Learning the hard way

During my college summers, I worked at a restaurant at night and worked construction during the day.

I considered myself a pretty solid employee and felt completely embarrassed during my first week on a construction site when the GC on the project asked me to move a bunch of bricks, and I started hauling them with my hands in a pile on my forearms. His words stuck with me in a bad way, “Hey, College, use the wheelbarrow, I’m not paying you for your effort.”

I didn’t think about the best way to do the job, only to do the job as I was told. As I got older and had a staff of my own I realized they could be a lot like I was, doing as they told and not thinking beyond that.

In 1913 Henry Ford introduced the Model-T that revolutionized the automotive industry by using something so undeniable, but it had eluded everyone else until then, THE ASSEMBLY LINE.

Do you know who else the assembly line and its efficiency concepts apply to, YOUR STAFF!

Without explicit direction of not simply what the task is, but the best way to do the task, your staff will do it whichever way their brain thinks to do it first and most likely this will be the wrong way. So, let’s look at the biggest efficiency tools and failure points your kitchen might have today.

Here are my Top 5 Efficiency Items:

Zone vs 1to1 defense:

The assembly line is all about zones. One person pushing out doughs, one person saucing and cheesing, and one topping or whatever your store demands.

To put it simply an efficient kitchen can’t be one pizza maker who gets a ticket printed out, then COMMUNICATES NOTHING, and simply makes one or all of the pizzas on that ticket, one by one, then puts them in the oven.

This seems like an effort, but it's worthless. Imagine a soccer team that didn’t speak, didn’t call for the ball, didn’t say a word, they’d get destroyed.

In your kitchen, staff who aren’t accustomed to team effort, or are more comfortable keeping to themselves will naturally go into this mode as their default. Only with systems of who does what in each area will that be avoided, and your process sped up.

Full Par / Full Prep:

Just like the make line, doing one task often and the whole way through is much less effort than setting it up, breaking it down, and then coming back to set it up again. If you slice or do prep in your store then your ideal prep should be based on how long the product will last along with how much space you have to store it.

We slice our pepperoni at Andolini’s and no matter how much we buy, we will go through that in days not weeks. It makes all the sense in the world to slice it all when it arrives and not every day with just enough to get by.

This is a balancing act of freshness, to food cost purchases and I get that, with that said if you could have all your produce and meats that are in your walk-in right now, sliced, prepped, and ready, would you want it? If the answer is yes, then do it all in one fell swoop, not a meandering effort every day.

Max out your pars so you don’t lose a staff member to doing prep in the rush. That’s the death nail you need to avoid, losing a table turn to a slow kitchen will always cost more than the extra hour to get all the prep done ahead of time.

Apathy and Adrenaline:

You have all the systems in the world, just no one uses them and if they do, it’s with passive aggressiveness or just plain apathy. Once one person doesn’t care, all their subordinates zone out.

At the same time, when someone is into it, others want to get into it as well, no matter how hard the task is. Adrenaline starts pumping, staff gets a feeling of purpose and everyone zones in on getting things done fast and also correctly.

I’ve always found it amazing that a busy restaurant with everyone dialed in and pushed to their limit will make fewer mistakes than a slow restaurant with all the time in the world.

Time Expectations:

Running on adrenaline will breed a sense of urgency. Having a sense of urgency is great but it only lasts when everyone understands what’s expected. The only way to hit goals is to have them defined without ambiguity.

Exact definitions of how long a pizza should take to get made, how long from when a ticket is printed to when it should be in the oven, to how much time it should take to cut and ball a batch of dough. All these need to be known down to the second if you ever want to get movement on your table turns and your labor costs.

DRI:

You can say every pizza should be in the oven in 5 minutes or less until you are blue in the face, but if you don’t have a staff member who is the Directly Responsible Individual for ensuring that it gets done, then you will have a bunch of staff pointing the finger or worse, saying nothing when you ask why is the kitchen so slow.

The DRI should be in charge and in the mix on the task. For example, you can have 4 people making pizzas, but one should be DRI for double checking each pizza that goes into the oven to doubly ensure it’s made the right way to avoid a refire.

A DRI for cleanliness, speed of service, speed of prep, and a DRI for everything IS A MUST. Yes, the buck stops with you the owner, but as it passes staff members along the way need to be entitled to take ownership of those tasks.

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