Identity, part two:
Maintain loyalty and information flow

With more restaurants, comes more delegation. Decisions are going to come at a distance from the front lines, and will be put in play when you’re not around. Instead of immediate feedback, you will get reports.

I promised that this time we would talk about structures, or rodents, or something. Ah! That’s right! The Loyal Order of the Rodent’s Posterior, and how to build your own local chapter of those who give a rat’s behind.

We observed that this sort of culture building is a lot easier in a ‘onesie’ (the sneering chain operator’s name for a single-unit independent). You just need to be there all the time, know everyone, work harder than anyone, and maintain sincere good cheer while unplugging the toilet or rewiring the makeup air heater on the roof in a Minnesota January. Nothing to it.

As the number of units multiplies, however, so do the difficulties inherent in maintaining a cohesive workforce. I can think of a couple of friends whose first restaurants were so successful that they expanded rapidly—and found out that it is no longer possible to be the same kind of owner. With a couple of places, you can still be pretty hands-on, though you may need to give up a hobby or two (we’ll presume you’ve already dispensed with such incidentals as “family” and “sleep”). When you get to three full-service restaurants, you need to sit down and have a conversation with yourself.

Here is where we face the grim reality that many units require many managers: you can’t do it all by yourself any longer. Your most important decisions are now going to come at a distance from the front lines, and will be put in play when you’re not around to see how they work out. Instead, you will get reports.

No business can operate without good information. In a single unit, the owner does the data collection largely by seeing it unfold in real time. If you are close enough to the action, you can still make things run with a cash register and a few solid people. Take a day off, they’ll tell you how it went and their eyes will likely be almost as good as yours.

As your economic reach increases, you can no longer act like the old-fashioned restaurant owner who sniffs the air in the dining room to see what kind of a night it’s going to be. You won’t shake every hand that comes in the door; you won’t put Mort the Bachelor’s order in before he sits down; you won’t make on-the-spot changes to the way the red potatoes are cooked because you’ve had a brilliant idea. (Speaking for the cooks, we’re grateful for this last one.) Instead—did I mention this?—you will get reports.

Once you’ve expanded a little, the value of anecdotal information decreases dramatically. You’ve got to know a person pretty well before you can rely on someone else’s instincts: do it too frequently and you’ll find that your bar manager is driving a Mazerati and your cash flow is flushed. So you wade into the forest of control systems: you buy a POS with inventory and scheduling software, you hire a geek like me to turn your recipes into a digital production manual, you set up a training program with a clear stepwise progression and clear evaluation criteria, and from all of these, you get reports.

So now you have streams of data flowing at you, and you can use those instincts you honed on the floor in an entirely new way: peering at numbers to make the world they describe reappear in your mind. (This is the part you have to decide if you like; it’ll occupy a lot of your time. If you need to be in the center of the storm rather than watching it on Doppler radar, stick with the onesie.)

For those who need it, there are also Big Brother cameras to watch the register and liquor dispensers to prevent overpours, but these innovations are not noted for their community-building characteristics. If you want that crackerjack staff you had in your first unit, where the whole crew felt they were the best in town and worked hard to prove it, a different set of controls is required.

The biggest thing you leave behind when you move to multi-unit management is personal feedback from the trenches. A single house affords the boss the chance to know everyone personally, and to make each one feel individually valued and respected. In return, the dishwasher may feel free to make suggestions about the location of the glass racks, and the prep cook may care enough to mention it when the fish order comes in feeling a bit too warm.

To compensate, the impersonality of a large business needs to be tempered with infrastructure. You’re already getting an idea of how many grilled chicken Caesar salads sell on Tuesdays from 12:20 to 1:14; now what you need to know is that the staff is bored to tears by the damn thing, hates to make it and hates to sell it. You need to create a way for that old gossip to flow back up to you—it can’t be relied on alone, but life sure ain’t the same without it.