Are you struggling to keep your team productive? Having trouble determining what’s working and what changes need to be implemented? Wish you knew how to implement more effective processes? If you're joining us for the 2024 Bar & Restaurant Expo Texas in San Antonio, then you're in luck!
Mike Bausch, owner of Andolini's Worldwide & The Unsliced Restaurant System, will be presenting, "Mastering the Chaos: A Holistic Blueprint for Boosting Productivity and Profits," as part of the conference on October 30 at 10:15 am. The session will teach attendees how to improve productivity, run effective meetings, and evaluate performance for continuous improvement.
We caught up with Mike to find out more about common productivity challenges in restaurants and how operators and their staff can improve efficiency in their establishments.
Bar & Restaurant News: What are the top factors that directly influence productivity in a restaurant environment?
Mike Bausch: The most critical factor is ensuring that effort is directed where it should go. Let’s say a manager could be working hard on minor tasks, like fixing a Red Bull mini-fridge or deciding on the type of trash can for the bathroom, while neglecting more pressing issues like ticket times or staff morale. It's essential to clearly define the primary objectives for each role. Managers and staff need to know what actions they can take to improve key performance indicators (KPIs), such as reducing labor costs, increasing revenue, or maintaining morale.
In a restaurant focused on speed, managing ticket times and monitoring them throughout the shift is crucial. In contrast, at a farm-to-table restaurant, the emphasis should be on product quality. Once the goal is clear, it needs to be made visible so everyone is aligned and moving toward that objective efficiently and effectively.
How can managers prioritize these factors for maximum efficiency?
Managers need to understand the tools at their disposal and make sure everyone else knows how to use them. Our restaurants use a whiteboard that lists all the necessary prep work. This visual tool keeps everyone aware of the day’s flow and ensures that we stay on track, much like how a marathon runner uses a watch to keep pace. We combine the board with a clock to ensure everyone knows what they should be doing at any given time, ensuring consistent progress.
What are the most common productivity bottlenecks in restaurant operations?
The most common issues stem from poor systems—or systems that exist but aren’t understood by staff. Even when a team isn't deliberately wasting time, inefficiencies arise without clear direction or leadership. A lack of clarity about who is responsible for each task or goal creates a huge bottleneck. Capacity constraints also play a role, but having systems in place with clear responsibilities helps overcome them.
How can restaurant owners or managers overcome these bottlenecks?
Owners must create or provide managers with systems that can be effectively implemented. I’ve rarely seen it work in reverse. These systems should have specific goals in mind, such as increasing sales, reducing costs, or improving morale. It's important to approach each tool or system as a hypothesis—something that may fail several times before finding the right solution. The key is persistence: The attempt might fail, but the system is only a failure when you give up on it and try nothing else.
What advice would you give to restaurant owners on sustaining productivity improvements over the long term?
Opening a restaurant is a sprint, but once it's up and running, it becomes a marathon. After the initial surge, keeping momentum requires highly effective weekly meetings and proper communication—not just frequent communication, but focused and actionable dialogue. This means not a Slack channel of memes but something more in-depth about who is doing it by when and did it get done.
Monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) like sales trends, customer reviews, average ticket size, labor costs, and food costs are what should be monitored. When you can diagnose a problem, you can create a solution. And once you’ve addressed each issue, you can scale that success across the operation.
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