Why Management Systems Are Crucial for Restaurant Success With Darren Denington & Alison Anne (Ep 200)

Why Management Systems Are Crucial For Restaurant Success With Darren Denington & Alison Anne

Welcome back to the show. I have a great episode for you as I'm back with Darren Denington and Alison Anne from the Restaurant Management 201 program. I've had Darren on the show several times over the years, and now maybe a third appearance for Alison. Welcome back. Good to see you both. Today is about management systems. Before we get into that content, one of you, give us a little tidbit. You're going to be at the Florida restaurant show that's coming up in the very near future. What we're going to be talking about is a segment of that presentation. Is that a fair way to say it? What do you have?

Overview Of The Florida Restaurant Show Presentation

We have a 3.5-hour workshop. We're presenting it twice. We're going to be presenting it on both days of the show. It is the Restaurant Management 201 workshop, where we take the entire course and bring it down to all of the most salient points. We’ll present them in the morning. This is one little section of what you can expect if you come to the show and take the workshop.

I'll be at the Orlando show as well. You guys hit me on November 8th and 9th. Let's dig right in. I'll let you guys talk a little bit and I’ll maybe interject with some questions along the way. Take us away.

We're talking about management systems today. One of the best places to start when we are talking about a concept like this is what exactly is a system. What do we mean when we say management systems? A system is a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network. I always think of the canonical cogs coming together. When one wheel turns, another one turns. You have the opportunity in your restaurant to have these systems where one action begets the next action, makes the next action happen, and everything happens automatically.

When one wheel turns, another one follows. So you have the opportunity in your restaurant.

This is also a set of principles or procedures according to which something is done, an organized framework or method. What are the steps that you specifically have set up in your restaurant for things to happen? The way I encourage people to think about systems and why systems are so important is that, when implemented well, systems become habits for you and your people. Think about tying your shoes. When you were a kid, you used to have to think hard and put 90 seconds of looping together to get your shoe tied.

Now, it's something that you can do in five seconds while you're having a conversation with another person. You don't have to use a bunch of time and mental energy to make something happen. It happens quickly. It happens automatically. The more of these systems that the management team has set up in a restaurant and can communicate and teach to an employee team, the more the day-in and day-out details of running the restaurant happen automatically in the background, which allows all of that mental energy to go to taking care of guests.

I liked that picture of the kid tying shoes and stuff becomes a habit. In restaurants, systems become habits. When those things happen automatically, it's a good part of your restaurant. Darren, lots of different system opportunities and different categories that you guys get into. Talk about a few.

When I first think about the systems that go into a restaurant, I get a little overwhelmed and a little confused because there are so many different parts that go into everything that a restaurant needs to do. For me, the light bulb moment was when I understood all the systems that were needed and how they work together. I like to break things into little categories. If you think about the systems that you need inside your restaurant, you're not going to know where to start.

Importance Of Leadership And Structure Systems

There are so many different ones that can always be updated, implemented, changed, and tweaked, but take it step by step. The first group of systems that you need is for leadership and structure. This is your organization charts and your job descriptions. This helps pull your managers together so that everybody understands their position. Everybody understands their role, and their responsibility, and the leadership team knows what everybody is held accountable for. The first order of business is to make sure that the leadership systems are in place.

There are not a lot of them that you need, but an organization chart, job description, action list, and responsibilities list are a few key pieces. The personal systems. That's where the individual now comes into it. Every individual on the team needs to bring forth their best effort and some personal systems, whether that's time management or how you organize your day and how you track your inbox. Where all your information comes in, whether that's your text messages, your emails, or your notes. You have to be organized yourself if you're going to be able to contribute to a good strong team.

Communication is what keeps everything flowing. Systems for communications are when you hold your manager meetings, type up the agenda, and how you're holding the accountability piece to everybody that's in the meetings. How you pass on all the details to your staff, whether that's a texting program or a private Facebook group. You have to communicate consistently and in a fashion that everything you need to get communicated does. Operations and staffing, there are a lot of different parts that go into that. Operations, you look at as a whole.

These are your checklists, your recipe books, and your prep sheets. There are a lot of different systems that go into it but when a group of people understands what those systems are, you have a lot better chance of implementing a good regular system that you can maintain. The staffing. That's your human resource part of this. When you go through your systems that are required to maintain a good staff, that's how you recruit. That's your policy for hiring, your applications, or your orientation checklists.

