Bridging The Chef
And Finance Divide
Samantha Singer on why chefs and finance teams keep misjudging each other, and what five years as a chef's director of finance taught her about closing the gap.
- Finance often challenges a labor or cost number without asking why it is set where it is, which can mean overriding a decision made for a real operational reason.
- Chefs are rarely business people by training. That is not a flaw to fix, it is a reason to put people around them who handle pricing and margin discipline.
- Cross-training has to run both directions: finance learning operations, and operators learning to read a P&L, not one without the other.
- Operators often see finance as disconnected desk work. Time on the floor is what actually changes that perception, not a memo.
Samantha Singer spent five years as director of finance working directly for a chef, and the lesson she took from it cuts both ways: finance frequently misjudges why a kitchen runs the way it does, and chefs frequently do not see the financial consequences of decisions they make on instinct.
Watch the full conversation with Samantha Singer, or keep reading below.
The labor benchmark that ignores the reason behind it
Singer described a common failure mode directly: finance sets a benchmark, say labor at 30 percent, and pushes to hit it without asking why the actual number sits at 37 percent. That gap might be waste. It might also be a legitimate staffing minimum required to run the kitchen safely and on time.
In her words
"It's very possible that there's a reason behind the labor cost being at 37, let's say, which is very high. I think that's where the biggest disconnect came from in finance, is that the finance leaders are very caught up on the metrics, the KPIs, setting those bars to make sure your profitability looks a certain way and hitting those targets. But operators don't have that same thought process."
Chefs are artists, and that is exactly the point
Singer is direct about what chefs are good at and what they are not trained for. "Chefs do not understand finance. They are artists, they are great at what they do, but they're not business people. And that's their strength, and that's why they have people around them who know how to do these things."
Working directly with one chef and his sous chef for five years, Singer's job was to teach the balance between ingredient quality and menu pricing: how much can be spent on a premium cut of meat, and how much the menu price can realistically be marked up before it hurts sales. "It was all about teaching the chefs and the operators in the kitchens how to do that balance, how to properly price out their stuff and their menus so you're still making the margins you want to be making."
Cross-training has to run in both directions
Singer was clear this is not a one-way education project. "There has to be cross-training done on both sides. It can't just be finance going to operations. Operations also has to have the understanding of finance." In practice, that meant something as basic as a lunch-and-learn on how to read a P&L, a skill she said many operators had genuinely never been taught.
What operators get wrong about finance
The misunderstanding runs both directions. Singer described how operators often picture finance staff as, in her words, "grumpies sitting behind computers," disconnected from the camaraderie built on the floor and in the kitchen among people who came up together. That perception creates real friction, and a bit of what she called animosity between the two groups.
Her fix was not a communication campaign. It was showing up. "Until you kind of show them that, they're never going to realize it." Being visibly involved, rather than only issuing a budget from a distance, was what actually shifted how operators saw finance.
A big part of being a finance leader in hospitality is bridging that gap, not only learning the operations, but teaching the operators about finance.
Samantha Singer, Agent CFO PodcastA shared, plain-language view gives both sides the same starting point.
Part of what makes the chef-finance divide hard to close is that the two sides are often looking at completely different reports, one built for margin review, one built for running service. ChatFin surfaces the same underlying numbers in a form both a controller and an operator can actually read, which makes the kind of lunch-and-learn Singer describes a lot shorter.
See ChatFin's reporting layerGive operators and finance the same numbers to argue about.
ChatFin turns POS, payroll, and purchasing data into a plain-language view both a controller and a kitchen manager can use, so the conversation starts from agreement on the facts, not a dispute over whose report is right.