FlippedOut
New member
Long timer reader/lurker, first time poster.
I have taken over a higher end pizza shop in the DC suburbs. The store was sitting around 5k a week, I have pushed the store to almost 8k a week. It has been quite rough, but I feel like I am almost there. The biggest problem I have is one I just cannot seem to fix: my staff. As I am sure many of you know, its a moving target that I just can not nail down. Here is the situation:
I took this store over in March of this year when I was promoted from a shift leader to junior general manager. When I got here, the store was being run by three shift leaders who fought each other non stop. With the store doing so poorly, they were afraid to hire another GM. Finally, they sent me in here to clean it up. When I got here, one of the three shift leads lost his mind and talked his way out the door. The other two are where I am having the trouble.
These two shift leads are solid cooks but not exactly business growing type material. The problem is, no matter what I say or what kind of rules I implement, I feel like I am getting just enough out of them for me to not want to fire them, but they are not up to my standard. These two have been here since the shop opened and have been through a couple of awful managers who trained them to have lower expectations. They also worked during the very slow growing period, when the store would do like 500-750 bucks a day at best. Now we are hitting more 1100-ish type days and they are doing just good enough to stay, but not anything like the crew from another store (same company) who has a higher volume.
Here is the other twist, after getting the inital house cleaning done when I arrived, I brought my wife in to help me get things tighter. We have a long term goal of doing something like this together, so we are using this chance to practice on someone else’s dime. So far so good. We are best friends and work very well together. She is an amazing pie cook and sets the bar much higher. One of these two shift leads is a younger woman who is in her party mode phase and always talks about going clubbing, being hungover, ect. She also has a way of acting like a baby around the other shift lead (who is my asstiant). This is driving my wife insnae, as she works real hard.
So, the question I have is who to get rid of these employees and train some new ones with a shoestring budget. Whenever I have a new person around, the rest of the staff all treat them poorly, as they all think that their hours are going to be cut. I was supposed to get a new store at first, and I was going to be able to hire and train a crew from scratch. This chance came up and I took it. How can I rebuild with the smallest amount of headaches?
Thanks for reading.
I have taken over a higher end pizza shop in the DC suburbs. The store was sitting around 5k a week, I have pushed the store to almost 8k a week. It has been quite rough, but I feel like I am almost there. The biggest problem I have is one I just cannot seem to fix: my staff. As I am sure many of you know, its a moving target that I just can not nail down. Here is the situation:
I took this store over in March of this year when I was promoted from a shift leader to junior general manager. When I got here, the store was being run by three shift leaders who fought each other non stop. With the store doing so poorly, they were afraid to hire another GM. Finally, they sent me in here to clean it up. When I got here, one of the three shift leads lost his mind and talked his way out the door. The other two are where I am having the trouble.
These two shift leads are solid cooks but not exactly business growing type material. The problem is, no matter what I say or what kind of rules I implement, I feel like I am getting just enough out of them for me to not want to fire them, but they are not up to my standard. These two have been here since the shop opened and have been through a couple of awful managers who trained them to have lower expectations. They also worked during the very slow growing period, when the store would do like 500-750 bucks a day at best. Now we are hitting more 1100-ish type days and they are doing just good enough to stay, but not anything like the crew from another store (same company) who has a higher volume.
Here is the other twist, after getting the inital house cleaning done when I arrived, I brought my wife in to help me get things tighter. We have a long term goal of doing something like this together, so we are using this chance to practice on someone else’s dime. So far so good. We are best friends and work very well together. She is an amazing pie cook and sets the bar much higher. One of these two shift leads is a younger woman who is in her party mode phase and always talks about going clubbing, being hungover, ect. She also has a way of acting like a baby around the other shift lead (who is my asstiant). This is driving my wife insnae, as she works real hard.
So, the question I have is who to get rid of these employees and train some new ones with a shoestring budget. Whenever I have a new person around, the rest of the staff all treat them poorly, as they all think that their hours are going to be cut. I was supposed to get a new store at first, and I was going to be able to hire and train a crew from scratch. This chance came up and I took it. How can I rebuild with the smallest amount of headaches?
Thanks for reading.
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Sorry Dave… I couldn’t resist after I read the “me thinks” sentence in another post.