The Restaurant Doctor - Electronic House Call

ELECTRONIC HOUSE CALL - January 14, 2000

THE POWER OF WE
I receive a lot of e-mail requests for information and assistance, most of which I can field. Occasionally, I get questions that are outside of my area of expertise or where I just want to open things up to other possibilities. Here are a few for your consideration. As always, if you have something to offer, reply directly to the person with a copy to me.

Ben Williams <ben@horsefeathers.com>
We're getting ready to switch from a Mac platform to Windows for our back of house accounting. Could you please ask your readers to suggest some simple restaurant oriented accounting software. We're not looking for POS integration and anything too fancy. We do all of our costings and explosions on in-house spreadsheets. All we need is a good single unit accounting package. It would be great to avoid another steep learning curve and benefit from those who have gone before.

Jim Covert <jpcovert@tir.com>
Most of us promote our top-performing employees into leadership positions. While they're superb employees, they may be great "doers" and ot such able "leaders"--- leading them to frustration and eventual failure as managers. Please share some tips on how to spot good leaders in a staff or at the interview table since some great leaders are only average at "doing" and therefore hard to spot. Are there particular questions to ask or any leadership-skills surveys that can be used?

Peter Croese <pecro@aol.com>
I need your help in finding companies to contract a beach, concession and catering operation. I own the park but I will not be in a position to operate the facility this coming season. Could you please help me? My phone number is 914-693-3192.

Stacey <mosaiconyc@aol.com>
My partner and I own and operate MOSAICO Food of the Americas, a Pan-Latino take-out cafe and catering business in Manhattan. We are interested in packaging some of our signature items and hors d'oeuvres (frozen). I was hoping you could give me some insight on companies that may be able to assist me to get this venture off the ground. Any information, suggestions or comments would be appreciated.

MOTIVATION REVISITED
Susan Duckworth of the Ninth Street Deli <suz@sockets.net> sends this along:

I own a small deli and have a staff of six and I finally got my staff motivated! I had tried profit sharing and other plans so that they would be interested in the business side of the deli, but nothing seemed to work. I had created a profit pool which was 10% of the business' profit and split it up according to the number of hours they worked. It was a lot of work for me and the checks were fairly small for most of them.

We had our Christmas party last month where we closed up shop at 5:00 on a Monday and I took them all out to eat at a local restaurant. They had drinks, appetizers....whatever they wanted. We all get along well and had a great time. Since most of them are college students they don't eat out at sit-down restaurants often. So I devised an incentive plan that for every month we reach a certain amount in sales, we'll go out to dinner again. Now every day when they come in they check the board to see how close we are to meeting our goal! It's amazing! I wish that I'd thought of it sooner.

If people are having this same trouble, maybe you could suggest to them that they just have to find out what the staff wants as an incentive.

MANAGEMENT INSIGHT SERIES
The special added bonus for early subscriptions expires tomorrow. For the details of my new monthly audio series and how it works, go to my website (www.restaurantdoctor.com) and click on the Management Insight Series logo.

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