Setting Your Compass

“Progress always involves risk; you can’t steal second base and keep your foot on first.” - Fredrick Wilcox, author.

There are a lot of extraneous forces that are currently affecting business – crude oil is at an all time high and the foreclosure rate on real estate has never been higher. All these elements combine to tighten up the mass’s disposable income. Consequently, things seem to be a little slow out in the food service market, and it strikes me as a great time to take a step back and do some evaluating. Are you achieving your goals? Do you have any goals for that matter? How do you set your goals? Is “MORE” a reasonable goal? More what? Profit? Sales? Customers? What are you using as a measuring stick for your own performance? Without clearly defining your goals, it is extremely difficult to set the course for action.

I have found that the highest obstacle to my achieving success is poor goal setting for myself. If I don’t know where I am going, I sure as heck won’t ever get there. I won’t know who to turn to for help, and I surely won’t achieve much. The old saying “don’t confuse activity with accomplishment” leaps to mind for me when I think of living or working without a goal in mind.
What keeps me from setting goals? Fear. Fear of failure. Unfortunately, if I don’t live my life with intention, I will unintentionally fail. I am bringing this up because I have had a number of conversations with people regarding their business and what they are trying to achieve. Without the proper goals, we will all slowly bleed out….bleed out our profits and our sales. Not a good situation to be in for any of us.

Why should we set goals? Setting goals gives us a target to shoot for as we evaluate our current state of affairs. With a clearly defined target, decision making becomes much easier. Let’s say we pick a goal of operating more profitably. This goal gives us a new pair of glasses through which we can evaluate our menu, our purveyors, and our operations paradigm. We can then look for ways to increase our tickets and decrease both our inventory and our operations costs. Let’s say we pick a goal of operating more efficiently – getting the food out to our customers quicker or under a specified time. From this perspective we can look at our operational profile – are our cooks efficient? Is our waitstaff taking additional time-wasting steps? How can we improve? What can we tweak to make things hum a little smoother? Remember, better service equals higher tickets and more customers. More customers equal more money for everyone – the waitstaff and the owners!

With goals like that in mind, it becomes a lot easier to set the course of action. You know what questions to ask your customers, your staff, and your vendors about how they can help you achieve your goals. Without a goal like that in mind, you get mired in the “just getting by” mentality that will eventually lead to the demise of your restaurant. Remember, the competition isn’t just increasing, it is getting better, and if we don’t, we will get left behind.