Do your guests smile, feel happy, enjoy their meals, and tell their friends about that?
Do your financial statements appear predictable and healthy – making you proud?
Does your culture deeply permeate your restaurants every unit, every shift, every table, every time?
Do your people demonstrably improve – doing things today that they couldn’t do last year?
These four critical questions make up 98% of any great restaurant owner’s brain space.
Let me make things simple for you.
Look for Answers Here
Once you answer the above questions – and opportunity for improvement becomes evident – start looking for improvement in three places:
- The Mirror: Your company’s strengths tend to be your strengths; its weaknesses tend to be your weaknesses. Your company reflects its owner. Ultimate success comes from balancing perspective.
- People: If you do not have capable people in place – who achieve the results you want and expect – stop reading this, start developing them, or move on and hire others.
- Systems: The restaurant industry has best practices. We have figured everything out. If your group lacks state-of-the-art systems daily, weekly, and on a periodic basis, watch the competition pass you by.
Two Out of Three Equals Bad
If you have:
- Right leadership, right people, but lack systems: Your people appear inactive and ignorant. They’ll run shifts every day, but they’ll make no progress on the analysis and action required to truly run a business.
- Right leadership, right systems, but the wrong people: The machine that makes things work sits there, untouched. Maybe your people are untrained, or maybe just plain incapable. You must make a distinction between the two. For your people who can grow, put energy into them. For those with no upside, move on (at a time of your choosing).
- Right systems, right people, but weak leadership: Your people will have no direction – like they’re on a road trip, their GPS has a glitch and they can’t buy a map because no one prints maps anymore.
Choose Your Focus
Using this thinking directs the way I achieve results when I work with my clients – successful people who want to be even more successful:
- Developing leadership
- Educating people and bringing in new people when we need them
- Implementing systems – this is actually the easy part because they have already been figured out
