The question contains the problem. The moment an operator sits down to define what excellent Guest Experience looks like, they have already made the mistake that produces mediocre hospitality. They are defining it. From inside the building. Based on what they do, what they prefer, what their operational model makes convenient, what their training manual […]
Probably nothing. Not because the market is too competitive. Not because the timing is wrong. Because differentiation is not something you create after you open. It is something you design before the first Guest walks in. If you opened without it, you did not forget to add a feature. You built the wrong thing. This […]
The word loyalty has been hijacked. In the restaurant industry it has been redefined to mean a discount that rewards a Guest for dining with you or incentivizes them to return at some future point. The result is a system that trains Guests to think transactionally — to respond to points, rewards, and incentives rather […]
The question is wrong. The right question is: what does this specific Guest need from this specific menu in this specific market for this operation to be profitable at the price point it requires? The answer to that question determines the menu size. Not a best practice. Not a competitor benchmark. Not a theory about […]
It is not the bad boss. The bad boss is a symptom. Every reason cited for why cast members leave — bad culture, poor leadership, inadequate pay, difficult Guests, broken processes, no work-life balance — is a symptom of the same underlying condition. They are descriptions of what the environment felt like, not explanations of […]
Get the read you cannot get for yourself. Most operators who fail in the first year failed before they opened. Not because they lacked passion. Not because the concept was wrong. Because they built on assumptions that were never tested, costs that were never modeled, and a Guest experience that was never designed for the […]
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 […]
After four decades in this business, one contradiction still amazes me: operators say they want teamwork and collaboration, then design every incentive system to produce competition and individual performance. Employee contests are an anti-teamwork tool. They pit cast members against each other in a transactional contest of winners and losers, dress it up as motivation, […]
An area manager tells his unit-level managers that if he ever has to physically work in their restaurants, they are failing. He is technically correct. If the multi-unit manager has to get behind the line or run food to keep the operation from falling apart, something upstream has already failed — the hiring, the development, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Every business school graduate has an answer. Undercapitalization. Poor location. Bad concept. Weak marketing. High food cost. Labor problems. The economy. The competition. The timing. Every one of those answers is a symptom. None of them is the disease. Restaurants fail because the operator didn’t know what he didn’t know and didn’t ask for help. […]
Most consultants bring the same product to every client. A framework developed somewhere else, calibrated to an average operation, applied regardless of the specific market, the specific Guest, the specific gaps the operator is actually facing. It is efficient. It is also the reason most consulting engagements produce short-term change and no lasting transformation. Here […]