bodegahwy:
Time spent planning and time spent marketing are more important to your business than time spent in the kitchen and will result in sales growth. Learn to trust employees. Running a shift is not rocket science. Any responsible high school senior can do it after a couple weeks. Make sure you train them and make sure you are looking for ways to measure results for service levels, food costs, labor etc.
Pardon my direct approach, but you are nuts to think that you have to be there every second. Your business will benefit greatly if you are rested and fresh and there is no way you can be if you are working 7X15 each week. Your business will also benefit if you take another 15 hours a week out of the operational mode and spend it on planning and marketing activity.
After 15 years owning a delco, I would tell you that an owner/operator should not be in the kitchen more than 35 hours a week. Spend another five hours doing office work (payroll, scheduling, bill paying and measuring) and 10 hours on marketing. That is the blend I think is most effective to grow sales and is a pace that can be sustained for years. That is not to say you will never pull a 70 hour week in the kitchen from time to time, but it can not be done as a normal course of business and still maintain excellent systems and a forward looking strategy.
I can assure you that we have a more forward thinking approach than the vast majority of people who open a DELCO. I agree with everything you are saying, in time.
The issue I have, and I don’t see how you can overlook this, is how could I possibly train someone else to run my store when at the same time I’ll just be learning the best practices for running my store? Until I become an expert at every aspect of operations and can communicate those details to someone else, how could it possibly be reasonable to leave your business to someone else?
Maybe I’m off on the timeline, and hopefully so. Trust me, I’m not taking a 25% pay cut to work 3x the hours.
As far as a 7x15 schedule, while not optimal, I’m certain that I can, and have in the past, handle the workload. It really isn’t all the different than a day deployed at sea.
I have another business and understand the importance of trusting it to employees. That said, for the first two years we handled sales directly before handing it off to someone else, and that was partly because we were in a franchise type system that already had developed manuals and procedures for success.
I don’t plan on being there for the sake of being there, I’m not spending every minute there to save on labor. My over involvement in the beginning is part of our forward thinking strategy. Developing work procedures that will allow us to open the second store as soon as financially practical and not having to wait on making sure the first store can run without me.
