Cost Control / Odds n' Ends

The day started with odds n' ends. Japanese cooking dude spoke about his weekend, his first cooking at the new Fatty Crab uptown -- only 2 weeks old and doing over 350 covers on a Friday night -- with only 60 seats. That figure made me nervous since the restaurant that I've been involved with is opening up....tomorrow.

Long Island Guy spoke of the new video screen system his restaurant bought for the chef, so the chef can see what orders are going to what station in real time, and cook his pizzas accordingly, making it easier to coordinate the different cooking stations with the front of house staff.

I spoke a little about the pizza class I took the day before, and how one of the wine pairings actually kind of rocked my word -- Lambrusco and pizza, a fantastic combination.

The rest of the class was dedicated to the Profit & Loss statement, a master spread sheet to record money coming in (few) and the money going out of (many) a restaurant operation. It went from easy-to-understand principles (revenue minus expenses equals profit!) to a bit more complex (the cost of good sold for food and for beverages must be kept separate as they are very different and if calculated together will skew the final figures.)

We kicked off with the 'In the News' segment -- this week, our table was chosen to lead, but unlike the other scaredycats in class, we got one brave soul to get in front and handle it rather than have the whole table trundle up and act like goons. There was a pretty heated debate about a New York Times article about the state's proposal to license grocery stores to sell wine. On one hand, the system we have now was set up eons ago by puritanical joy-killers that only serves to put barriers in the way of people enjoys the grape. On the other hand, it's a money-grabbing move by the state that'll make low-rent mass-produced wine brands common in all corners while making it harder for smaller, more artisan producers to make a living.

On the cover the dining section, two writers made multi-course meals for 6 people each, for a budget of $50. They came at that number as the lowest price two diners can get a meal at a restaurant. Bruni reviewed the meals very tongue in cheek, not giving it too much seriousness -- if the Times were to take home cooking seriously, the restaurant establishment wouldn't be too amused. Maybe it's time for a new section, like how the Arts is split up between pop culture & movies and fine arts & classical. One dining section for eating out, one dining section for eating in?

To continue the critique of the Times, there were two similar stories about food in Wednesday's paper, one about the new stadium for the Yankees, and another about the new stadium for the Mets.

We went around the class and did presentations of marketing ideas for the fictional Juicy Rib. Most of it was just people talking unenthusiastically, a few people did little adverts and banners, and I was the only one who did a PowerPoint....I thought most people would, but I guess that's my egg-head graphic design background talking. Here is a video export of my magnum opus:

There was more talk of motivation after the break, but I dozed off. We received a new text book dedicated to Food Management and Cost Control, which we'll start in on Monday,

Motivation / Marketing

Today's class started with an overview of the concept of price per square foot of space -- in NYC and any urban area, each square food is costly, and each square foot must be made to pay. Depending on concept and menu, the kitchen is typically 1/3 of the space, though to minimize the kitchen could lead to a more profitable restaurant. A place like Per Se is over 50% kitchen, which makes one wonder if they actually make money over there, despite the high prices.

The first half of the class was a continuation of the discussion of Equal Employment Opportunity law, which I will not parrot here. We discussed an interesting case of a group of men who sued Hooters for discrimination -- they wanted to be servers, but lacked the boobage. Hooters won -- They proved that being a woman for the position of Hooters Girl is a BFOQ -- Bona Fide Occupational Quality. Being that they had a history of discrimination and it was written into their concept from the beginning, from a time before these laws, they were in effect grandfathered in. They also showed that men had other opportunities at Hooters: bartenders were predominantly male, as was....management! Which seems like another case for discrimination against women, but what do I know. Gender, race, disability and religion are protected classes -- beauty is not. Yep, Hooters can not hire you based on your bra size or if you're just fugly.

Next we reviewed our marketing plans to improve sales at the Juicy Rib, for which we will give presentations tomorrow. I'm working on a silly and hopefully humorous PowerPoint that I'll try to post up on in here, y'all.

To end the class, we got further into the supervision book, about motivation. There are various theories of motivation, including but not limited to:

• Motivation through Fear: Threaten to influence behavior. Good in small doses, but does not work in the long term, like the boy crying wolf. While some people do need an occasional kick in the pants, long term this generates hostility, resentment and revenge.
• Economic Person Theory: People are economic units that are plugged into the business. Self fulfilling prophecy -- if you treat people like the only reason they are there is for the pay check, they'll act it.
• Human Relations Theory: People who are happy will be motivated to work. Hello, benefits and insurance!
• Maslows Hierarchy of Needs: Just like marketing theory, same goes for motivation. From the base of the pyramid to the tip, it's physiological (pay), safety (benefits, pension), social (friends at work), ego (job title) and self-fulfilment (a challenge).
• Theory Y & Motivation: Work is as natural as rest and play, and should be a motivator unto itself.
• Herzberg's Motivation-Hygiene Theory: This says that for a worker to be motivated, first there must be a standard of 'hygiene', or maintenance, in place -- fair company policy, safe working conditions, fairly compensated staff and helpful supervision. If that is in place, then the following motivators can improve productivity: recognition, responsibility, achievement and work itself.