Staffing systems are pretty simple to implement and a nice little package to wrap up that whole piece on how you manage all your staff behind the scenes. That goes all the way through to discipline and how you're retaining them. Training is one that I like to separate because it is a big one. A good thorough training program requires several individual systems to be set up so that you have a good training package.

Financials And Marketing Systems

Financials and marketing, there are a lot behind the scenes on both of these. A lot of times this is where a leadership team or an ownership team tries to divide the responsibilities and tries to figure out who is taking what aspects of the responsibilities that need to be done. The systems that come into play on the financials are your costing cards, your POS system, your P and L, and your taxes. There's quite a bit to the financial systems. The same with marketing. I guess the systems that I look at for marketing are to keep you organized, to keep you on track, and to know what is needed next.

Marketing charts, marketing responsibilities lists, and marketing committees, we look at this as a separate group and we say, “What systems does our marketing department need? What systems does our training department need?” We break it into categories. I find it's a lot easier to manage all of them if you understand. You can take them in little pieces.

First of all, there are so many details in running a restaurant. You covered all of that down. What I was remiss in doing is not introducing you guys fully. Darren, you have an enormous background in running your own places and coaching and consulting restaurants all over the country. You dial this stuff into a formula that works and that is what's great about this program. This is not guesswork. You guys have implemented this stuff all over the place and you figured out the formula. Darren is incredibly organized. This stuff is very effective to bring into place. I wanted to make that little side note there. I know you want to talk about the team aspect. Go ahead.

Thanks, Jaime. The only way to get organized is to first have the right team in place. There's a lot that goes into building a strong leadership team. Once you have that team and once you're meeting regularly, and let's say we're talking about restaurant 201 here, not restaurant 101. What we're assuming is that you've got the basics and you're looking for those extra pieces. Start with your leadership team. Get them on the same page. If your leaders trust each other, if they feel like they're wanted at the meetings, and that their voice is being heard, then they contribute.

When they are present and they participate, that's when you have somebody who cares and is willing to work through the hard pieces to get the systems implemented. That participation has got to be nurtured. You have to pull new managers into it and get them excited about it. There are so many different things that the restaurant can work on, but a management team identifies what those priorities are. Throughout the management meeting, which is one of the centerpieces of any successful restaurant, I think it's that 1 or 2 hours a week where you hold a manager meeting.

During these meetings, it's much more than just talking about what went on last week. You're building a team. You're trying to involve everybody. You're trying to identify your projects and your priorities so that there's a little bit of a roadmap. If you have 7 or 8 managers, let's get them on the same page and work on things productively together. If you're going to tackle implementing a new training system, then 5 or 6 people working on all the aspects is probably a lot easier than one.

When it comes to building your team, you're going to have some conflict, but make it constructive. You don't bring attitude and issues onto the management discussions, but you bring some pushback, “We tried that in the past. I'm not sure if that's the best system for us.” I find that those open honest conversations are what drive the management team. To get to those open honest conversations, you have to have trust. To build the trust with the management team is a process.

Committing to doing it right as a management team, you have 6, 7, or 8 people involved and embedded in trying to make this restaurant successful. That's what leads the group. We certainly understand how difficult it is to get a good staff. If your management team is together and genuinely trying to help each other and work on everything as one unit, then leading the staff is so much easier. There have to be some good open discussions between the management team. There is going to be a little bit of conflict, but it's all based on trust and respect.

You have to help the people on the other side of the table. You're trying to build the restaurant together and helping each other is a lot easier than not. For any good leadership team, there has to be accountability, which comes from the organization. An action list is still my favorite simple little tool that tracks all the extra things that we do in the restaurant, who is taking care of them, and when they are going to be completed. It's a working document that every single week is updated.

You got a book suggestion for us down there. Tell me about that. It's not in my library here.

It’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. That's the foundation of it. It's the trust and being able to have your voice heard. When you feel like you've contributed and that the people around you respect you and you feel like you should be on this leadership team, that's when you start to flourish. That's when you genuinely start to care more. That's what I feel finds that work-life balance. That good strong management team can handle the restaurant and run it well so that your life outside is fun, enjoyable, and relaxing.

I did two episodes probably similar to each other, but they were both phenomenal restaurant operators. One of the things they both highlighted was extremely low turnover, which was created from the culture that the operators built. That helps a restaurant get going when you're not turning people over and when they're staying with you. They talked about long-tenured people, building that trust, and giving responsibilities. It's such a powerful piece.

