Guide

Michael Gomez on Making HR Pay for Itself in Restaurants

By Wilson K Lee, updated October 2026 · How I get these numbers

Plenty of owners can tell you last month’s food cost to the decimal. Far fewer can tell you what staff turnover cost them last year. Michael Gomez spent about 30 years in HR, and in our talk he showed how he turns that second number into a dollar figure an owner can plan around.

These days he runs MGI International, LLC, his own executive search and HR consulting firm. The road there went through McDonald’s, PepsiCo, Disney and AT&T. His last seat inside a restaurant company was running HR at Tasty Restaurant Group, a franchisee with KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Burger King, Dunkin’ and Baskin-Robbins under one owner, about 7,000 people in 23 states.

I interviewed him in Atlanta at On the Clock 2026, the same event where I sat down with Joe Guith of CKE Restaurants. I took 720 Sweets from a single dessert shop to seven and then sold it. Now I write and make videos for owners of food and beverage businesses, and this page is written for owners running one to five places. So my questions to Michael stayed close to the money.

What Michael walked me through

A help line for every McDonald’s franchisee. In a San Diego unit with more than 10,000 employees, Michael wrote McDonald’s first human capital plan, and later he was asked to lead the rebuild of HR from Oak Brook, Illinois, with a team of 18. One result was a shared services center giving what he called “just in time, dedicated support.” Any company store manager or franchise operator in the country could call one 800 number for retention, staffing and labor legal advice.

Competing brands, one back office. At Tasty he ran HR for brands that compete with each other. Payroll, the technology under it, and shared rules on sick pay, paid time off, nepotism and bereavement could run across all of them, while pay programs tied to each brand’s corporate scorecard were harder to share. On culture he wanted each brand to stay itself, with new hires taught its own history, because, in his words, “Colonel Sanders isn’t leaving KFC anytime soon.”

The weeks spent reacting. He walked in to a pile of serious labor problems and a handbook that had been started but never delivered. Constant reacting, he said, is not a satisfying way to operate, so he finished the handbook and got all 7,000 people to sign it electronically. Then he gave every serious complaint one route, handled by trained investigators, and “they’re all attorneys.” His reason: people want to feel secure and want an unbiased place to take a problem.

Hours first, then dollars. His HR directors told him that complaint route gave each of them about 400 hours a year back. The money came next: about $400,000 a year in lower claims against a cost of about $100,000, or $300,000 net. He summed it up in one line: “Welcome to HR as a business partner.”

A benefits plan the crew could afford. At a previous company the benefits looked good, yet 93% of people skipped them because they could not afford them. He moved staff to a plan with no net cost to them: $25,000 to the family if a worker dies, $1,000 for a hospital stay after an accident, and telemedicine for the whole family. As he put it, “all of a sudden they have something that they didn’t have before.”

The turnover math, and the managers who carry it. Citing hospitality management research at Cornell, he works from the rule that a store’s turnover percentage sits close to what that turnover costs. A standard pizza store at 150% turnover is losing over $140,000 a year, so getting from 250% down to 150% saves about $100,000 in that one store. Applied across the group’s units, he puts that at about $7.5 million. Add the roughly $2.6 million in payroll tax that the benefits plan did save, and by his estimate, “that’s a $10 million swing.” He also speaks up for the general managers who live with those numbers. He describes the stores they run as million dollar businesses, and he is not sure their pay matches what they are asked to do.

Doing Michael’s math at your own shops

Michael’s numbers come from a group of 7,000 people. His habit of counting works at any size. Here is how I would use it if I were running two or three shops today.

1. Work out what one point of turnover costs you. His pizza numbers come to roughly $1,000 a year for every point of turnover in one standard store, since 100 points was worth about $100,000. Your store will be different. Take that as reference. Don’t take it as Bible. Divide the number of people you replaced in the last twelve months by the number you need on the roster. That is your turnover rate. Then ask what 30 fewer points would be worth. That figure is your budget for fixing it. For the other half of the people math, I walk through how to calculate labour cost per meal in a separate guide.

2. Give your managers one place to get answers. The 800 number meant a McDonald’s store manager could get a straight answer on a staffing or legal question. At two shops the version is a shared page with your answers to the questions managers text you most: who covers a no-show, how sick days work, what to do when a guest gets hurt. Write the first ten this month and keep adding.

3. Count who actually uses what you pay for. 93% is the number that stuck with me most. If you offer a staff meal, a discount or a benefit, check how many people use it. If most of your crew skips it, ask them why before you add anything new. The answer is usually cost or hassle, and both can be fixed.

4. Put every people spend in three lines. About $100,000 in, about $400,000 back, $300,000 net. Use the same three lines the next time you spend money on your team, even when the amounts are a hundredth of his. A training day, a new hire bonus, a raise for your best shift lead. If you cannot fill in the third line, you are guessing.

5. Give your GM hours back before you give them more work. Michael calls a manager’s store a million dollar business, and he says we ask a lot of those managers. My own view is that every hour of paperwork you take off a manager goes back to the floor, where guests notice it. Sit with your manager for one normal week and list where the hours go. Then cut or hand off the three tasks that matter least.

If you only do one of these this week, do the first. Once turnover has a price, every other decision on this list gets easier to make.

Two longer reads from this talk

Michael’s talk split neatly in two, so I wrote it up twice for Workstream’s blog, one article for each thread.

• Why HR Stays a Cost Center Until It Can Show a Number covers the money side: the complaint route run by attorneys, the benefits plan, and how his turnover estimate reaches $10 million.
• 5 Things Michael Gomez Fixes First When He Walks Into a Franchise Group covers his method, from the plan he writes in his first 60 days and the handbook through to clear performance standards and feeding the payroll contract into an AI tool to check what the provider owes.

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