For the past five months I had been running a couple of coffee shops for an investment group that had bought several cafes in the area because, as they understood it, these places were money machines that required very little actual work. As it turned out, these places could only rightfully be called money machines if the sole purpose of that machine was to take your money, incinerate it, and scatter the remaining ashes to the wind. This is why mine and the other general manager’s positions were absolutely essential to the health of the investment company. It was our job to turn that red ink into black (metaphorically speaking since nobody keeps an actual paper and ink ledger anymore).
So, how does one become an excellent manager? How does one become the kind of manager that gains the respect of their employees while driving sales and cutting costs? Luckily I had two people that I could go to for advice. One, was my boss who, when I first met him as new employee, had stormed into the coffee shop with a box containing several gallons of whole milk and plopped them on the floor and tried to make a hasty retreat, but was stopped by the shift lead who informed him that our entire point of sales system was down. He helpfully replied, “Not my problem,” and disappeared. The other person I went to for advice was my wife, who with nearly ten years of management experience was frankly horrified by much of the advice I received from my boss.
Now, it may seem like it would make sense to fill the rest of this post with advice I got from my wife who once had an employee tell her, “I feel like having you here is the answer to my prayers.” I’m not kidding. To my right is a cork board pinned with messages from former employees about how great my wife is. But let’s face it, that magnitude of professionalism and work ethic is one in a million and basically impossible for mere mortals to emulate, so instead here is a crash course in management 101 as I learned it from my former boss.
- “Good hospitality service starts with being well staffed.” In one of the coffee shops I managed we had five stations and I was told to make sure to have every station staffed with an employee who would do that one job. What this looked like was one person at the drive-thru window taking orders and payments, one person on bar 1, making the drive-thru drinks, one person at the walk up taking those customers’ orders and payments, one person on bar 2 making the walk up customers’ drinks as well as handling any online orders, and finally one cook making the sandwiches and heating up the pastries for both drive-thru and walk up customers. This way everything runs smoothly and quickly. From the moment the customer opens their mouth to order until they receive their food and beverages they are engaged with a friendly employee while the other employees bustle around quickly preparing the orders. Wait, never mind. Labor costs are out of control! Drastically cut everyone’s hours! Fire people if necessary!
- “Cut labor until it hurts. Then cut a little more.” This staffing philosophy replaced the first advice I received once my boss remembered that we had to pay the people that worked for us. I admit I struggled with this as I didn’t like to see my employees stressed and overwhelmed, and I hated to cut hours from people who needed money to pay rent and buy groceries for themselves. So to help the people that needed more hours we agreed to send them to work at other cafes that the company owned. I’ll never forget sending this young girl over to one of those cafes only to find out that she was there completely by herself for six hours trying to make drinks she had never learned to make and ring up customers on a point of sale system she had never used before, all while angry customers berated her to the point of making her cry. I know this sounds awful, but here’s the point you should take away from this story. The following week we received an email from our CFO congratulating us on our labor hours at that location!
- “Lie to people to get what you want out of them.” This seems so obvious that I'm a little embarrassed I didn’t think of it myself. I came to my boss with an issue. The employees were unhappy about having to buy new clothes when a new uniform policy was set to take place and they wanted a stipend. I asked if this was possible to which my boss replied, “Here’s what you do. You lie. I lie to people all the time to get what I want.” I probably thought about that sentence every day after he said it. At first I was concerned. After all, if he has no problem lying to people to get what he wants, that could mean he might lie to me! But then I realized how ridiculous that line of thinking was. What he said was, he “lies to people.” He didn’t say, “I lie to you.” So obviously I had nothing to worry about and instead took away a valuable lesson.
- “P&Ls are useless.” As a new and ambitious general manager I wanted to see where our money was coming in and where it was going out to help me in making decisions about the business. I foolishly assumed that things like COGs (cost of goods) and tracking waste were important financial resources that I would need. My boss quickly squashed such overreaching meddling with his KISS (keep it simple stupid) reasoning. He told me that as long as we were keeping the customers happy and collecting the money, the profit and loss statements wouldn’t be necessary. Of course he did tell me this back when we were staffing five people each day and running up an enormous labor cost, so he may have revised his position on P&Ls too.
- “Screw them coming and going.” Part of my duties was to organize our catering services as well as running the two coffee shops. My boss would sell the catering jobs and then find ways to make things massively more complicated than they needed to be. I apologize. I realize that sounds critical of him, but that’s only because I haven’t yet explained how over complicating things is actually an ingenious way to make buckets full of cash. You see, he once sold seventy-five gallons of hot chocolate and apple cider to a dance group that was performing at a park. The dance group wrote us a check and told all their dancers and their parents that beverages were free to them. But the wiley salesperson that my boss is, saw an opportunity and expressed that opportunity with colorful language that I won’t repeat here, but the gist of it was that these dopes, pardon me, these guests coming in for free drinks could instead purchase different drinks from us. And all we would need to do is create a special menu with three new drinks and a pastry sampler box that we would sell at a premium price, create attractive menus for guests to see with QR codes signing them up to our app, move our point of sale stations to the park and run extension cords to power them, create the new menu on the point of sale and work out the logistics of connecting them to the internet, purchase a van for running cambros of hot chocolate and apple cider back and forth between our kitchen and the park, figure out how to install an industrial coffee brewer on site, staff the event with employees by promising them they could take 10 minutes to eat some pizza in the van, and create fail safes for anything that could go wrong. A lot of things went wrong. Just for example our POS system would not work out there so we used an entirely different system and I created the new menu on it and taught my employees how to use it. It seems like a lot, but it was well worth it in the end to receive an email stating that the revenue from the event was, “not as good” as he had hoped.
- “Put a lock on your dumpster.” This didn’t involve me as much as it involved the other GM because the dumpsters we used at my coffee shops did not belong to us (we had permission, don’t worry). But the other GM was informed to buy locks for his dumpsters because otherwise, “the Mexicans or Chinese will use it.” I actually don’t think I’m a good enough writer to continue to satirically pass this one off as management advice. Just know that soon after that meeting I put in my notice that I would be leaving the company.
Well that should do it for Management 101. If you found any of this advice useful you’ll be glad to know that I have a landfill full of additional advice I received while working for that company. But I’d like to leave you with the words of the company’s President and founder when he saw a woman and her two children get out of their car in our nearly empty parking lot and head toward the library that’s next door to the office, “You can’t park here. This is private property.” I imagine that quote will someday adorn the statue they will build in his honor.