Hey, restaurant owners and operators. What does that lego airplane and this
real airplane behind me have to do with running your restaurant,
and hiring your staff, training them better,
and training them faster? I'm going to share all that with you right now. Coming up!
Hey, everybody! Ryan Gromfin here, author, speaker, chef, restaurateur,
founder of therestaurantboss.com
as well as clickbacon.com and scalemyrestaurant.com.
Now I apologize for my voice and my red eyes and the dark light.
It's about 5:30 in the morning here. I'm getting ready to take
this beautiful 182
about an hour and a half north of here just south of fort-worth
to an airplane show, where I'm going to meet and hang out with some other airplane dorks like me.
But what does all of this have to do with operating your restaurant?
Well, it has to do with the fact that things that are complicated now become uncomplicated later.
Things that are hard now get easy later,
like riding a bike for example.
Riding a bike was hard one day and then it became easy.
Well, how did riding a bike go from being hard to being easy,
to being second nature for you right now? And when we figure that out when we figure out
how something goes from being complicated to not
complicated goes from being hard to not hard.
We could take anything then, that's what's important is learning
how something goes from hard to being easy
and then applying that to anything else that we do
to make hard things easy.
So, like flying this airplane for example, this was hard
and then one day, it became easy.
And the way that that happens is we chunk it down.
See everything that's hard is hard
because it's made up of a bunch of easier things.
Those easier things are called sub skills.
And when we learn how to get good at or master
a bunch of sub skills that all leads up to getting good at and mastering
the big skill.
So, again like riding a bike.
When you're good at balance and you have a decent amount of strength and agility then
riding the bike is easy.
But when you're young and you don't have those things yet, riding the bike is hard.
Flying the airplane.
When I first started flying an airplane or when I talk
to people that I fly airplanes, like wow, flying an airplane that's hard. Wow! Wow! Wow!
But the reality is, it's kind of second nature.
I don't want to say it's easy but it's become much easier
but when you're learning how to fly an airplane, you don't just get in with a co-pilot
with an instructor, and say, okay. Today, we're going to learn how to fly an airplane.
What you do is there's a series of sub skills that you learn.
When you taxi an airplane, you don't use your hands. You use your feet. You use rudder pedals.
So, you have to learn how to taxi an airplane.
You have to learn how to start the engine. You have to learn how to
use the avionics and the radios. You have to learn how to communicate on the radios. You have to learn how to
climb out on take-off, how to descend for landing,
how to flare for landing, how to make steep turns,
how to do all these things.
But those are just a series of sub skills
that all lead up to learning how to do something hard.
Now the best example I have to share this with you
is going to be with Lego. So, as we're talking about chunking it down,
I said I was going to talk about Lego, a very interesting story about Lego.
I'm here doing some Legos with my son, Cooper, say hi. Hi!
So, very interesting story about Lego. Lego in
the 70s, 80s, maybe early 90s, was a very popular toy.
And then they went nearly bankrupt.
And the reason Lego went nearly bankrupt is because
you remember getting all those bricks. You would just get
boxes and boxes or bags and bags of yellow bricks and orange bricks and red
bricks and different colors as they call. And they call them bricks.
And the challenge was the stuff that they showed on the box,
kids couldn't actually create. Because there was no real instructions.
It was just bricks, and you had to use your imagination but
our imaginations weren't skilful enough to create the stuff. So,
once you had a bunch of bricks, you didn't need to buy any more.
So, Lego got this great idea to start kind of developing more complex kicks
and kits and licensing out. Like
with Star Wars, and Disney, and all these different characters.
And then the challenge was
they would create these really complex really expensive kits as you guys know, Lego's expensive.
But no one could finish them.
No one could finish them because they did some surveys and they found out that the instructions
weren't very well written. And they weren't divided up very well.
And so, again, Lego struggled.
And then, when Lego figured out how to write their instructions,
how to chunk it down, the company had
huge success. So, now when you get Lego,
you get sorry that says one, a bag one,
bag two,
bag three. And then the instructions
are divided by bags.
