Monthly Archives: August 2014

Top Trick to Hold Your Managers Accountable

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By David Scott Peters

www.therestaurantexpert.com

Once you start using systems, your job becomes holding your managers accountable. As I’ve explained in previous posts, the secret to it all is checklists that keep your team on task and focused on what you expect from them. Daily paperwork is one set of checklists that are a “daily” necessity.

Here is an accountability checklist that covers daily paperwork.

□ End-of-Day Paperwork

  • Was it completed before the last manager left the building?
  • What is the over short?
  • Check that cash deposit was used, not POS cash due.

□ Paid Out

  • A paid out is cash used from a bar or cashier drawer to pay for a bill, an invoice or a store run.
  • Entered to balance.
  • Was the line item detail completed?
  • Is there a receipt in the daily paperwork?

□ Manager Log

  • Are the questions being answered?

□ Invoices

  • Check that invoices are being entered as they come in.
  • Check that invoice line item detail is being completed.
  • Review physical invoices against the invoice summary report. Pick the correct date range, print it off and compare them to your vendor invoice summary reports.

□ Purchase Allotment System

  • Check to see that the purchase allotment system is being used and followed.
  • Double check purchase orders are within your purchasing guidelines.

□ Labor Systems

  • Are master schedules in place and accurate?
  • Has a labor allotment been run?
  • Schedule is within budget guidelines using the reverse labor system?
  • Is labor being tracked daily with the reverse labor system?

□ Food/Beverage Systems

  • Are your products usable, have pars and locations set?
  • Are recipe costing cardscompleted?
  • Are you checking that orders are within purchase allotment guidelines and being placed on time (complete)?
  • Has your inventory locations section been set to how the product appears on the shelves or alphabetical?
  • Are inventories being taken every Sunday or at least the last day of the month?

Give this list to your managers. Your job is to hold your management team accountable and all you have to do is check their daily activities, holding them to this checklist.  If you simply ASSUME they are being done, you will not have control of your cash, profits or management. Follow this checklist to ensure you are doing your job!

For a checklist complete with descriptions and explanations of each category, visit this page for a Daily Paperwork Checklist.

By the way, Daily Paperwork is even easier to manage when you use our web-based restaurant management software – SMART Systems Pro (SSP). And with SSP, you can check daily paperwork anywhere you have Internet access, even from the beach.

David Scott Peters TheRestaurantExpert (1)David Scott Peters is a restaurant expert, speaker, coach and trainer for independent restaurant owners. He is the developer of SMART Systems Pro, an online restaurant management software program helping the independent restaurant owner remain competitive and profitable in an industry boxed in by the big chain restaurants. He is best known as the SMART Systems guy who can walk into any restaurant and find $10,000 in undiscovered cash before he hits the back door… Guaranteed! Learn more at www.therestaurantexpert.com/rdspos.

 

6 Systems to Use to Avoid Failure

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By David Scott Peters

www.therestaurantexpert.com

Many restaurants fail because they simply failed to plan.

How do you avoid failure — small or epic? It’s simple really. You plan for success. You put yourself and your restaurant in a prepared state that can handle anything that is thrown at it.

Planning for success requires the implementation and consistent execution of a list of very specific systems and more importantly, someone inspecting that the systems are followed on a daily basis.

Here are the top six systems you can’t survive without.

Sales Forecasts – Predicting sales is critical to any restaurant. If you don’t document what you think you are going to do in sales for each day of the week, you run the risk of buying too much or not enough product. You run the risk of bringing in too many or too few employees. Each scenario results in lost opportunity and profits because you probably wasted products, 86’d items, lost money at the time clock or provided your guests a terrible experience at every turn, virtually destroying your business as they go off and tell everyone they know and on the Internet, through Twitter, Facebook, Yelp and more, how you suck!

Budget – A budget is critical to the successful implementation of systems, because it gives you cost of goods sold and labor targets. Without targets, you simply cannot make the right decisions and cannot measure your success, because you don’t even know what success looks like. (Check out our free restaurant budget report for a step-by-step guide in creating an effective budget for your restaurant.)

Purchase Allotment System – The purchase allotment system is based on sales forecasts for the entire month, your actual sales for the entire month as they happen, as well as your food or beverage purchases as they are delivered each day. This system ensures that management knows how much money they have to spend to not only make sure you have enough product, but to do it within budget, making it easier to keep your cash in the bank and not on the shelves being risked to waste, spoilage or theft. Most of my most successful members pin their restaurant’s turnaround to this system.

