Management – September 2011
IT’S NOT ABOUT THE MONEY !
By: WC Wells
Several years ago I read the story of Jeremy, one of the “fishmongers” at Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle. He was diagnosed with brain cancer and, as it would be with most of us, this was not part of his life plan. He was passionate about his work and his life.
He had clear intentions about both, and as a result he made a very conscious choice to not let his diagnosis interfere with his commitment to those intentions. He survived the brain cancer and discovered along the way an amazing truth - that the only way he could be truly committed to his intentions was to let go of the results.
If the only validation of a commitment is the result it creates, then one must question if they were really, truly committed in the first place. Jeremy’s story resonated with me.
During my 14 years as the head of Tommy Bahama’s restaurant division, we spent a lot of time reminding ourselves that if we were going to be truly committed to the intention of delivering a memorable guest experience that it was not going to be about the money. We thought of it as “management by intention” versus “management by results”.
Unlike many restaurant businesses where the most important thing - if not “the only” thing - is the result, we decided to focus on our intentions. We believed that intentions, when clearly understood by the management and staff of one’s business, become powerful guidelines. They become your map and will determine where you are going, how you are going to interact with others along the way, what your guest is going to experience while in your premises, and how they are going to feel when they leave.
Intentions are also about one’s state of mind and therefore they create the critical context and culture within which you operate your business.
As more and more members of your operation begin to understand what they are, then those members are able to more effectively and efficiently deliver the goods and services you offer. Best of all, they can do so without having to be micro-managed. And because those intentions support the intrinsic value of the goods and services you are offering your guests, then having everyone in your organization “on the same page” dramatically increases the possibility of meeting or exceeding any targeted results or goals.
Intentions are also much easier to manage and can be done so on a much more frequent and on going basis than a weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual goals. They can beaccomplished daily, can be accomplished throughout a shift, and can be accomplished one guest at a time.
Most restaurant kitchens set annual, monthly, or weekly food cost goals. But the reality in a kitchen is that being focused on a specific food cost number, trying to measure it constantly and spending a lot of time worrying about it will not ensure that you achieve that food cost number. At Tommy Bahama, we had food cost goals for the year as well as for every month, but the truth was I spent almost no time focused on those goals. Instead, I wanted us to simply focus on the intention to have “the best food cost possible” and to create action steps that would support that intention.
More than once when meeting with all our Managing Chefs, I told them that I really did not care what their food cost number was because it was just a number. I also told them what I did care about and why I thought that caring about those things would get us to some place we wanted to go.
When it comes to food cost there are always things that are outside of our control: floods in the lettuce fields, a significant increase in the price of commodities, a sales mix that is skewed towards higher food cost items, inflation that is beyond our ability to raise prices on a timely basis, etc. So we focused on what we could control. We put systems and processes in place that would allow us to manage our intention to have the best food cost possible.
Rather than be committed to a specific food cost number we were instead committed to establishing contracts for our most expensive purchases; to weighing everything that we paid for by weight when it came through the back door; to double-checking all invoices to make sure they were priced correctly and accurately reflected what we actually received; to tracking and quantifying our waste on a daily basis; to always using recipe books in our prep effort; to servers signing-off on all orders received in the kitchen; and to a lot of other action steps.
What we knew was that if we completed those action steps given our prices, the cost of our recipes and our sales mix, that at the end of every month and at the end of the year we would have the best food cost possible. If it wasn’t the food cost we wanted then we were at some very clear points of choice: increase prices, reduce portions, reduce quality or create and promote new lower cost menu items.
We could have hammered incessantly at a specific food cost, and we could have worried about it. And none of that would have helped. In fact, it could have caused some of our key people to quit because of the stress, others to “fudge” on the quality or the portion sizes and lose their integrity in the process, a few to chose to be victims and unaccountable for their results, and some to “relax” once they felt they had reached the goal and consequently not exceed it. Instead, we chose to “manage by intention.”
Using intention as our guiding hand we could literally, over any given period of time, monitor our intentions and make corrections when needed. We could regularly asked ourselves if our action steps were, in fact, in-sync with and supportive of our intentions. What we didn’t do was work specifically on our goals, and we rarely talked about them. Instead we actively pursued our intentions and that in the end became our “secret sauce”. For at the end of the day, not hitting our number was only going to tell us that we didn’t hit the number. If that is true, then why would we want to put all the focus on a sales goal or a specific food cost goal? I didn’t think we should.
With the help of our management teams and staff, we determined what the real reasons were that caused people to frequent our business. We then created intentions that clearly matched up and supported all those reasons. We took the time to educate everyone in our organization so that they understand those intentions. We asked them to be involved in developing the action steps needed to support and fulfill those intentions.
Given we believed that we had hired smart, capable and good intentioned people, then all we had to then do was get out of their way. When we went through this process at Tommy Bahama our results were usually exceptional. They weren’t always the result we had set as a goal a year or so earlier but we knew that they were always better than what they otherwise would have been without this process.
The bonus for managing by intention is that for everyone work becomes easier, more fun, more purposeful and with better partnerships, all of which leads to low turnover, higher quality goods and services, more memorable guest experiences, and over the long haul, noticeably greater results!
WC Wells is an expert at creating an authentic and remarkable culture of hospitality that generates "raving" guests and fosters exceptional long term top line growth. Former President and “TGIC” (The Guy in Charge) at Tommy Bahama's Restaurants, he spearheaded the development and initial growth of Tommy Bahama's unique concept of "Islands" that placed both a full-service high quality casual restaurant and an upscale casual menswear retail store under one roof. Contact WC at wcwells@comcast.net.