If you find yourself running into the same problem each week in your business, that is the clearest sign you’re ever going to get that it’s time to come up with a new system for whatever those problems happen to be.
If you fix one problem a week (even a small one) that recurs, by the end of the year you will hardly recognize your own business. If you just keep fixing the problem now but not in a way that keeps it from happening again, then your future looks like burnout and depression. Your choice, but note- it IS a choice!
Here are two great stories from my days as a catering business owner that show you what I’m talking about. I’ve told them before at different times, but hopefully here, retold and back to back, the impact of how easy it is to make changes to improve your business will really sink in.
When I first bought this business, one of the key weekly tasks was to go through everything we had in inventory early Monday morning and put in an order for everything we’d need for the week’s upcoming events. The way they did it before I was the owner was that they would just print all the week’s menus on sheets of paper and then put all the papers on a clipboard.
The owner would walk around through the kitchen (with three walk-in refrigerators and two walk-in freezers in different parts of a large building!) adding up the items needed for each party and then comparing with what was in stock and doing the math on what to order. They would handwrite a list of items to order and then call it in.
The order would come on Tuesday, and often on Wednesday we would discover items that were missed (or sometimes, doubled), and we had to then make a run to a grocery store or supplier to make up the difference. Every. Single. Week. This was how they had done it for twenty-five years!
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By the second month, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I made an Excel program to first outline the food order for each party that week that would then create a combined output list. It would also tally what we had ordered the previous week and what we would have expected to use.
And it included every single item we ever ordered on the same list every week, so if someone noticed something we were running low on but it wasn’t noted, they would be able to still include it.
I did it for two weeks myself, and on the third week I then trained our head cook on doing it with me. He took it over the fourth week, and I never looked back. Our trips to the grocery store all but disappeared, and our food costs improved by 10%.
I took a task I had to do and dreaded and turned it into a more efficient process that I no longer had to do at all. My Mondays got better, and I could work more on growing the business, and as we grew, we did so more profitably.
As it turned out, my Monday headache going away became the head cook’s bad Monday for a different reason. A few weeks after I handed the job off to him, he asked if he could rearrange all our cold storage. I gave him the go-ahead (because why would I need a say in how he did his job? If he had a better way to do it, I’d be an egotistical idiot to get in the way), and he reorganized everything so like items were all kept in the same place and everything was neatly labeled.
He fixed his Monday problem, which he didn’t realize was slowing him down until he had to do the inventory himself. Small improvements cascade through the business, and everyone benefits. And then you don’t hate your days and don’t mind the idea of the business getting bigger. Win, win!
Here’s another example of a simple fix born from a repeated frustration and problematic process. One of the big failure points was when the employees would come in to load the trucks for events.
The first job in getting ready for an event was to load the gear needed on the truck for that event. All this stuff was kept in a large room with wall-to-wall shelves, and each item was in a stack or basket or plastic divider or bucket.
This task could take half an hour for an experienced employee or double that for a new person (and we had new people working nearly every week) while they figured out where to find all the stuff written in abbreviations on the loading sheet they needed to gather and load. Very often, a truck would leave with something missing- or worse, something that was for a different event!
Someone would have to be dispatched to run all over town bringing missed items and swapping the wrong ones- hopefully in time for the event. The room could get pretty chaotic on a busy day with three or more trucks loading at once. Then bringing it all back and putting it all away in the proper place was even worse- it never got done right, and things got “lost” all the time when they were put somewhere they weren’t supposed to be.
But this was how it was always done. Until one day, I was talking through the problem with a friend while trying to brainstorm a better way. He knew nothing about our business but was lending a sympathetic ear. He asked how much overall gear we had, and I said we had enough to do ten parties at once.
So, he said, why don’t you just make ten piles and have each truck just grab their own pile- even if they end up with some stuff they didn’t need, at least they are sure to have everything they did need, and they won’t have to run around trying to gather it all. So simple.
Except we didn’t just make piles on the floor of catering items because, well, that would be gross.
The solution we did come up with was to put ten large lockers in the equipment room, replacing all the shelves. Each locker had a lock on it. And then when a crew came in, they just got a key, and the only job that had to be explained was that they took everything out of the locker and put it on the truck. When they came back, they cleaned everything and put it back in the locker.
Suddenly, no more forgetting things, no training needed for new people, and full accountability for returning all items! We saved so much time; even with loading some stuff that didn’t end up getting used, we cut almost 90 minutes off the time needed to run an event, including the before and after time.
If we had simply continued to live with the problem instead of looking for solutions, we’d have continued to have wasted time and profits on an inefficient and wasteful process. Instead, we solved it once and forever benefited from the solution.
As a side note, I heard that years later the original owner of the business took it back over from the person I had sold it to and proceeded to put things back to the “way they’d always done it” rather than take a minute and appreciate the new approach. You can show people the path, but you can’t make them take it, I guess!
In your business, however, where you can decide, I strongly recommend you decide in favor of continuously looking for ways to fix problems for the long term, in a way that doesn’t require you to do more work or be more involved. That should really always be the goal, and if you can achieve that, you’ll be the happiest business owner on the block!