Labor Allotment System – Labor allotment is a system that’s based on sales forecasts for the next week and the actual hours worked and sales for last week. With it you can easily alter your schedules to meet budget by letting each manager know how many hours and dollars they have for next week’s schedule so they can adjust them appropriately. For most restaurants, this is the first step in making sure you don’t schedule too many or too few hours to insure the guest has a great experience and you don’t lose money at the time clock.

  1. Order Par Levels – The days of your chef or kitchen manager ripping off a cardboard box lid and heading into the walk-in cooler with a grease pencil just staring up at the shelves like a tourist in New York City with their mouth wide open and ordering based on their intuition need to end. By asking your vendors for a descending case report and some simple formulas in a spreadsheet, you can easily calculate how much of each product you need to have based on your anticipated volumes, like clockwork. Creating ordering pars means that anyone who is trained to count the product on the shelves accurately can create an order that puts you in a position to succeed.

Prep System – This is one of the most amazing systems because it really is a simple clipboard system that promotes teamwork, trust and a kitchen that is always prepared for anything that comes its way. It promotes teamwork and trust because as a shift is finishing up, those cooks are counting prepped products in their stations so the next shift walks in knowing exactly what needs to be prepped or gathered to run a successful shift without running out of product in the middle of the shift. The simple byproduct is a shift where no one leaves the line during the busiest times of the day to find or prep product to complete tickets.

Let me be perfectly clear, the implementation of these systems is extremely important to your success. They are the keystone to your planning process and will guide you to a successful shift each and every day. But the piece of the puzzle that makes this all work is someone on the management team or in ownership that inspects that the systems are not only being used, but completed on time each and every day.

While we hope that we can simply count on everyone on the management team to be an adult and do what is required, there are many things that can derail the process. A simple inspection is all that is needed to get things back on course.

Implement these six systems and then inspect what you expect to be on your way to flawless shifts on a daily basis, a restaurant filled with happy trained employees and happy guests.

Translation: these systems create a restaurant that people love to go to and that makes money.

David Scott Peters TheRestaurantExpert (1)David Scott Peters is a restaurant expert, speaker, coach and trainer for independent restaurant owners. He is the developer of SMART Systems Pro, an online restaurant management software program helping the independent restaurant owner remain competitive and profitable in an industry boxed in by the big chain restaurants. He is best known as the SMART Systems guy who can walk into any restaurant and find $10,000 in undiscovered cash before he hits the back door… Guaranteed! Learn more at www.therestaurantexpert.com/rdspos.

 

Make Yourself a Priority

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By David Scott Peters

www.therestaurantexpert.com

Independent restaurant owners tend to be the nicest, most generous people on the planet (even the grumpy ones). Think about it. They put others ahead of themselves all of the time. They will bend over backward to take care of guests’ needs. They will run all of their credit cards to the max in order to make payroll. They’ll even go for years losing money, while their guests tell them how to run their restaurants and their employees drive nicer cars than they do.

So stay with me and listen to what I have to say, even if it’s not the first time you’ve heard me say it.

“You Have a Responsibility to Run a Profitable Restaurant…”

Responsibility to your customers. You have a responsibility to run a profitable restaurant for your customers. Look, there is a reason they dine in your restaurant. You provide an obviously much needed service to your community and guests, otherwise you would not be in business. You must be profitable to stay open for them.

Responsibility to your employees. You have a responsibility to run a profitable restaurant for your employees. This is how they are gainfully employed. This is how they pay their bills, feed their families and live. (Yes, half of them may drink their paycheck away, but that’s another story.) You must be profitable to stay open for them.

Responsibility to yourself. You have a responsibility to run a profitable restaurant for you, your family and any investors you might have.

This third area of responsibility is where the lesson begins. A great majority of restaurant owners run their businesses as if they were a charity. Taking care of everyone else first and if there is anything left over that “would be great.”

The reality is you must make you the priority!

Think about it, without you, there is no restaurant for the customers. Without you, there is no restaurant that employs people to work. Without you, there is no restaurant. So you see, YOU are the priority. Without you everyone suffers.

What do you do with this revelation? How does it affect your life? Well that answer is easy to understand, but sometimes very difficult to execute.