So, when you start the instructions, it says bag one. And you build bag one, then bag two,
and you build bag two.
So, what this does is this allows cooper and I
to do a couple of things.
One, we can sit down and not have to commit
to building the whole set because there's nothing worse than losing one piece and not being able to finish it.
So, like right now I just did some dinner prep.
We're gonna sit down. And we're gonna build bag one.
We're not gonna open bag two, we're not gonna open back three, we're not even gonna worry about it.
We're just gonna build bag one, it might take us 15/20 minutes. And then,
right, and then, we'll be done. Maybe, we decide to go to bag two.
Maybe, we don't but we're gonna be done with bag one.
And we're not gonna lose any parts and we're going to complete it, right.
And you're going to get the feeling of completion. I'll get a cup to put our Legos in.
He's going to get a cup to put the Lego pieces in.
And then we feel good and he feels good because he completed a step.
Then we'll go to bag two. And then we'll go to bag three
and before you know it, Cooper, jump again.
He's trying to jump to get it, alright. Oh, good job, be careful.
There is stock on the stove, Cooper, be careful.
Okay. But basically, what happens is
you build on it. So, you complete one, and then, you complete two.
And then sometimes, parts from one go into part two,
and then sometimes, parts from two go into part three.
And then you end up with this.
But this wouldn't have been possible to do if it was just
a bag of bricks with a giant instruction manual, not divided into bags.
Okay, Cooper. What do we call all these pieces here?
Sub-assembly. What do we call them?
Sub-assembly. So, as you'll see in the instructions right now, we take, we're going to take the
second sub-assembly we made.
We're going to combine it with another sub-assembly
that gets combined with another sub-assembly to create
an assembly like a skill, like a sub skill.
That's the point. To another sub-assembly, to another, another---
That’s the point I'm trying to make here. When you're training your team,
break your training down into smaller pieces like customer service.
Like we said, customer service is not just customer service. It's
greeting the guest properly. It's greeting a table properly.
It's taking phone orders properly. It's handling complaints properly.
When you can do all 20 of those things, then you have great customer service.
Hey, so, I just want to quickly bring this whole video together.
We talked about a lot of concepts about making things that are hard,
easy about making things that are complicated, less complicated.
And the way we do that is chunk it down from the big skill to the sub skills.
So, in your restaurant, we talk about hiring your staff and training your staff.
One of the biggest challenges that we find is like I mentioned
just before this people say to me things like,
Ryan, I'm having a hard time with customer service.
Ryan, my team isn't good at customer service,
how do I get my team better customer service. That's just an example. It could be
speed of cooking. It could be speed of prep. It could be organization. It could be ordering.
It could be any number of things.
But what I encourage you to do is whatever it is that you're challenged with,
break that skill down into smaller sub skills.
Then develop trainings for the sub skills, not the main skill.
Mr. Miyagi, wax on, wax off, right.
Daniel son keeps saying, I haven't learned karate,
I haven't learned karate. Then all of a sudden, he starts punching him. He says, wax on, wax off,
paint the fence, sand the deck, whatever.
And then all of a sudden, Daniel's like, wait,
I'm good at karate now. I didn't even know I was
learning karate. I was learning all these other things but now I'm good at karate, it's no different.
When your team is struggling with something, if they get good at answering the phone.
And they get good at greeting the guests.
And they get good at handling complaints.
And they get good at understanding the menu. And they know the wine list, and they know the beer list.
And they know how to use all the different parts
of the POS without having to stop and think about it, or get a manager.
When they know how to
give refunds, when they know the difference between a comp and a void,
when they know how to sell gift cards, then all of a sudden, one day,
your team's awesome at customer service. And you didn't even train on customer service.
You just trained on how to do 30 easy things, right.
Because running your restaurant isn't hard, what makes running your restaurant hard
is doing a hundred or a thousand easy things, well,
every day.
I love every single one of you, crazy restaurant people. And remember,
systems create freedom, freedom creates value, and value
creates scale. Have an amazing day, and I'll see you all next week. Bye-bye.
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