Lineup Topic

00:00Hello Music City! This is Brandon Styll and we are talking lineups today. We have got a brand new lineup topic for you and this episode is going to be brought to you by The Compost Company. Clay and Jeffrey Ezell are out there every day hustling to help reduce greenhouse gases. Did you know that the number one reason for greenhouse gases in landfills is your food waste? Food waste going into the landfill gets stuck underneath everything and then it creates methane and that is greenhouse gases. However, you can be part of the solution with a special Slim Jim that you get from The Compost Company. You can put just your food waste in a compostable materials into this container. They will come pick it up every single week and then they will turn this into compost which then gets sold to you, the consumer, landscape companies and local farmers so they can have organic soil. So the full circle of life as far as your food waste is going to be taken care of with The Compost Company. I am trying it starting this week at the Green Hills Grill and I am so excited and that is going to be part of our lineup topic today. Call Jeffrey Ezell. His number is 615-866-8152 or follow them at compostcompany.com or check them out on the web at compostcompany.com. So this episode today is going to be a lineup topic and it's going to be a lineup topic about lineup topics. I know, right?

01:34So I was listening to an episode of Restaurant Unstoppable with Eric Cacciatore at episode number 895 with Roger Boudon. He is the founder of Restaurant Rockstars and he's got a podcast and they were talking a lot about the actual act of a lineup and this brought up some some conversation. So if you're a restaurant manager or owner, this podcast is for you. If you're not, then you can listen but I don't know how much you're going to get out of it. So what we do before the shift is we start a lineup. How do you craft a lineup and what do you do with it, right? So you want to give specials. You want to talk about anything that's special. If the chef come out, hopefully you can make one of those specials. Let everybody try it. It's always a fun thing to do and then any kind of hot topics, anything that's going on in the restaurant, you can give announcements. It's a great way to cascade any messages that you need to get over to the entire staff. I had a guy ask me today, he said, hey, how do you cascade messages and what is it like? How do you do it? And I said, well, you we really go by like the one-minute manager, right? The book by Ken Blanchard. It is that easy. Okay and I'm going to break down the one-minute manager here in like 30 seconds. So the one-minute manager is three individual techniques if you're a manager. You do the one-minute goal setting because this is as rudimentary, as basic as it's going to get and I love it because this is exactly what most of us should be doing every day but we go, we don't even think about it, right? So you got to do one-minute goal setting. This is one-on-one or anytime that you're telling somebody who's a direct report what the expectation is for them over any given period of time. So that can be in a lineup. You can say, guys, tonight I'm expecting everybody to sell the fish. I'm expecting everybody to sell this featured wine. I'm expecting everybody to come in with full hands in, full hands out. Tonight, hot food, hot, cold food, cold, whatever the basics are. You're letting them know exactly what the expectations are and you can do this if you're an owner. You can do this with your managers. You're a general manager. You can do it

03:34with your managers. Managers have one-on-one sit downs with your staff but letting people know what the expectation is of them is probably the number one thing that most people complain about with managers that they never told me what the expectation was. Then they just flogged me over the back when I didn't do it, right? So explain to you what the expectations are for the shift. That's number one in a lineup. You want to tell specials, are you 86 anything? And then you go into during this shift, this is what the game plan is and this is my expectation of you. Right now, so many people, and I hear this a lot just in my restaurants, they go, we're going to cover it in lineup. Okay, well it's great that you're going to cover it in lineup but after you're covering it in lineup then you have to actually go do something with it. And this is where the second and third part of the one-minute manager come into play. So there's two other parts. There's the one-minute praise, right? Where you praise somebody for doing the thing that you ask them to do. And then you have the one-minute, it used to be the one-minute reprimand. If you read the book 10 years ago, it was called the one-minute reprimand. Now they've updated to the one-minute redirect. Okay, so I'm just going to use the example of full hands in, full hands out, right?

