I love doing consultancy work. I find that the debate with other people really forces me to think, analyse and invent. And occasionally, it sparks a moment that I need to write down. Last week was one of those. 

Historically, I have talked about ‘coach party’ rostering, which I thought up when I was at M&B, using it when we bought a load of pubs from Whitbread.  

Coach party rostering was my response to those who always had an extra member of staff on incase a coach party arrived. It is the practice of a manager, or owner, who stands in as an extra pair of hands, incase service gets busy. Last week I renamed it +1 management.  

Of course, we all know that this is a commercial disaster. Firstly, whoever comes in feels like they are working, when in reality, they aren’t. This just makes their week feel longer, unnecessarily. They should be working a shorter week, coming in only when required. 

Secondly, it causes costs to mushroom. An extra 10 hours a day, or 70 hours a week, is not far off £50k a year down the drain. But even in our own pubs, it seems very easy to drift back to +1 management. Our teams seem to like having three instead of two front of house in quieter sessions. Why? 

Is it because they can stop and chat? Is it because of the proverbial coach party? Or is because they like to have one on the bar, one wait staff and one food runner? 

When I ask my own team, I can’t seem to get a straight answer, other than a repeated promise not to do it again. 

I am conscious that my last article was on lowest common denominator management, and I am in mortal danger of wanting to do the same! 

However, our root out of conundrums like this is threefold:

1 – Have a shift plan that ensures multi-tasking is part of how the shift is run – not just slack tasks, but also the key role of ‘float’. 

2 – Teach management that having an extra person on, ‘just incase’, is poor management practice. It will make service worse, and you won’t recoup the costs. 

3 – Make your labour costs visible. If you are just managing labour ratio, you will never see this detail, and will be oblivious to the problem, which is even worse.  

So, I suppose I should be grateful. I can see the problem, and know what to do, and I now know the best way to explain it the team that need to deliver day in and day out. 

Over the last ten years, we have been trying to get Mother’s Day right, and I am still not sure we have. In terms of covers, Mother’s Day is our biggest day of the year. At our busiest pub, we had 753 booked this year. Sadly, we served only 688, resulting in a day that netted us £18k, which was slightly less sales than Christmas day, when we served around 230 covers.  

It has become clear that there are several specific challenges when it comes to Mother’s Day, which can perhaps be better remedied on normal trading days. The first is no-shows. Despite ringing every customer up beforehand, our no-shows were still around 9%.  

Next year, I think we will have to start taking deposits, and we are switching to LiveRes to enable us to do that. The reason no-shows are a bigger problem on a day like Mother’s Day, is that walk-ins are few and far between – it is too much of a risk. On other days, when we are busy, people not turning up matters less because we are a big enough restaurant and can compensate with walk-ins. So, it is likely we will start taking deposits next year, so that we do not lose that 9% again.  

The second challenge on Mother’s Day is price. We are in a constant dilemma about what to offer. At one end, we can stick to our Sunday roast pricing, but we seem to then waste the opportunity of being full. If our regulars were the people coming to us on Mother’s Day, that would be great, but it tends to be those who visit less often and are looking to go somewhere slightly different than usual. It feels like a day where everyone trades up! 

Is the right approach to have a more expensive Mother’s Day menu? Do we offer three courses at a fixed price, or maybe two courses? I think our reluctance comes from knowing there are likely a fair number of people who do not want to eat that much. Our preference is to have a separate Mother’s Day menu, which we send out early with each booking so that our customers are well informed ahead of time. Better planning and organisation are crucial for days that feel slightly harder to forecast.  

We also want to look into Mother’s Day gifts to extend our offering – what about flowers and fizz? What about a box of chocolates on the table to take home? It feels as though creating a whole Mother’s Day experience and going beyond the meal is something we ought to do. It is certainly another one to consider for next year!  

With all this in mind, what could we take next year? Deposits could add 10%, an enhanced menu could add another 10%, and offering more of an experience could add 5%. We probably won’t get it all right, but there is a decent chance of growing by 15% next year, which is another £3k we need. 

I’ll let you know how we do! 

In our pub business we have recently been recruiting for a Deputy General Manager. During our interviewing, it has been fascinating to learn why so many staff want to leave the largest companies in the sector and come and join little old us. We should not really be able to compete with larger businesses, but we do, and I have been curious in finding out why.  

We lose on many things, particularly staff development and benefits, where bigger companies do a great job. But we win in two more key areas. Firstly, the team ethic of a smaller business, with Directors being visible and involved, which also means we get the small things done much more quickly, particularly regarding repairs. But where we really win in comparison to the Goliaths, is in managing our labour.  

It should not come as a shock that as an industry, we really care about customer service. While there are many factors that contribute to the productivity levels of our teams, I think that staffing levels are perhaps one of the most significant.  

Some of the candidates we spoke to voiced frustration over the fact their employers chose to set cash targets as means of budgeting their labour over the Christmas period. The staff felt they would have done much more than the target, but as a result of it, were not given enough resource to do so.  

It is always a bit of a shock, and quite fascinating to me when I hear about bigger companies managing their labour costs with the bluntest of instruments. Of course, cost management is at the forefront of every operator’s mind, particularly with NLW increases looming. Simply setting a cutthroat budget to slash costs will also slash sales. We will not win over the customer if we deliver bad service, and more importantly, we will not win over our people if we are seen to act in not only an illogical way, but also in a way that impacts their job satisfaction levels. We have all seen what happens next:  they either leave the company, or more worryingly, the industry. 

Managerial behaviour in a devolved, people-intensive industry can be really difficult to get right. It is a bit of a truism to say that we have some great managers, some OK managers, and some poor managers. We need to find the best way to let our best managers manage, and to train our worst managers to be better at their job. In truth, it is likely this means taking different approaches for different people. There is something I refer to as ‘lowest common denominator management’ – which means adopting management practices that cater to your least experienced people, as opposed to just your best or average people.  

