If you are not familiar with Murphy’s Laws, there is a web-site that you can go to read up on it. As you read, you will undoubtedly have experienced some or most of them first hand in your own life and or business. I grew up in the Seventies and had plenty of posters in my bedroom, Murphy’s Laws was one of them. I will say that the poster was funny to read and laugh about, but how could I have known that they would ring true through-out my career!!
I hope this will be the first of many articles I can share and help some of you along your road to success. I was thinking about a particular “law” this week that I read on the web-site mentioned earlier, it goes like this: “left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse”. I know this sounds a little pessimistic, well maybe a lot, but ever try to run on auto-pilot? I have, and no matter how well I thought things were “dialed in” or running smoothly, there is a reason businesses have managers. Tell me, do you think football, baseball, racing or any other team sport can survive without anyone in charge?! The truth is that teams, businesses, organizations of all kinds must have structure. I will say that people want organization, structure, and even routine. I know for myself that I need to have an outlet for my creative side, but I have to have order and structure. Chaos will spell certain doom, so what is a manager or owner to do to keep the guest totally satisfied on every visit?
I learned a few things in college, but the most memorable of all the definitions goes like this: precision is repeated accuracy (short version). That may not mean much to anyone unless you have had some engineering, but most people know the difference between a Lexus and “some domestic brands”. I would venture to guess that a good portion of the general public knows about the quality and reliability Toyota has delivered over the last 30 years. So what does this have to do with precision and accuracy, let alone the restaurant industry? I have been using this little line for some time now: “expect it to be correct, don’t anticipate it to be wrong”. Toyota and other Japanese manufacturers have dedicated themselves to this very principle for decades now, precision is not just a word, but a way of doing business. Remember the definition? Precision is repeated accuracy, it is not just hitting the target, but hitting the center of the bulls-eye every time. Now I know we are not talking about machines, but food and human production.
There is a way to translate this definition or “philosophy” to our business, it starts at the back dock. If you want the guest to have a WOW experience every time they visit your restaurant, you have to start at the beginning. I am sure you are asking how could the back dock ever matter or impact the guest experience. If you have been in the business long enough to go through training,or at least get your Serve Safe certification, you should already know this answer. HAACP, everything begins at the back dock, everything that hits the table comes through that back door. It is the most critical control point in the restaurant, but I will talk about HAACP at a later time. HAACP is the order of flow for the restaurant and dictates its success or failure. I know this is a bold statement, but how your back of house operation runs and is organized, affects the entire operation. Your kitchen and service staff judge the management and/or ownership on how effectively the kitchen is run and food production is executed (quality, quantity, and ticket times) on every shift.
“Expect it to be correct”, the first part of this Barcio Method, sets the tone for the everything in the restaurant. If you have any doubts, I’ll make a short list for you: uniforms, plate presentation, stocked bathrooms, accurate quote times, realistic labor forecasts, proper portioning, correct chemical usage, prep sheets used, pull thaws on time (not having to water thaw,ever), safe counts on every shift, etc., etc. Managers and owners tend to get worn down at times and relax standards, and that is what we are talking about isn’t it. Expectations are standards, whether they are “high” or “low”, every business has to set them and stick to them. There is no detail too small or not worth worrying about, remember Murphy’s Law? Nothing can be left unattended, everything influences the guest experience, remember the back-dock?! If the guest drives around the building and it is a disaster area, what do you think they will think about the cleanliness of your operation. You have to think about potential employees and managers also, they make judgments based on what they see. I have to tell you that I have found more often than not, a dirty and untidy back-dock reflected directly on the restaurant as a whole. If you and your management team are in the survival mode, it’s time to change your mind-set and take charge again. Remember, the best employees want and need you to be in charge and want to held accountable. Accountability is easy to say, but hard to execute, just like the WOW factor. I’ll talk more about accountability later on, but know that expectations can not be ignored when it come to accountability, they are dependent on one another.
“Don’t anticipate it to be wrong”, the second part of this Barcio Method. It seems that some places I have worked for over the years subscribed to the mentality of everything is going to be wrong. I think there were many reasons for this type of thinking. I’ll go through a one of them for you, firstly, low expectations of the staff. There can be many reasons for this, but usually can boil down to two. One is the staff may have been “inherited”, and two is “they are all that we can find”. I’m sure we can go on all day about several more reasons, but for the sake of argument, I’ll leave it at two. I have experienced both, the first one is a valid point for low expectations, but I always try to give a “new team” for me, the benefit of the doubt as to their abilities. I believe it best to spend a reasonable amount of time evaluating the staff and deciding for myself if anyone is not performing up to standards. I believe this is the fair thing to do and can save time and money (re-hiring and training new staff). I have been very satisfied by doing this over the years, not to mention the personal rewards for me. The second excuse for low expectations comes from the old line of, “they are all we can find”. In some areas this is true, but in time, quality begets quality. Meaning that the best staff you have, will attract the same quality people. People want to be a part of success and the staff wants to count on people they know and trust.
I have to say that all of this translates into the magic word, turn-over, or lack of it. It is important to remember that I have always tried to draw on every source available to me over the years. I know that nothing runs exactly to plan, but I want to have as little frustration as possible in my day to day operations. I do not believe in luck or things just falling into place, there must be a design or a plan with so many moving parts. More on all of this later.