04:44Because when we're short staffed, the number one thing that we can do is really practice fundamentals and execute really well on full hands in, full hands out. If somebody's walking across the entire restaurant and they have two hands, there's nothing in their hands, it is a waste. It is not efficient if they do not stop by a table, pre-bus somebody else's table, pre-bus their own table, but walk back into the kitchen with something in their hands, right? So what you do here is when you say in lineup, and my expectations for the shift are that we really focus on full hands in, full hands out. In lineup, you can say that, but then throughout the shift, you have to find people who are getting full hands in and people who are getting full hands out, and you have to thank them. You have to let them know that you're watching. This is the main part, okay? You have to come in and say, hey, thanks for good job, full hands. Thank you, full hands. Way to get that full hands. Let them know that you see them doing the things that you asked them to do. If it's selling bottles of wine, when you see them take a bottle of wine to the table, walk by and tap their shoulder and go, great sell. I see that. Good job. Let people know that they're doing a good job. Now, this sounds, you're hearing this and you're like, yeah, dude, we know, we get it, but it's a lot harder than it sounds because you get caught up and you're talking to a table and you don't see this, but make it an intentional point to follow up with your staff afterwards.

06:04Now, at the end of the day, when you tell people what the expectation is for a shift, keep notes, write notes on the people who do the great stuff and tell them in the moment, don't wait, tell them in the moment that they're doing a great job. You don't even have to really do any redirects for people. If you see people that are intentionally not getting full hands in or full hands out and they're walking by empty dirty tables or whatever, write their name down. At the end of the day, sit down with them and say, hey, in line up, we talked about getting full hands in, full hands out, yet I noticed you really didn't do that today and I want to know why and what we can do to get better at that. In that one-on-one conversation, that redirect or it's not really a reprimand, it's that, hey, look, I'm watching and I'm following up with what we talk about because I think so many times we get to line up and we say these are all the things that we expect and then we just go and run the shift and we forget about it. At the end of the day, we go, did we do it? At the end of the day, they go, I don't know, maybe, did they do it? Sure, this person did it or that person did it, but if you're doing a sales contest, this is why we do a wine feature every two months. We do it for two months at a time and I recommend everybody to do this because A, it gives you the ability to negotiate with your wine vendor a better deal on a wine you're going to sell 20 cases of because you got two months to feature it and B, it gives you data.

07:21It tells you who's engaged. Who's engaged in your restaurant are the people that are selling specials and they're the people that are they're following through with what your strategy is and how do you gauge that? How do you measure that? Well, when you do a wine feature, you do it for three weeks and you can look at it and go, oh wow, Ron sold 40 bottles of it, but Sarah didn't sell one glass. Well, that's an easy conversation with Sarah to sit down and say, hey, why don't you sell a glass? But you can talk about these things in lineup. You have to follow through with what you talk about after enduring the shift. So that's it. That's my lineup topic today is that start the lineup off, tell specials, bring chef out, try the food. And if you can do a contest, make it fun, make the shift fun too. And after a lineup, one of the biggest things that you can do is set the pace. Okay. As a leader in a building, nobody wants to hear you do a ra ra lineup speech and then go sit in the office and count money for 45 minutes. So like inspect what you expect as you get going, set the lineup and then say, go check your sections and I'm going to walk around and then start walking around quickly around the building. People see your energy and they see your pace. That's how you start the shift. Well, don't start letting them go, all right, I'll be in the office for 30 minutes and y'all just get going. Get out there, hustle, go talk to guests, be on the floor, be present. Like I said, this is a lineup topic about lineup topics today brought to you by compost company. And hopefully this was helpful to you. I don't know, but it's something that I've noticed sometimes in my own restaurants that we do a great job of doing lineups, bringing everybody together, but I like to watch people's eyes in lineup because I don't participate as much as I used to because that's that the managers really do a great job at it. But I watched their eyes and people will start glazing over after 10 minutes.

09:11They start going, is he almost done? Did I'm really tired of this? Is she finished? And that can happen. So when you ask people to do stuff, one minute manager, go read it, Ken Blanchard, um, one minute goal setting, sit down, let people know what the expectations are of you. One minute praise, let them know you see them doing the things you've asked them to do. And if they don't do the things you asked them to do, it's a one minute redirect. Sit down and say, Hey, I clearly spoke this and this was the expectation and you didn't do it. Can we talk about that? It doesn't have to be a long 45 minute conversation. Just let them know that I'm watching and I understand that you're not doing it. People will change their behaviors really fast and they will engage a lot faster than you know. If you go back to the episode with Will from Culture Index, he says 20% of your staff is actively engaged. 50% of your staff is disengaged and 30% of your staff is actively disengaged. It's a crazy number. Try and go figure out who those people are. Use data, get it done.

10:17Anyway, thank you for listening today. And if you're not a restaurant manager, maybe this will work with your children, whatever it might be, just some really simple basics for you on a Wednesday. Have a great rest of your week. Good luck with CMA week guys. Bye bye.