New Business Openings (NBO)

Practice Doesn't Make Perfect

Posted on Nov 20, 2009 in New Business Openings (NBO) by Jeffrey Summers 0 Comments

I was re-reading one of the newsletters I subscribe to, on the topic of a restaurant’s life cycle and how after the opening the greatest challenge is to attain consistency by reducing all repetitive job processes to checklists and procedures. I could not disagree more.

You must do those things BEFORE THE OPENING! This is bad planning plain and simple and not a very good use of limited pre-opening resources. If followed, this will not only place your operation at risk, but will needlessly increase your costs due to inefficiencies, low productivity, chaos and bad guest experiences!

Just because some openings look like clown school does not mean it has to be that way for everyone. The whole point of the New Store Opening planning stage is to get these processes and procedures down, then train staff to execute them so that your service and production models are able to create that “wow” you need to grab momentum. Trying to do this after the opening amounts to nothing more than having two sets of operating rules for your staff one before opening, and another real set of rules afterward. Which means that now you have to retrain your whole staff! As well as force them to forget the old habits which will linger and cause disruption of your new procedures and processes and slow down any chance you have at being able to maintain any momentum coming out of your opening.

After executing nearly 20 very successful new store openings over 27+ years, it still amazes me how little planning is attempted let alone actually done when it comes to some of the most important items that will mean the difference between success and failure. This does not have to be rocket surgery either! But you will have to devote time and resources to it. Remember, success has to be managed and this involves planning for it – because failure happens all by itself.