It also shows you your own pattern. Mine cleared the middle first for about a year, which was a very clear message about where I was standing.
Do you scrape diced onion off the board with the edge? Everyone does it and it wrecks an edge faster than the cutting does. Flip the knife and use the spine. It feels fussy for about a week and then it is just what you do.
If you do want to do something, make it a reason to come rather than a price cut. A new hot dish for the cold weeks worked far better for us than 20% off ever did.
Counting strokes instead of hunting for a feeling has made the whole finishing stage much less anxious. I was doing about triple the passes I needed.
Tried this and I was hitting the middle of the bevel, not the edge. Explains a lot.
Even where they are within their rights, a phased increase costs them nothing and keeps a four year customer. Worth asking every time.
Work out the actual pound impact before deciding how much energy this deserves. Take the affected items, multiply by last month's real sales counts, and see what 18% costs you per week. I have twice discovered that a scary sounding increase was 40 a week, and once discovered a boring one was 300.
Do the Monday close first, then hire once you can see straight.
The reason is that hiring while you are working 55 hours and doing admin at midnight means you will train badly, supervise badly, and probably hire the first available person rather than the right one. A new part-timer is not free time in month one, it is more work — recruiting, training, correcting, and payroll admin you currently do not have.
Monday costs you 900 gross, not 900 net. Take off the wages you would have paid, the stock and utilities, and it is likely closer to 500-600 of real margin. That is a fair price for reclaiming a day, getting your admin out of the evenings and being fit to hire properly in three months.
Fair, and the half-day version is probably the better first move if the client mix is nervous. My argument is mainly against hiring while exhausted.
A 220 waterstone will remove metal faster than a diamond plate at a similar price, honestly. But it will dish noticeably in one long reprofiling session and you need a flattening solution anyway, which puts you back at the same total spend. The plate wins on the arithmetic even if it loses on raw speed.
Six months is not too early to know, but the number you have is telling you something more specific than "it is not working". You are turning people away at exactly the hours the second room is empty, which means the constraint is not the room, it is having a second pair of hands at evenings and weekends.
A room only pays for itself when someone is in it. 8 hours a week against 300 a month plus the build cost is a slow road; 20 hours a week changes the arithmetic completely. I would put the effort into staffing or renting the room to a self-employed practitioner for the evening and Saturday slots rather than into marketing the room itself.