I'm sure you guys dig into that aspect of it, but it was great to hear that. I remember one of the operators. She was fantastic. She talked about this example of people coming to you as a stone. She uses the stone as an example. You can apply pressure to a stone and if you apply it the right way, it can turn into a diamond. Everybody can become that special person. I thought that was neat. Look for those episodes coming out. Alison, let's come back to you to talk about managers. There's so much they need to do. Go through the responsibilities that you think.

I freaking love what you put in because so often I talk to people who think, “If I get the latest technology, if I get the latest system put in place, or if we can get these details in order, then we'll be okay.” I typically stop and go back to culture every single time because you can have the most amazing systems in the world, but if you don't have the kind of culture and relationship with your people to implement them to have people who are sticking around for long enough to not have to be constantly retraining people on these systems, then they're not going to be that successful.

You can have the most amazing systems, but without the right culture and relationships, they won't be successful.

As managers, our first responsibility is to take full ownership of all of the results of everything that we're putting together. It's so easy to say, “If only Tommy would show up on time for his shift,” and by putting that blame on other people or looking for ways that it's not our fault and we're doing okay, we're doing ourselves and the business a disservice. We can't do anything about things that we don't have control over. We look at what are the ways that I am responsible for all of these results that are happening.

Now that I'm responsible for it, that means that I can make changes over here with me. The only person that I can control to change some of these outcomes. That's more of the mental shift that we talk to managers about making. Darren was talking about group commitment to success, believing these systems are going to work, and being in agreement with each other. Not only do we want and need to put systems in place but we believe that putting these systems in place is going to be the answer for us. We're willing to move towards them.

This is our priority. We're going to start with training. We think that's our top priority or we think our top priority is operations so that everyone is pulling in the same direction. You don't have a bunch of people who are secretly putting their own priorities before the group's priorities. Knowing those systems are going to work and are going to make a difference, and then committing to consistently using them. Even as a manager, I know it can be so easy sometimes to think, “It would be so easy right now to go in the outdoors. I don't want to walk around to the indoor.”

There's that modeling that we do for our entire team by committing to consistently showing up and using the systems that we've agreed to put in place so that not only they become stronger, but also our teams see, “This is important.” That comes from that agreement as a whole team that this is how things are going to go in this restaurant. Maybe people disagree and maybe people have other ideas. We've come to a consensus that for this business, these are the systems that are going to be most successful for us.

Consistency is key. Managers must model commitment to using agreed systems for the team to follow.

Pay attention. What does that success look like? Are you getting the results that you thought you would that you need to be continually building toward the business's future? If you're not, then update. It's not like we created this system and now it's set in stone. This system has resulted in a higher turnover rate than we thought it was going to. Let's go back and look at where we need to update them. You can't update a system unless you have easy access to look at what are the steps of this system. What did we create to make up this system?

This cannot be the kind of thing that you talk about once at a manager's meeting and everybody has in their heads and then move forward like, “I'm sure that'll be fine.” These things need to be written down, organized, and stored. Does everyone know where to go to access these are the steps of this system that we have put in place. There are a lot of conversations that you can have that when you have agreements around them, they have a positive impact on all of those system categories that Darren was talking about.

I'm going to share something a little off-topic but relevant. Take responsibility as a leader. We'll go to football for a second since we're talking about the timeline. It's football season. My team, the Miami Hurricanes, did the most disastrous thing you could imagine this past Saturday. You probably didn't see the game, but I'll give you the highlight. It was a sloppy game but in the end, they had a chance to kneel down the ball and finish the game. Kneel down, the clock would have run out, and win. Every coach does that. Every person knows how to do it. They don't do it.

They run a regular play. The dude fumbles the ball. The other team picks it up and eventually scores with one second left. A game that could have been won big deal, you end up losing. Everyone is upset, but what does the coach do? What does the coach have to do? The coach takes full responsibility as the head coach for the program. You need to do that as a leader. He could have said, “Jimmy didn't do his thing. The quarterback could have done it himself. Running back could have done this.”

My point is he did the right thing and you have to do that as a leader. Everybody looks at that. It's still a very painful experience. They should have won that game and now I think it takes them out of the playoff and all that other stuff. Alison or Darren, talk about implementing systems or the actual implementation.

