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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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% […]
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, […]
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, […]
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 […]
I have never believed in bad employees. I believe in bad hiring processes. Bad training systems. Bad performance standards that were never defined precisely enough to be held. Bad cultures that subsidize mediocrity because conformity is easier than standards. Bad leadership that creates the conditions for ineffective behavior and then acts surprised when the behavior […]
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 […]
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 […]
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? […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
Some people argue that talent is overrated. The evidence across every industry suggests otherwise — and the multiplier is not what most people expect. The best developer at Apple is at least nine times as productive as the average software engineer at other technology companies. The best blackjack dealer at Caesars Palace keeps his table […]
The Product Is Not The Food Operators in the hospitality business have a blind spot so common it has become an industry assumption: the product is what is on the plate. It is not. The food is the delivery mechanism. The product is the experience — the event in the day-to-day life of the Guest […]
Every service failure is the direct result of a process breakdown. If not a broken process, then the absence of a process where one should have existed. The server did not screw up the order. The process that was supposed to prevent the screwed-up order was not in place, not trained to, or not held […]
A colleague asked this question in a forum years ago. The answer has not changed. Yes. Restaurant marketing is broken. Not because the tools do not work. Because the thinking behind how most operators use them is wrong at the foundation. Here is what is actually broken: The assumption that retail strategies work for hospitality. […]
