are actual chefs — they seem like they come from accountants, or from people who aren't on their feet all day putting out fires with the team and the kitchen while also cooking the food itself.
I wanted to keep the same framework of how you actually work in a kitchen: analog.
And when I did look at software to help my business so I didn't have to do everything manually, everything cost a lot — just to do a single function.
As someone who owns a small business, I cook the food, but I also do the books. Seeing all of these facets, I understand how every single component in a kitchen actually connects. Your invoices connect to your recipes. Your prep connects to your sales. Your sales are affected by your costs. Each of these items, at its essence, is linked — and there was never a real way to calculate it.
This whole time, while doing the manual work — writing prep lists, putting in orders — there's actual data hidden behind all that intuition, data that can be stored. Every time I wrote a prep list, if I'd just taken a photo of it, I could look back over a month and see how many times each item was prepped, and be more efficient because of it.
I wanted to build a tool that could answer all of those questions, so I'd have more time to focus on the parts I actually care about: creating, and being with my team.
I learned every part of this the hard way.
I've worked independently and owned restaurants for over seven years. I don't actually come from a restaurant background — I started everything on my own, from scratch. Because of that, I had to learn everything from the ground up.
In a typical kitchen you're taught what to do, but not always how or why. Because I owned my own places and taught myself, I learned to do all of it — shelf installation, deep-cleaning appliances, all of it — just to save money. And I made more mistakes than most people who came up in this industry.
But with more mistakes comes far more knowledge. I understand not just what to do and what not to do, but exactly why — because I've seen what it looks like on the other side. Lowboy is how I bridge that gap for other people.
Four things that run a good restaurant.
Learn to let go early.
The sooner you delegate or ask for help, the better off you'll be. In the beginning you want a hand on the pulse of everything — and you can, for a long time. But it's never sustainable. The quicker you look for help, the easier it is to actually run your restaurant and get where you're trying to go.
Communication makes or breaks it.
Between business partners, line cooks, or the front of house — the better you communicate, the more efficient and effective the whole place runs. Being able to write down or say exactly what you're feeling and what you know is the only way people understand you and your vision for the restaurant.
Time is just as important as money.
When you have freedom of time and can see your restaurant as a whole, you don't feel pressed into bad decisions. The worst decisions get made under pressure. It's self-fulfilling: money gets tight, so you tighten up, and suddenly your food feels tight and isn't as good as it was. Step back, fix your systems, and you move forward far better.
The business matters as much as the food.
Pricing, staying on top of bills, labor — to me, that's what actually proves a successful restaurant. Plenty of places make amazing food; high-caliber chefs open landmark spots and close within a year. The ones who understand their business, their systems, and the inner workings are the ones who survive and thrive.
The independent owner who's stretched too thin.
Lowboy is for the independent business owner. The one who feels stretched and inundated with paperwork. The one who wants to understand what's truly going on with their business but doesn't have the time to dig through all of it. Lowboy is for people who want to become more efficient without losing the quality of what they built.
Why "Lowboy."
It's one of those words that only means something to someone who works in a restaurant. The lowboy is the unsung hero of the kitchen — it serves across the hotline, it works as a prep table, it stores everything you need to fire the next dish. It's multi-purpose, and it exists in just about every restaurant in the country. For its ubiquity and its flexibility, that's what this is named after.