Marketing / Theories of Leadership

We rolled open with odds n' ends. A random article on the ins and outs of tipping (our foreign students just don't get it -- are you supposed to tip if the service is bad? And what the deal with tip jars at Starbucks?) Slovack Ricky Martin went to Waverly Inn and was just shocked (Shocked! I say) that the food wasn't very good. Of course it wasn't, it's a an old village stalwart taken over by some pretentious literary scenester-types to turn into a snobby clubhouse, food is beside the point. An article appeared recently that a lot of illegal food carts have been popping up around the city due to the economy -- it's quite easy to get a license to sell food, it's just a test of one's knowledge of food safety, and the city issues an unlimited number of them. A permit, however, allows a person to actually sell food on the city streets, and is limited to 3000 only. The cops have been sweeping up carts with people holding licenses but no permits.

The class broke into groups by table and had us come up with three marketing plans for the fictional 'Juicy Rib' restaurant, based on the demographic and customer stats from the case study. Here are the three we came up with:

• Goal 1: Maximize lunch time profits. Objective: Raise soft drink sales in the lunch daypart by 20% within 3 months. Strategy: Deeper penetration of target market with core product. Tactic: Offer combo meal, hitching the soda with the popular BBQ sandwich and a side. Budget: Low, just a few new signs for in house promotion, maybe an ad in where ever. Evaluation: Success determined by sales figures generated in house.
• Goal 2: Increase market share in the underrepresented 20-35 year old segment. Objective: Introduce BBQ by the pound for delivery, particularly to the college market and sell at least 20% of deliveries to that market in 3 months. Strategy: Diversification and product development. Tactic: Late night delivery, advertise on college campuses, co-brand with a beer distributor. Budget: Delivery people, advertising, pay off the beer distributor, cost of keeping the kitchen open late. Evaluation: Keep database of where the new product is delivered. Demographic research will tell us the ages of the areas.
• Goal 3: Appeal more to women. Objective: Increase sales to mall shoppers by 20%. Strategy Market development. Tactic: a BBQ vending cart in the mall. Budget: High. Cart, permit, license, staff. Evaluation: Keep track of who is buying at the cart.

We spoke more of the definition of leadership. Formal authority is given by the title, the right to command. Real authority, however, must be earned from the subordinates. It's a bad situation when the one with formal authority and the real authority are two different people.

Theories of leadership, there are numerous. The old style boss was autocratic: all carrot & stick, reward and punishment, shut up and do your job as your told.

Theory X & Theory Y supposes that the old style assumes everyone hates work and just want the security of a paycheck -- employees must be ridden, while the new style supposes that work is the same as play or rest, and if a worker is motivated by commitment to a greater goal, work is not inherently despised.

Situational Leadership says it's all, well, situational, with a mix of directional behaviors (show ya how to do it) and supportive behaviors (care & support & praise.)

Transactional Leadership appeals to the worker's self-interest, but is a problem because whenever you ask the worker to do something, there must be a transaction to go with it. I understand why this may not work in the budget-conscious restaurant industry, but when I worked in an animation studio of a major network, whenever I was asked to stay late or do an extra project, it was strictly transactional and very satisfying emotionally and financially!

Finally, Transformational Leadership is all about always looking forward, communicating to in spite, challenge and lead by example. Hello, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates!

Supervision / In the News

I spun the In the News segment of class in a decidedly pizza direction, talking up articles like the one about the Italian pizza vending machine that actually makes pizza from scratch, and news that a beloved NYC institution recently burned down, but will simply rebrick its oven and carry on. More pointedly, the restaurant where I've been working as manager got a very brief mention in New York magazine. I told the class how I'd brushed this mention off as too minor for noteworthiness...but the day after it hit the newsstands, we had a steady stream of visitors who saw the mention and wanted to know what was up. Publicity, ain't it a bitch! We're not open yet, hope to be soft opened next week, so we'll see.

NY Times had a creepy article about too many cooks in the kitchens -- unemployment is hitting the restaurant sector hard. Richard noted that when there was a slump in the 80s, a lot of Wall Street types found refuge in transferring their skills to food service. Now those refugees are getting the pinch again.

Our friends over in Arizona's Heart Attack Grill are offering unlimited free food every day for anyone over 350 lbs. Nice. God Bless America! But we're not the only scary ones... In Milton Keynes, England, the squirrels there are going nuts for....squirrel-flavor potato chips.

