Topics
Employee Management
Fundamentals and Next-level Steps for a Solid Restaurant Employee Training Program
You Get the Staff You Deserve Restaurant Employee Training is an investment The quality of your training directly correlates to your team’s potential success, which affects the quality of your food and the end customer dining experiences. Great...
Topics
Employee Management
Building Blocks: Bad Hire?
Don’t blame others for a bad hire. Look in the mirror. We all know the saying about subpar employees: One bad apple ruins the barrel. But if that’s true, why do we as pizzeria owners tolerate the bad apples on our staffs? Obviously, no one wants ...
Topics
Employee Management
Mike’s Monthly Tip: The Value of a Leader
Why is it that you can have two people with relatively the same age, background and acumen have two vastly different outcomes from the same team? The straightforward and non-simple answer is leadership. Once you see them in action, is only when you s...
Topics
Employee Management
A Framework for Paid Time Off
Proper PTO Paid time off, also known as PTO, isn’t easy for restaurant companies to navigate. It can enhance the likelihood of retaining top-tier talent, but it can also be easily abused. PTO is never fun when it leads to vital personnel gone when ...
Topics
Employee Management
Building Blocks: Effective Ways to Incentivize and Reward Your Team
“Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.” – Charlie Munger In the restaurant industry, employers are constantly talking about how difficult it is to hire and retain good employees. My philosophy is, when it comes to staffing your...
Topics
Employee Management
The Crucial Owner/General Manager Bond
The Perfect Tandem Any independent operator can tell the same story about the good old days when they first opened the shop. As owners we were working 18-hour days, seven days a week, 100 hours plus weeks, and no days off. But then as business grew, ...
Topics
Employee Management
Building Blocks: Team Building
Words and actions are the key “Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.” – Steve Jobs, Co-Founder of Apple You can have the best recipes and the best location, but if you can’t build a great t...
Topics
Employee Management
Building Blocks: The First Steps in Building Your Pizzeria’s Team
In a column named “Building Blocks,” it’s no coincidence that we’re going to spend some time talking about building a team. After all, employees are among the most important “blocks” in your business. Follow along for the steps to fol...
Topics
Employee Management
Mike’s Monthly Tip: Employee Thrive Mode
The post-pandemic malaise is in full effect. Without seeking to knock on a ton of wood, it would appear that the pandemic is drawing to a close. Or as close to an end as possible. Will it ever be entirely over? Who knows? Probably not, but it’s...
Topics
Employee Management
Building Blocks: Bite-Sized Lessons in Pizzeria Leadership
“Leaders become great not because of their power, but because of their ability to empower others.” — John Maxwell, bestselling author/speaker/leadership coach. Often, I’m asked to share my secret for success. It is a humbling question — and...
Topics
Employee Management
Mike’s Monthly Tip: They did it the wrong way. Now what?
Fixing a behavior in the workplace I had a recent situation where a person posted a bad photo of a slice of our sausage pizza served to them at lunch. It only had three pieces of sausage instead of the typical seven per the recipe. The knee-jerk reac...
Topics
Employee Management
Building Blocks: 3 Steps to Improving Employee Recruiting and Retention
Steve Jobs, who knew a thing or two about growing a business, once said: “Recruiting is hard. It’s just finding the needles in the haystack.” And the legendary co-founder and former CEO of Apple spent a lot of time hunting for those needles, es...