This was written in 2017 when restaurant wages were rising at nearly 5% year over year, double the rate of menu price increases. The argument then was that operators who believed their existing business model would “work itself out” were making an expensive mistake. They were. Labor costs in hospitality have risen more than 20% […]
If you’re waiting for Friday & Saturday to be able to make payroll – you have serious issues that need to be addressed. #20thCenturyThinking — Jeffrey Summers (@JeffreySummers) July 28, 2017 You have a business model problem. Not a cash flow problem. The distinction matters because cash flow problems have cash flow solutions — a […]
There is a pattern so common in restaurant management that it deserves a name. A manager hires someone. After a short time it becomes clear the hire was wrong. The person is terminated. And instead of asking what went wrong in the process that produced the hire, the manager blames the employee. “I took them […]
By definition, best practices are what the crowd does well. They represent the aggregate experience of many operators across many contexts, distilled into recommendations that tend to work to varying degrees in most situations. Which means they are designed to produce average outcomes at above-average consistency. That is a useful thing. It is not a […]
Q: “I get so frustrated with myself on a weekly if not daily basis . Like how can I set personal or work goals and then continue to make choices that prevent me from achieving those goals ??? Sometimes it’s just forgetfulness , laziness , moments of weakness or taking the easy path instead of […]
Employee Engagement Is Not A Program The statement that employee engagement is “tricky to tactically execute” contains two errors in four words. It is not tricky. And the employer does not execute it. Engagement is intrinsic to the employee. It is a property of the person, not a product of the program. The cast member […]
Every Shift Is The Only Shift That Guest Will See There is a scheduling philosophy in the restaurant industry that sounds like operational efficiency and produces operational failure. It goes like this: slower days are lower priority. Lower priority days do not require the same level of talent. Therefore, schedule your less experienced cast on […]
Q: Shouldn’t you use social platforms like TripAdvisor to market your business? A: No. You shouldn’t use a consumer platform (which is what social media sites are) for commercial messaging. Social platforms are not a multi-purpose business tool and any attempt to push messaging to them will be met with negative friction. FUQ: But can’t […]
The restaurant industry does not have a retention problem. It has a growth problem. The difference matters because retention problems have retention solutions — better pay, better benefits, flexible scheduling, recognition programs, stay interviews. Growth problems have only one solution: actually developing the people you are asking to stay. The cast member who took an […]
Training, as it stands in most restaurant operations, is broken. It is transactional at best and completely irrelevant at its worst. Not because operators do not care about developing their cast. Because the thinking behind most training programs is wrong at the foundation. The following four ideas came from an actual gathering of corporate chain […]
The performance/values matrix tells you who the cast member is. The engagement matrix tells you where they are right now — and what the leader needs to do about it. Two axes. Business success contribution on the vertical. Individual satisfaction and success on the horizontal. Where a cast member falls on those two axes determines […]
Every budget conversation in hospitality should start with one question: is every single line item in this budget Guest-focused? Not customer-focused. Not revenue-focused. Not cost-focused. Guest-focused. Does every goal for the front of house and the back of house connect back to the Guest Experience? Does every pre-shift meeting, every line check, every vendor conversation, […]
Teamwork has become a marketing term or art. It sells books, training programs, workshops, and consulting engagements. It appears in company values statements and pre-shift speeches. It is invoked whenever a leader wants to inspire collective effort without doing the harder work of building the conditions that actually produce it. Most of what gets called […]
After four decades of hiring, developing, and coaching thousands of cast members, I have learned to look for specific behaviors that separate the remarkable ones from the merely competent. Not credentials. Not experience. Behaviors. Here is what A Players actually do. They go beyond service to produce hospitality. The steps of service are not enough […]
The operators who build sustainable success are not doing more. They are focused on different things than the operators who are struggling. Six specifically. They focus on the Guest Experience above everything else. Most of the work that fills a shift has nothing to do with the Guest. Reports, policy mandates, cleaning schedules, process management, […]
You have heard it for years: hire for values, train for skills. Here is what it actually means in practice and why most operators get it wrong. You need cast members who can perform and who share your values. Both. Not one or the other. The server who can sell the menu brilliantly but is […]
Most operators would answer yes if you asked whether they are working to improve their Guest Experience. The dishwasher, the server, the cook, the manager on duty — every one of them would claim they are contributing to a better Guest Experience. And they might be. But individual effort is not a Guest Experience program. […]
First and most important: you do not define it. The Guest does. The Guest Experience is how a Guest thinks of you after considering every interaction they have ever had with you — from the moment they first became aware of your operation to every visit, every meal, every interaction with your cast, every review […]
For years I heard gurus tell operators to think outside the box. I resisted it. Not because outside the box thinking is wrong. Because I kept looking at the businesses around me and seeing that nobody had exhausted their inside the box thinking first. How do you move beyond something that is not even working? […]
Most operators, consultants, and industry associations use the words interchangeably. They are not interchangeable. Confusing them is one of the most expensive mistakes in the business. Two questions. Only two. And they have to be answered in order. What kind of business do you want to be? How will you become it? The first question […]