Our most trusted and experienced managers can be encouraged to perform even better; others, who perhaps have less experience in the business, may require a more hands-on approach until they get there.  

Labour is the sharp end of our industry. If you demand a 75% food gross profit, the team will accept that your economic model is such that it is the right thing to do. They might baulk a bit more at pricing when they are the ones that get the grief from the customer, but they will also accept that dealing with price increases are part and parcel of the job. However, when it comes to labour, they can see when they are understaffed. 

Even if our teams believe they need more staff than what is required, it is our responsibility to spend time explaining why the way we have planned our teams is right, and how they can be more productive in their role to achieve the same goals.  

This is what companies are potentially failing to do. We work in an industry where people want to understand more, and where, when explained, they are more motivated and accepting of the requirement.  

We need to explain when a two on shift is better than a three on shift; why we do not need a pot wash at quieter times; why certain tasks are to be thought of as slack tasks and not as fixed tasks. Sometimes, in our rush for a result we forget these basic processes. 

I have no doubt that we will need to train and explain to our new team how we work, what we care about, and how we deliver in our own way. 

There is a myth in our industry that being understaffed is the biggest challenge to sales growth, and that is the missed opportunity. But the truth is that, while we all want to have the right number of staff, the bigger enemy to service and sales is overstaffing. 

Let us take the difficult example of when you need 1.5 people on a shift FOH. Clearly you can’t have one, because they would fail, so the right answer is to have two. You might decide that you want one on the bar, one serving and one running food. Then you have three. Comfortable – and many might argue that they have the structure right, service will be great, and they can cope with any increase in sales. Good rostering, right?  

But I have seen countless examples of what actually happens on this kind of shift. One person does the work of 1.5 people, badly, and the other two people chat.  

Of course, the customer is forgiving if you have two people working hard and it is busier than expected, but equally they are unforgiving if they see two people chatting.   

We have all seen it too often. Recently, we were doing some customer training and made this point to managers. There was no argument – they all agreed. 

So, if we can all agree that overstaffing is the biggest enemy, why does it happen? 

Is it because rotas are written without thinking enough about demand? Is it that people think there is a minimum number on shift that is required and can’t see how to run their business on less? Is it fear that someone won’t turn up? Is it that they overstaff in case they are busier? Is it that the manager really wants to do nothing on the shift so rotas extra hands? 

Is it that there are a few standard shift structures that are deployed, and the staff don’t want to create any more? I think it is the combination of all of those reasons that causes overstaffing. 

But what is the cost? The problem with our industry is that the majority of shifts during the week are quiet. If we have 14 shifts a week, then it is likely that at least half of them are quiet shifts, where there is a tendency to overstaff. If say 20% of our labour occurs at these points (for one of my own it is 35%), and we could save 10% of this, then this is still a 3.5% improvement in labour. And we all need that. 

So, let’s come back to the reasons. In truth only the first and the last can be solved through systems, unless you control a manager to death and remove any level of authority – an equally dangerous approach.  

The rest are achieved through education and training. It has been great to have recently seen both managers and kitchen managers get the point in recent training sessions. But the prize is a big one. Reduced cost and increased sales are the dream ticket. So, let’s bust the myth. 

The planned increase to minimum wage has made a substantial change to the differentials between young people. From April next year, over 21s will see a minimum wage of £11.44, whilst under-18s will receive £6.40. 

There is a solid argument against paying under 18s only 55% of the new minimum wage for adults. Many of them are better than that, which poses the question – is this age discrimination at a government level? Here in lies the rub. While a lot of under-18s deserve a higher rate, there is often a high chance that as employees, they will not work out for the following reasons:  

For many under-18s, working in hospitality will be their first real job. We must teach them the basic disciplines of work: turning up, preferably on-time; looking smart every day; smiling, and not just to friends; going to work with a hangover and not hiding in corners; being polite to colleagues; talking to old people; working as a team; accepting proper discipline; listening to instructions and not repeating the same mistake – the list goes on.  

A number of young people fail on any of these measures, and some, sadly fail on all. The churn of under 18s is therefore considerably higher than for those on their second, or probably third job. The training to help them through some of these barriers is also considerably higher.  

The hospitality industry has always been a good training ground for the rest of British industry, teaching the skills that mean those people are better able to hold down and excel at jobs in the future. A job working in a pub means that person has already developed a work ethic, which is a positive sign on a CV. 

The real risk is that if this differential gets eroded, the cost of employing experienced hands may seem more appealing, and so the incentive to employ these first jobbers starts to disappear.  

But what is the right number? The argument we should accept is not a theoretical one, but a practical one. Are these young people getting the chance to start work? The answer is no!  

Less than 5% of the 25-plus age group are unemployed, whereas after a brief dip to under 10%, the unemployment rate for under-24s is now climbing sharply and currently sits at 12.7%. Anything over 15% and I suspect the government will feel grave concern, but it looks like we are heading that way pretty fast. 

Having read the summary of the low pay commission report, it looks to me as though it takes a massive amount of time to pull together, which means it is likely they will not have reacted enough to the stats which changed sharply between April and July this year. 

To layer on further challenges, we also pay our teams tips. Where these tips are through a company, hopefully the low pay commission have taken them into account. But, where they are not, they will not be in the report. This means that young people are certainly earning more than the government are recording. 

My hope in all of this is that wage rates for young people are set at a point. As an industry, we want to employ young people and continue our vital role in helping them start their careers. I am proud of those who have grown through my own pubs – having watched some join as teenagers, gone through a successful university career, and ended up with great jobs. I would really like that to continue.