5 STEPS TO BACK TO SCHOOL PROOF YOUR RESTAURANT THIS YEAR

Every year in September many restaurant operators, especially QSR & Fast Casual, find themselves in a pickle. The same conundrum that happens EVERY year rears its ugly head. We end up in the same place saying to ourselves, “I did it again, again I am not prepared for September when I lose all my summer help, NOT NEXT YEAR!” But the reality is, we made that exact same promise to ourselves for the last 10 years.

It’s the end of May and you think to yourself, “School will be out in a few weeks, if I can make it until then when the kids are out of school, they will have more availability and I will be in good shape!” 

That availability will blow up, taking some pressure off. Summer hits, and the part-timers can do anything. The messages fly in, you have many of your kids and part-timers coming up to you proclaiming, “I need ALL the hours that you can give me.” Maybe they just graduated, and are leaving for college and need to bank cash? Possibly it’s a kid that just got their license and needs to buy a car? Perhaps it’s a school teacher’s spouse and things temporarily changed at home for a few months, and they want to do more. Either way, if you are excited about the break, you can grab a few early days. Catch on some Admin work in the office you really need to get to. You will fill the time, that is for sure.

This can be a trap, so watch out!

This is the wrong time to take your foot off the gas!  And more importantly, the calm before the storm.

It’s easy to get caught up in the 86,000 things that need to be done yesterday. The marketing that has to be done, the new products that have to be executed. The summer business heats up or slows down (depending on your seasonal business). This is the time to exercise some slight discipline. Start thinking about September and what happens at back-to-school time NOW.

Yes, it’s only June, but June/July. A good amount of applications poured in, but it’s a trap, a trap of comfort. This is what happens every year. I call it the Karmic Cul-de-sac, we go from, needing help, to having the appearance and feel we have the availability, then the vacations and requests pour in.  Undoubtedly, we have the same holes in the schedule that we had before, when we cover a trip or vacation for our family following the return to school and life where everyone leaves, which leaves us exactly where we started. Karmic Cul-de-sac.

Do we play Chess instead of Checkers? What if we thought strategically and tactically, like the Ant & the Grasshopper? Am I aging myself when I mention that story? 

The Ant prepared for the winter while the Grasshopper played, then in the winter, the Grasshopper died because he wasn’t prepared, while the Ant was able to live more comfortably through the harsh winter being prepared with plenty of food than what he needed. We can learn from this story. The lesson, “Manufacture the outcome!”

These 5 steps will help you be ahead of the curve this year when in an instant your staff’s availability changes, and you’re stuck with a schedule that has more holes in it than Swiss Cheese. This year we will actually do things differently and be in a better position.

1) WATCH THE MINORS

You will get applications, it happens every year. Interestingly, though, we aren’t getting as many summer applications as we used to get. Many kids aren’t looking for summer jobs. Whether they are lazy, are in front of Netflix, iPads, or X-Box or the parents aren’t pushing them and empowering them, who knows. I know I am guilty of this with my kids. My daughter Emma yesterday, I left the house she was watching a show when I left, she was still watching the show when I returned 9 hours later. I asked her, “how many episodes did you watch?” She replied, “The entire season, 23 episodes.” Man, that is what she did all day long? Seasons are usually watched one episode per week, over the course of 6 months, not binge-watched in one day. The ability to do this is destroying productivity now and tomorrow.

So many of these “applications” that you do receive are kids looking for work, many of them minors. Many of the parents of these minors will “push” their kids to get a job, which is awesome. But many, you have to be careful. You have to be able to decipher what’s actually happening. The parents want a “professional babysitter” (your company) so they know where their kid is while they are at work, and they want their kid to get paid, so they can stop feeding them money. Also, so the kids learn responsibility and skills. I get it, and I love it. But if we are not careful, we add a massive layer of stress and chaos to our company if we hire too many of these guys.

Think about the times you saw kids working and just standing around. Think about what it takes to teach people who have very little to no experience and have to spoon-feed. Do you know the definition of a catalyst? It’s something that makes something, do something. That is what your management becomes, a catalyst to get people to move, to do the things, to get them on task with what needs to be done. When you have too many people that need this level of babysitting, it can put a lot of pressure on management.
Then it happens, all the kids who said, “I need all the hours that you can give me!” Now unroll the scroll of all the things that they “can’t do” this summer. The list of vacations and requests pour in at an alarming rate. The parents who wanted to teach their kid “responsibility & skills”, yeah that is only what they want when it’s convenient and fits their schedule. They have trips for the family planned, so all that money and time invested to “teach, train and educate”, yeah maybe in a few weeks. See no one sees the impact on you and your business. People walk around like horses, with their blinders on. They only care about their needs and wants.
This is the trap we need to avoid.

2) MANAGE THE REQUESTS EARLY

Very quickly you realize, you have additional staff, and you still struggle to write a proper schedule with all the positions and needs filled. Because the requests sneak up on you so hard and fast. We have to be ahead of this. We have created a company-wide communication tool, and we rely on this to put out messages, quickly, fast and sometimes scheduled out. Not only that, but we ask over and over, confirm and reconfirm availability, scheduling, and requests. Things change, plans change, so we want to be on it as all of it affects people’s availability. We call this “Tourniquet Pressure” apply pressure all the time, light pressure keeping us in the know all the time. With this information, we build out “shells” of the upcoming schedule to assure we can see out 5-6 weeks, as well as using a Google Calendar that we are constantly updating. How many times have you been so busy that you write the schedule last minute, only to now see that 3 key people have all requested the week off, now you have no time to be ahead of it. This can really mess up the operation that week.

