Lexington, KY - Many traditional marketing textbooks focus on the “four Ps,” which include product, price, placement and promotion. But in the restaurant business, perhaps more than any other industry, there is a “fifth p” that refers to people.
Restaurants are people-driven businesses: people, serving to people the food that people not only need, but love.
Think about it: If a restaurant has 100,000 customer visits in a year, at least several employees closely influence the quality of each of those visits. There is the direct interaction of the server (see “What Makes a Good Server” on page 25) followed by what comes from the kitchen and the cook or chef. Others impact the dining experience in areas like cleaning, maintenance, food prep, bussing tables, valet parking, taking out garbage, executing social media strategy and the staffing and management of shifts. If there are 10 people directly or indirectly influencing the dining experience of those 100,000 diners, then theoretically there are at least one million opportunities for interaction and influence.
While effective human resource management involves many aspects, including planning, interviewing, selection, training, retention, labor scheduling methodologies (including software), base compensation and incentives, the component that holds all of this together is the enterprise culture.
“It is big when you believe that culture is what your employees do and say when you are not watching,” said Rob Perez, who along with his wife, Diane, owns Saul Good Pub, which now has two locations in Lexington with further growth expected.
Perez noted that effective enterprise culture sets expectations, helps define what type of person is a fit for the organization, facilitates teamwork and helps employees make decisions when faced with a new situation or gray area.
“Make your goals the same as the staff — a positive guest experience,” he said. “We find the more time we as managers spend on food quality, service timing and guest interaction, the better our service culture becomes. Whatever the managers choose as a focus, that focus automatically becomes important to the employees.”
Perez’ goal is to create a working atmosphere that is focused on the guest experience. One way he does this is by aligning his business plan, the goals of the staff and the customer experience. This service culture is reinforced by setting high but attainable expectations for employees.
There is a short list of priorities and everyone is expected to be passionate about them. The emphasis is on keeping operations simple and clear.
The Saul Good Pub menu is focused, which in turn makes it easier for the employees to execute.
All employees must know the menu, and testing is an important part of training. Employees are trained to “give the guests what they want before the guest knows they need it.”
All actions in the restaurant have service-time goals, since service steps without goals are ineffective. The store managers are leaders and are expected to lead. They ask guests about food and service at the table, and the staff is aware this is happening, encouraging close attention to concept execution.
Saul Good’s service culture is characterized by a sense that everyone is part of a fun and effective team, holding each other accountable, being willing to ask for or offer assistance and having the right knowledge (product, service steps and cross-training.) Perez noted that once you have developed an effective culture, you then have a good handle on who will fit your organization, which makes interviewing, hiring, training and retention more effective.
Other area restaurateurs have their own unique approaches to the “fifth p.” As restaurant organizations become larger, the enterprise culture becomes more critical to success, because as each new location opens, owner/operators have one more store to focus on, and hence, less time on a per-store basis.
The Bluegrass Hospitality Group (www.bluegrasshospitality.com) has six concepts in multiple cities, and training to maintain their standard is critical. Lexington-based Thomas and King (www.tandk.com) has 88 Applebee’s and seven Johnny Carino’s locations. Their organization culture is titled WOW!, encouraging a “guest first” mentality and exceeding expectations. Extremely large organizations such as Kentucky-based YUM! Brands (www.yum.com) accomplish this over 37,000 stores in 177 countries through a culture of recognition that is part of their “How We Win Together” principles, built around a “people capability first” philosophy.
To call the restaurant business “enormously challenging” is an understatement. There is the inventory, keeping the books, insurance, marketing — the to-do list seems endless.
But the pros who have succeeded will tell you that it’s as much a people business as it is a food business — and people come first.