Implementation And Follow-Up Systems

The question comes up, “But how? We've talked about all of these systems and all of these things to put in place, then what?” That becomes the question. A very high level for every single one of your systems. These are the things that we say that you have to have in place for implementation to happen successfully. There should be one point person. Your people need to know, “If I'm talking about operations or training, who is the one person that I go to with questions? Who is the one person who holds this and makes sure that it's moving forward successfully?”

We talked about it. There's an organization that's necessary, diligence and accountability. We've all been or we all are in restaurants. We know how easy it is to jot down a to-do list on a piece of paper, then three weeks later, you find that to-do list and say, “That's right. I did mean to do all of that.” Darren was talking about manager's meetings. It's so important for the entire management team staff to know what actions we're taking next, by when are we taking them, and who is going to follow up on these things to make sure that they did actually happen.

Accountability and diligence are key for keeping systems on track.

Go and follow up with each other, Follow up with staff, and have agreements in place about how that follow-up is going to happen so that everybody understands and knows, “Tommy is going to come and talk to me about that on Friday because that's what we agreed on.” You're building team and trust and culture rather than having people pick at each other and go after each other and feel like they're being micromanaged.

Have it all be in one big agreement that you're following up with the management team and with your staff members, and then continuously bring things back to the manager's meetings. What is our priority? How did the actions go that we were taking on this past week? What are we taking forward? What were our results? Where do we maybe need to make changes? Implementing the systems becomes as simple as knowing what you're doing and then having the support structures in place to follow through and do it.

Implementing systems is as simple as knowing what you're doing.

This is a small slice of what you're going to be talking about at the Florida Restaurant Show. If you were to kind of sum it up, Darren, and what you talked about today as it relates to the 3.5-hour presentation that you give live at the restaurant show. How do you bring it together?

The end goal is to get a group of people who are all on the same page and want to be there and are working hard to continually improve the restaurant. That's where it becomes an enjoyable work environment where it thrives for everybody involved. If that's the end goal, how do you get there? Systems, to me, that's step two. Step one is the leadership piece. When you have a group of people in your leadership team who are on the same page and working towards a common goal, they feel appreciated and they feel like they're in the right position for them.

When they then work on the right systems, let's take that as a project. Over the next two months, let's dive into all of our systems. Let's start with category one and go all the way through eight and review all of them. When a group of people works on the system, now you have clipboards in your kitchen. Your kitchen manager can walk up at any time. There's an inventory clipboard. There's this ordering guide.

There's a responsibilities list. There's this dishwasher opening and closing checklist. It's nice and neat and organized, then that is brought to the staff. I've always found that the staff appreciates the organization and that they like the systems as long as everybody is held accountable. If you want to get to the end goal of having a great staff that's working together as one, you have to have the right leadership and you have to have the right systems.

Give me the logistics of it. What do they do? Go to Restaurant Management 201. Can they sign up for the workshop there or they register for the conference first? What happens?

Logistics And Registration For The Workshop

They can go to Restaurant Management 201 and tons of details about everything that we're going to cover during the workshop. Click to register, which then takes you to the Florida Restaurant Lodging Show registration site. You'll sign up for your passes for the show. Register for the workshop and that's all combined as one price. You don't pay for your tickets when you register for the workshop. Wednesday and Thursday, it's the same workshop held twice. You choose which day you like. Bring your team. Bring some key employees, general managers, owners, managers, everybody. It's built for doing this together.

If folks cannot attend live, what else can they get from you guys? Is there any other training you're doing down the road? I know you do a few other live shows as well. Where else could they get involved?

That's a stay tuned for now. There are so many different ways that we can bring this material to teams. We're talking about what's the most impactful way that most people can get a lot out of it. We will look forward to letting you know what the next steps are.

Stay in touch with those, folks. If you're going to the Florida Restaurant Show, check this out. I'm looking forward to seeing you both there. Darren Denington and Alison Anne from the Restaurant Management 201 program. You can find them there on RestaurantManagement201.com where you can sign up for the November session. Enjoy the Florida Restaurant Show. See what else is going on, and look to find me there as well and say hi.

In the meantime, more great restaurant marketing operations, service, people, and tech tips are at RunningRestaurants.com. Please do me a favor. Hit that like button, subscribe to us, and give us a review wherever you happen to be watching this or listening to it. That's a big help. We appreciate it. We'll see you next time. Thank you again to both of you. I appreciate it.

Thank you, Jamie.

Important Links

• Darren Denington - LinkedIn
• Alison Anne - LinkedIn
• Restaurant Management 201
• Florida Restaurant Lodging Show
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team