We moved on to supervision, looking at the case study of Bernie, a line cook who got promoted to supervisor then got steamrolled by all this coworkers, because he was too nice and wanted to be their friends at the expense of being their boss. We applied scientific management style (shape up or ship out, fire the evil ones), human relations (sorry you don't like me, how can we help you to be happy?), participatory (what do you want changed and redesigned to help you do the work?) and humanistic (using any style that makes sense to the situation.)

We spoke a bit about the difference between management and leadership. The former is all about organization, the latter is all about inspiring with a vision for the future to be worked towards. Upper management needs to have the leadership thing, the lower level supervision needs to have the management thing. We read through a case study of a new supervisor laying down the law to an established crew, leading to the conclusion: leadership is manipulation.

Market Segmentation / Supervision

OK, OK, I'm bad -- I kind of dozed off during a lot of today's class. The subject matter was actually pretty interesting, it's just that I've been burning both ends of the candle, at one end is helping manage a soon-to-be-opened restaurant, the other end is a wife in the 3rd term with our first child. So here is what I can recall...it's all a bit of a dream...

We shot out of the gate with analysing a case study of market segmentation for a fictional restaurant named the Juicy Rib. Based on census data and in house polls, we extrapolated what age groups we were doing well in, which were underrepresented, and based on projections who we'd want to focus on to stay profitable in the future. By looking at a year of sales of what menu items sold the most and least at what times, overlaid by the nearby sources of customers, told a lot about what could be done to increase sales, what didn't need pushing, etc.

The second part of the class was dedicated to outlining some major theories of management. Scientific Management is breaking it down into rigid structures, demanding obedience to the machine, and generally juicing the worker out of every cent of productivity. Hello, McDonalds and most fast food! Boring drones, they.

Human Relations Theory says that you make the worker happy, you get them to produce. Hello, Google! Hello, Microsoft!

Participative Management has the worker participate in designing the systems that they will use to complete their tasks, which usually gives the worker more interest and satisfaction (and more productivity) in their job. The manager who solicits advice from their workers AND actually acts on it, hello!

Richard described Humanistic Management as a melange, particularly in a restaurant. In the kitchen, a fascistic Scientific method might be best, but if the servers are going to be the first line on the ground giving feedback on what the customers want and say, a participative method might be more effective. Because you don't want the line cook giving his own funk to the chef's dishes, and you don't want a server acting like a robot!

I haven't done the readings, haven't had time, but hopefully this weekend I'll have time and expound here on the juicier details.

Marketing / Supervision

We started the day with a rambling odds n' ends. Slovak Ricky Martin went to Perry Street, loved it, and didn't really say anything too enlightening other than impressing on us that he must have real hi-falutin' taste. Based on the pizza restaurant menu layout the class developed, Guy brought our suggestions to his graphic designer, to which the designer got offended and acted really defensive. In Guy's own words, the guy is a serious guinea (ginny?) and is old school. As a designer myself, I suspect the guy's skill set is out of date and his defensiveness means he should have been fired a long time ago. I told the class about the poster I saw in the window of a Burger King (above) for apple fries -- fresh apples cut and packaged to look like french fries, with caramel served in a packet like ketchup. Basically, the least healthy way of serving apples possible. On one hand, cool, they're selling fresh fruit to kids. On the other hand: they're training them to associate french fries with health. It's like trying to make healthy food look like porn food to make it appealing, when really what makes it healthy should be enough. Like sex -- does sex need to be porno sex to be appealing? Come on!

Next we reviewed a marketing case study of a fictional restaurant called the 'Juicy Rib' (ewww!) The place is trying to figure out the best way to roll out new products, but need to know demographics to determine what it should be: cheap? expensive? lunch? dinner? eat in? take out? beefy? veggie? butchie? girlie? By using data sets from the census and in-store polls of current customers, the details of income, age and living area kind of filtered into a logic that answers the questions. Wednesday we'll pick this apart farther.

Richard gave out an outline for a basic restaurant business plan, and reviewed it. It wasn't that big, and we have a whole 4 months to complete it...fictionally if desired....and still some students were twittering like it's so much work. Jeez, people, you don't have to work very hard to write your plan, but don't expect any investor to give over funds to pay for your half-assedness.

We closed out class with a short case study out of our supervision text. A shmoe at a restaurant is a hard line worker for a few years, gets promoted to manager, is determined to be a nice guy, unlike the hard-ass nit-picker who was the previous manager, and promptly becomes hated and steamrolled by his fellow employees who once were his friends. Why? Well, management should have promoted him to a a place where he wasn't working with his ex-equals, they should have given the employees a heads up, Shmoe should have thought more of being effective and less about being nice and, in my opinion, if moving him to another department wasn't an option, they should have given him a salary raise without a promotion. And Shmoe should have quit and gotten a management job somewhere else. Like, say, me!