Introduction:

Hey restaurant owners and operators, I want you to just stop right now. Stop with the distractions, constant research, constant changing technology, looking for someone else to solve your problems, or trying to find a better POS system. What you have right now is probably good enough.

What you’re probably not doing is focusing on the things that matter the most in your business. It’s so easy to lie to ourselves and not do the hard or uncomfortable things. If you’re in sales, it’s easy to not pick up the phone and make calls. If you’re a real estate agent, it’s easy to not sit at an open house. If your car salesman, it’s easy to not follow up with the people that have visited you over the last week. 

And if you’re in the restaurant business, it’s easy to not focus on your numbers, not train your staff better, write better operations manuals, take pictures of your food so that your staff knows how to serve it properly, to offer tests to your servers to make sure they know their food, etc. It’s easy to not do this because the other stuff is so much more fun.

Is your business not exactly where you want it to be right now? It’s because you are not focusing on what matters the most. You are probably lying to yourself and finding things to keep you busy. You’re probably yelling at me right now saying, “Ryan you don’t understand, my restaurant is different. You don’t understand my staff; you don’t understand there are always problems in the restaurant; there are always distractions and things that keep me busy.”

You’re right! But the reason you’re constantly distracted is that you haven’t taken the time to put the systems in place to properly train your staff and make sure that they do their job right. Instead, you threw them an apron and said: boom, you’re now trained! You assumed somebody else would train them or you’re assuming that they know how to do a job when they don’t know how – then you’re constantly distracted with cleaning up their mistakes.

Focus on what matters:

I want you to grab a pen and paper and write down what is the most important thing in your business? For most of you, it’s going to be your staff. Some of you may disagree with me on that, but if you don’t have the ability to hire and train the best staff on the planet, you’re never going to be able to achieve your goals. You’re never going to grow because you’ll always be working in the business. 

So what is your ‘one thing’? I’ve done a book report on a book called The One Thing, which is a great book that you should read regarding this topic. In the book, the authors ask you to identify the one thing that if you were to focus on just that, everything else would solve itself. If you aren’t spending 50% of your time working on that one thing, I promise you are being distracted or you are distracted by things that don’t matter.

I want you to identify what the most important thing in your business is, and if you need help finding that out you can contact me and let’s have a strategy session or you can find a coach in your area. But, find someone with an outside perspective who can help you identify what is the most important thing in your business because often it’s hidden or not as obvious as you think. Most of you think it’s going to be your food or marketing, but my guess is that it’s not. 

Summing it up:

Figure out what the most important thing in your business is, and once you identify that spend 50% of your time mastering it and ignoring all the other distractions. Time to get to work!