Topics
Employee Management
Mike’s Monthly Tip: Advocate or Adversary
Are you an adversary or advocate for your employees? Hopefully, your knee-jerk response is an advocate. But advocacy for your staff means in all aspects of their job, you are rooting for them. That means all of them. When someone does something wrong...
Topics
Employee Management
Mike’s Monthly Tip: Reap, Sow, Repeat
Currently, the restaurant industry is in the most significant hiring crisis in modern history. Monetary and governmental issues aside, the way to rise above these pitfalls is through high morale and keying into staff’s direct motivators. What makes...
Topics
Employee Management
Building Blocks: When’s the Right Time to Increase Employee Pay?
If you opened a new restaurant during the pandemic, hopefully you’re one of the many pizzerias across the country experiencing a sales surge due to your business’ existing options for takeout and delivery. But as states open restaurants to full c...
Topics
Employee Management
Finding, Hiring and Training Managers
Inspiring Greatness As the manager of five pizza restaurants, I receive two questions more than most others: How do we find people? And do I ever sleep? The latter question, of course, refers to my busy schedule — but if I can answer the first ques...
Topics
Employee Management
Building Blocks: How to Retain Your Winning Team
Previously, we discussed how to build a staff of servers, cooks and drivers with a winning mindset. The unspoken question is this: how do you retain them? You’re not alone if you can’t find anyone to hire right now, making it so important to keep...
Topics
Employee Management
Creating a more diverse and inclusive workplace
Represented One of the nation’s largest private-sector employers, restaurants have long celebrated their role in promoting opportunity and diversity among the ranks. And in so many ways, it rings true. Kitchens, counters and dining rooms at restaur...
Topics
Employee Management
Building Blocks: Instilling a Winning Attitude within Your Employees
How to make winning contagious When opening new locations, I would argue there is a magic formula, and I’ve tried to lay that out month-by-month. But there’s a missing ingredient to make it all work that’s completely up to you: a winning attitu...
Topics
Employee Management
Building Blocks: Cross-Training and Scheduling
In our last installment, we talked about how important labor cost is to your restaurant’s bottom line and being aggressive when it comes to setting targets for spending in this area. There are two important factors with regards to how you can eithe...
Topics
Employee Management
Mike’s Monthly Tip: The Employee Hangout
Set standards and enforce them You’re in your business all the time, surrounded by the same four walls day in and day out. Even if you own multiple locations, you’re seeing the same people over and over again, and that’s not a bad t...
Topics
Employee Management
Building Blocks: 3 Steps for Restaurant Trainees
You’re open, your marketing and branding is working, and your processes and equipment are improved. Things are looking great, but there might be another major bottleneck bogging down operations — and it’s a big one: training. Training is one of...
Topics
Employee Management
Current Job Market and Hiring Process
The pandemic changed the way operators attract and hire employees Finding talent has always been a challenge, and the COVID-19 crisis made the task even tougher. Pizzeria owners say the process of attracting, hiring and onboarding workers has changed...
Topics
Employee Management
Mike’s Monthly Tip: The Few and the Proud Employees
Acquiring talent has never been more challenging than it is today. Developing solid, dependable employees is currently extremely hard. It’s not too dissimilar to how hard it was to recruit enlisted service members after the Vietnam War. After remov...