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 […]
Spend time in any industry forum or blog where front-line cast members talk to each other and you will quickly see the gap between how they think about the work and how the operator needs them to think about it. It is not a gap in effort. Most front-line cast members are working hard. It […]
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, […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