If you knowingly hired people, knowingly knew these barriers were coming up and did little to plan around it. You can’t complain about it. If you know what’s coming up, and what coming around the corner, you have a better chance of mitigating around it and preparing. When we have had multiple requests, especially losing A-Players for that time period, we planned for it by giving people preferred time off ahead of time, like the weekend before, so everybody gets what they want. Giving key staff the weekend off before a tough spot helps your team plow through it because they are recharged. This is a best practice that we do.

3) STOP HIRING PEOPLE WHO WON’T BE THERE IN SEPTEMBER!

“When you are in a hole, stop digging!”

Too many times, “I have punched myself in the face” LITERALLY!
The first thing we have to understand is that people want to fill “their needs” first. They only care about themselves, which is ok. No one will ever look through your “lens” instead they walk around with “blinders” on to your situation because they have a need and filling it is their priority. Maybe they need additional income, they need more income, they need weekends off, whatever it is, it just is. So, they really don’t understand that working Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, say 9:00 AM-2:00 PM and wanting to get paid top dollar for it, has very little value to your company. While your company has needs and wants to survive, it needs the best availability from people possible.

Take this way of thinking when hiring college kids.

• They come home, gung ho, ready to rock-n-roll, and then they are home for 10 weeks.
• You hire them, it takes you 2 weeks to get them up to speed to be able to function at a preliminary level.
• Then they drop on you the family vacations, the trips planned with friends, etc.

So out of those 10 weeks, really only 3-4 of the weeks they can actually work. Many times they tell you they go back to school in September, and actually become unavailable as they need to prepare or return sooner than expected (often at the last minute) so September becomes the second week of August.

Is the juice worth the squeeze?

School teachers follow the same suit. I love our teachers, what they do is thankless and hard. But, their mindset is on back to school. Your business is not their priority, they care about filling their short-term need, and then they return to their teaching jobs.

So, this is the wrong time to take your foot off the gas.

Continue to hire, and continue to run your Ads.

Think about the person that the universe wanted you to meet. The person that is working somewhere else has now decided it’s time to jump.

They won’t see you as an option, and you will lose that opportunity if you stop. It’s OK to over-hire a bit, chances are people will fall off (Attrition). Alternatively, look to always be upgrading your staff, an A-Player will add depth you didn’t have yesterday and change the way you think. With every conversation and every interview, you must have September in mind. Ask yourself the question, “tell me what happens in September when kids go back to school?” Any people you generate will impact positively in September.

When September hits, keep that foot on the gas mindset.

Now that you have lost staff, and you need to replenish. I like to call this “keeping the Equilibrium.”

Imagine a room with 6 balls in the room and 2 doors. The goal is to keep 6 balls in the room at all times. That is the need your company has to deliver your products and services, your need to write a schedule. A ball goes out one door, so a ball must come in, Equilibrium. Then 2 balls leave the room, and only one ball comes in.

Equilibrium is broken. Then 2 balls enter the room (you hire) then 2 leave, you are right back in the same place and have accomplished nothing.

4) SEGREGATE PEOPLE ON YOUR SCHEDULE

This is a Jedi mind trick of mine.

Actually, border off and group people on your schedule. Don’t just list everyone out. Put 14/15-year-old together, 16/17-year-old together, Adults together, day shifters, evening people. We use Excel and color code certain items like trainee’s, permanent versus temporary requests. By doing this, it becomes easy to quickly get a pulse of where the needs are visual.

Having budgeting information, like daily hours, and total goal hours, then gearing them to projected sales keeps end-of-week totals in mind at the beginning of the week to course correct and adjust.

Constantly looking at the grouping, what I see is potential availability concerns now and later at a glance. It is a constant reminder of the obstacles we have to overcome, and my team is trained to see it the way I see it. The data is written in front of us, we have to not just look but be constantly reminded of it. It’s about the depth or lack of depth with our scheduling

5) COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE

Have a conversation with your graduates. It will be enlightening what you learn. Many kids today are going online and staying local. Alternatively, they are commuting to school and availability 2-3 days a week may be crucial when back-to-school hits. These guys are already trained and doing it for you now, they just have obligations that have to be worked around. There is nothing sweeter than when things work for both of us.

Also, things change. Things happen in their lives, your ability to stay ahead of them can ward off unneeded stressors for your team. Imagine one of your employees has ride issues. No car, no license, whatever it is. Suddenly it’s a few weeks before back to school and your transition and their ride issue are no longer there, so they quit with no notice. Imagine the possibility communicate could have? Simply having frequent conversations and open communications, you were ahead of this event in their life. You could offer them coaching and/or possible solutions like noting:  “Sally is scheduled at the same time as you, we will schedule it so for the next few weeks and talk to Sally to have her pick you up on the way in, how does that sound?”

Unfortunately, many people simply lack the skills to problem-solve. They have a problem, and they just give up and quit. It’s hard to figure out a solution. It’s easier to go into a cave and feel sorry for yourself, so that is what many people do. This behavior impacts us greatly, so it’s on us to help them develop these skills, think differently, and become problem solvers and self-sufficient. Unfortunately, many of our people aren’t getting these skills at home or at school. So if we want better people, we have to be the change. We have to get people to see their “blind spot”, which many times is right in front of their face.

So, this year in September when many restaurant operators, especially QSR & Fast Casual, find themselves in a pickle, I hope you’ll find some guidance in my suggestions.  

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