Hospitality hustle: How Amano owner Savors profits

The owner of Auckland restaurants Amano, Azabu, Ebisu and Non Solo Pizza says every minute on the clock and meal on a plate can make or break margins.

That measure of its profitability lifted by 4 percentage points in the year to the end of March, something that was not easy to do in an industry with high fixed costs in rent and wages - the latter often eating up to 40 per cent of revenue.

“Our business really depends on our venue managers driving everything, every day,” Savor Group chief executive Lucien Law told Markets with Madison at its Auckland viaduct venue Bivacco.

“Those decisions of sending someone home slightly earlier, or calling in more staff and, and optimising that trade, is what it’s all about.

“Everyone’s obsessed with running a great restaurant and I think it’s hard to run a great restaurant unless you can extract some profit from it.”

Its 20 venues made an average margin on food of 22 per cent, or 16 per cent after overheads, he said.

Alcohol was much higher, around 70 per cent.

At the top line, its popular all-day Italian eatery and bakery in Britomart, Amano, turned over around $240,000 a week - $12.5 million a year.

Bivacco was about the same.

An all-day Italian-inspired eatery on Auckland's harbour Amano, turns over about $12 million a year.

It was an enviable position amid the closures of other restaurants such as K Road’s Cotto, Peter Gordon’s Homeland and Parnell’s Pasture last year.

Despite the state of the economy and people pulling back on spending, Law said it had a resilient, returning customer base.

“The biggest thing about scale is, from a customer point of view, we can try to put the things on the plate under $50, which we work incredibly hard to do.

“We take off a lot of dishes that are gonna go over that. We’d much rather see our customers more frequently than on special occasions.”

Savor CEO Lucien Law reveals its secret ingredients to success in today's episode of Markets with Madison above.

Savor has come a long way since being acquired by Moa in 2018, a then beer-brewing entity that was later divested. It acquired Amano’s operator Hipgroup in 2021 for $11m.

Since 2019 (what Law called the last clean reporting period before Covid-19 survival mode), Savor had increased its revenue by 299 per cent.

It expected to show earnings growth of up to 73 per cent to $9m in the financial year just ended in March.

Listen to Lucien Law talk about his hospitality hustle in today’s episode of Markets with Madison above.

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Madison Reidy is the host of the NZ Herald’s investment show Markets with Madison. She joined the Herald in 2022 after working in investment, and has covered business and economics for television and radio broadcasters.