WHEN YOUR SYSTEMS BREAK

Saturday night. Full house. The till dies.

That sentence is the entire business case for redundancy in your systems. We took orders on pen and paper for four hours, ran the kitchen off shouted tickets, and lost a night's margin to a machine that cost £400 to replace with something that had a backup.

The lesson isn't 'buy better tills'. It's that every single-point-of-failure in your business needs a plan B that a stressed, tired human can execute at 7pm on a Saturday. Write the plan down. Test the plan. Because systems don't break when it's convenient — that's the whole point of them breaking.