Restaurants steer through the rearview mirror, meaning they need accurate data from what has already happened to change direction or adapt to negative trends. If this data is late or overly complex or non-existent, the restaurant flies by the seat of its pants and nothing is ever good enough for the owner…at least not without profit. Managers get stressed and staff begins to turn over.

Soon stability becomes elusive as cost-cutting measures are introduced to save the sinking ship. Menus are changed to lower COGS and labor. Managers are not replaced so teams are forced to work longer hours. Customers can smell desperation, and regulars visit less often or simply vanish. Morale declines with guest count. Word gets out and the business circles the drain until it eventually closes. The owner blames their teams or the economy or themselves for the failure…but it’s none of the above.

Managers, like their employees, need a boss – a guide. Even though they may be near the peak of your organizational pyramid, they too need to operate with a foundation that includes guiding principles, cultural aspirations, a solid operating structure, and accountability procedures. Without this bedrock, managers are only mimicking what they learned in their previous jobs. To use a sports analogy, they’re running another coach’s playbook without that coach present to analyze and engage and adapt it to the new (your) team. It doesn’t take long for that management team to unravel and for chaos to ensue.

In the hospitality industry, EVERY guest has expectations. To be truly successful you can’t manage them – you have to exceed them. Piece of cake, right?

WHEN GREAT RESTAURANTS GO STALE:
PROBLEMS WITH OWNER OVERSIGHT

Business owners create businesses to generate profit, not to be tied to a position. When an owner is pulled into managing daily operations, they now have a job, and the venture can turn sour. Entrepreneurs are owners, not managers, and inevitably this will show.

Entrepreneurs are idea people. They’re good at generating high level ideas and designing money-making structures, but the ‘nuts and bolts’ (or ‘salt and pepper’) are best left to those who specialize in that. To put it another way, we operate with the precision and skill of a surgical team so you can focus on your overall good health.

Owners often place too much trust in their current staff, expecting them to self-police and deliver new, superior results. Instead, this invariably leads to a revolving door in search of the “right” manager.

Even in high-caliber store-level leaders, managers’ focus on delivering results is constrained by their ability to deploy processes developed by others. They unintentionally pass off their familiarity as their capability to identify and implement systems that suit the business (“Fantastic! You worked at Cheesecake Factory so you can make our place run like that!”) Since people don’t know what they don’t know, if(when) a manager doesn’t deliver, the owner views the manager as failing. Never quite able to achieve ownership’s goals, the manager becomes frustrated, the venue struggles, and good people and families get hurt. Soon the place is known as a manager grinder.

Restaurant owners often tell themselves that snagging that one seasoned Director of Operations is all it takes. Without the benefit of a team approach to oversight, hiring a rainmaker D of O often merely adds an unnecessarily high salary to your budget without solving the problem.

Poor performance stresses the owner and mires them so deeply in the daily grind that they can’t focus on what they’re good at, which is creating new businesses. Eventually, the shine comes off the penny and owners can’t wait to cash out.