First, you have to start making yourself and your family the priority. You need to create a budget, which ultimately shows you how much money you want to make. You need to put into place the systems you know will help you achieve your budget. And most importantly, you will need to manage your business to that budget, which often means making the tough call.

To get you started, here are the key areas where we focus when we start working with a new restaurant:

  • Cutting labor cost
  • Reducing food cost
  • Expecting more from management

This is where we start, but the list goes on and on. It’s a process and lots of tough calls have to be made. But when you change your mind set to “You have a responsibility to run a profitable restaurant,” you’ll never go back to the way it was. Instead, you WILL make money without sacrificing your independence.

Just remember YOU have to make YOU a priority. Without YOU, there is no restaurant. “You have a responsibility to run a profitable restaurant!”

David Scott Peters TheRestaurantExpert (1)David Scott Peters is a restaurant expert, speaker, coach and trainer for independent restaurant owners. He is the developer of SMART Systems Pro, an online restaurant management software program helping the independent restaurant owner remain competitive and profitable in an industry boxed in by the big chain restaurants. He is best known as the SMART Systems guy who can walk into any restaurant and find $10,000 in undiscovered cash before he hits the back door… Guaranteed! Learn more at www.therestaurantexpert.com/rdspos.

 

Attracting Good Restaurant Employees

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By David Scott Peters

www.therestaurantexpert.com

One of the key lessons I’ve learned over my years in the restaurant business is that not everyone works for you just for money. Money is a factor, but people are looking for much more.

So how do you provide the “much more?”

Many years ago now, Fred Langley best articulated what you have to strive for if you want to attract and keep the very best people on your team. He said you have to become the “Employer of Choice.” So what does that mean?

Without going into the whole explanation behind clinical psychologist Frederick Herzberg’s, “Herzberg’s Motivation-Hygiene Theory,” let’s cover the key factors beyond money that he says motivate people to work and work hard:

  1. Supervision – Make sure you have a management team that coaches employees to success, understands what makes each employee unique and is able to push their buttons to get the best of your people.
  2. Fair compensation – While you don’t have to be at the top of your market’s pay scale, you certainly cannot be at the bottom.
  3. Good working conditions – Make sure you have a clean restaurant, that you have all the right equipment and tools for your employees to do their jobs, and make safety a priority.
  4. Interpersonal relationships – Avoid at all costs having a management team that thinks all of their people are stupid and treats them like crap. Remember, this is a people business and it all starts with your internal customers.
  5. Recognition – Look for people doing things right in your restaurant and give them kudos when you see it. It’s easy to find people doing something wrong. When you focus on the good things, you create a positive work environment where people want to continue to please you vs. just waiting for the scolding.
  6. Responsibility – Sometimes you have great employees who have been with you for many years who NEVER want to be a part of the management team. Yet, they are willing to do more. Look to teach and assign them tasks that make the company better and get more done. Allow them to be a more valued asset on the team and they will be motivated to do more.
  7. Achievement – With responsibility there are often measurable results. When your team sees how what they do has a direct positive impact on the business, they get a real sense of achievement, which makes them want more.
  8. Advancement – Remember money is not the only thing people are looking for when they join your management team. Many want to know that there is a clear path to promotion and advancement in your company. Whether it’s moving up the management ladder, moving into the next better paying line position or gaining the skills that make them more valuable in their career, there needs to be a clear path to advancement that’s based on doing a good job, not who you are sucking up to.
  9. Work itself – I remember my first jobs in the restaurant business were washing dishes, and I hated it. It felt thankless to me, and I was probably not mature enough to want to work that hard as a young teen. Moving up in my career, I’ve always kept that in the back of my mind when managing employees. You need to make sure the job, no matter what level in your organization, is rewarding.

High employee turnover is expensive and disruptive to any business. With training and systems in place, you start with employees who know what their job is and what is expected of them. But to keep them long term, you have to be an “employer of choice.” If you properly address the majority of these factors, you’ll be one!

David Scott Peters TheRestaurantExpert (1)David Scott Peters is a restaurant expert, speaker, coach and trainer for independent restaurant owners. He is the developer of SMART Systems Pro, an online restaurant management software program helping the independent restaurant owner remain competitive and profitable in an industry boxed in by the big chain restaurants. He is best known as the SMART Systems guy who can walk into any restaurant and find $10,000 in undiscovered cash before he hits the back door… Guaranteed! Learn more at www.therestaurantexpert.com/rdspos.