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Employee Management
Building Blocks: The Value of Teaching — Rather Than Training — Your Employees
Pizzeria owners are rarely only owners. Instead, we don many hats and understanding every role in the shop. In fact, I know one clever owner who wears a shirt that says “Maintenance Man” on the back. Even if we’re not masters in every facet of ...
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Employee Management
Mike’s Monthly Tip: The Seasonal Staff Exodus
How to handle the seasonal staff exodus at restaurants and pizzerias Handling the exodus. It’s a little dramatic, but it might feel like that when you have one, two or maybe even three employees that decide to leave all at once. I’ve noti...
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Employee Management
Building Blocks: 3 Steps to Hosting an Effective Team Meeting
Get more out of your team meetings “Like a human being, a company has to have an internal communication mechanism, a ‘nervous system,’ to coordinate its actions.” — Bill Gates OK, do you really need to run your company like Bill Gates does?...
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Employee Management
Today’s Restaurant Manager Compensation Packages
Restaurant manager compensation isn’t what it used to be With respect to manager compensation packages in today’s hospitality environment, Uno Pizzeria & Grill CEO Erik Frederick acknowledges one overriding truth: “The old rules,” he says...
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Employee Management
What’s the difference between Restaurant Tips and Service Charges?
Common Compliance Issues with Tips, Tip Pooling and Service Charges Tipping models and service charges are some of the most discussed topics in restaurants today among restaurateurs, employees and customers alike. While tips and automatic service cha...
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Employee Management
Fundamentals and Next-level Steps for a Solid Restaurant Employee Training Program
You Get the Staff You Deserve Restaurant Employee Training is an investment The quality of your training directly correlates to your team’s potential success, which affects the quality of your food and the end customer dining experiences. Great...
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Employee Management
Building Blocks: Bad Hire?
Don’t blame others for a bad hire. Look in the mirror. We all know the saying about subpar employees: One bad apple ruins the barrel. But if that’s true, why do we as pizzeria owners tolerate the bad apples on our staffs? Obviously, no one wants ...
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Employee Management
Mike’s Monthly Tip: The Value of a Leader
Why is it that you can have two people with relatively the same age, background and acumen have two vastly different outcomes from the same team? The straightforward and non-simple answer is leadership. Once you see them in action, is only when you s...
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Employee Management
A Framework for Paid Time Off
Proper PTO Paid time off, also known as PTO, isn’t easy for restaurant companies to navigate. It can enhance the likelihood of retaining top-tier talent, but it can also be easily abused. PTO is never fun when it leads to vital personnel gone when ...
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Employee Management
Building Blocks: Effective Ways to Incentivize and Reward Your Team
“Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.” – Charlie Munger In the restaurant industry, employers are constantly talking about how difficult it is to hire and retain good employees. My philosophy is, when it comes to staffing your...
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Employee Management
The Crucial Owner/General Manager Bond
The Perfect Tandem Any independent operator can tell the same story about the good old days when they first opened the shop. As owners we were working 18-hour days, seven days a week, 100 hours plus weeks, and no days off. But then as business grew, ...
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Employee Management
Building Blocks: Team Building
Words and actions are the key “Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.” – Steve Jobs, Co-Founder of Apple You can have the best recipes and the best location, but if you can’t build a great t...