Boba, Pugs, and Too Much Process!

This weekend I marched in the annual Los Altos Pet Parade (thanks, as always, to Tim and Stacy from Justia for allowing my mutt to join their pug group, The Hug Pugs)!

This small-town event brings around 1000 people into downtown Los Altos. The participants start gathering at around 9:15am, the parade starts at 10am and everything is over by 10:30am.

Much to my kids’ delight, we discovered a Boba Guys boba tea store conveniently located at the end of the parade route. After a few minutes of begging, my kids convinced me to get them some boba. I walked over to the store and saw three teenagers behind the counter. Alas, when I tried the handle, it was locked. I then noticed that the store wasn’t scheduled to open until 11am.?

By 10:45, there was a line more than ten deep waiting outside of Boba Guys to get in. The workers inside, however, didn’t budge - they continued to chat amongst themselves.

Maybe the store opened right at 11am. I don’t know, because by then my family had already left town. I did fulfill my promise of boba to the kids, but through a rival boba store miles away.

I’m sure I am not the only potential customer that Boba Guys missed out on that day. Had they opened an hour earlier, they would have recorded one of their best hours of revenue ever. Instead the employees sat behind locked doors and watched that profit go elsewhere.

Deviating from the Process

I have never owned a quick service restaurant (QSR), nor have I owned a business that relies on minimum-wage teenagers as the main workforce. Undoubtedly, these sorts of businesses require a heavy amount of process to be successful. Due to the frequent? turnover of employees, low levels of expertise, and overall lack of passion for the job, most QSRs have probably concluded that the best approach is to have employees follow the process rather than act on their instincts. McDonalds doesn’t want the grill cook to decide to add his own blend of special ingredients to the Big Macs!

That said, had the owners of Boba Guys walked past that store this weekend and watched their employees twiddle their thumbs instead of opening the store 45 minutes early, I’m certain they would have appreciated and rewarded a little bit of deviation from the process.

A few years ago, I hired Mike Wolfgang to help train new executives on the Entrepreneur’s Operation System, or EOS. Prior to his business career, Mike was a US Marine (for a while serving on Marine One!). Prior to meeting Mike, I had always assumed that the Marines operated as a top-down organization - whatever your superior tells you to do, you just do it, and nothing more. Mike explained to me that the Marines encouraged every Marine to use their judgment when interpreting orders.

As this explanation notes: “Make every team member a problem solver. The Marines empower those closest to the front line to be decision makers. Why? They are the ones that are typically facing the problem head-on and have a greater understanding of the present need and are better informed to make critical decisions.”

While a general may create the strategy for a battle, once the battle begins, the front-line soldiers are given discretion to modify the strategy based on what is happening on the ground.

This, by the way, is in direct contrast to the approach the Russian army has used in Ukraine, with dire consequences. As The New York Times reports, many Russian generals have been killed because the Russians use: “A centralized, top-down command hierarchy gives decision-making authority only to the highest levels — compared to the more decentralized American structure that pushes many battlefield decisions to senior enlisted personnel and junior officers — forcing Russian generals to make risky trips to the front lines to resolve logistical and operational issues.”

Process Without People Fails

I am a huge believer in process (indeed, I often joke that PPC not only stands for “pay per click” but also for “people, process, and culture”!) A company without process is just a bunch of smart people running around trying to make smart decisions. There is no brand and no predictability of results.

The best companies, however, always make room for employees to deviate from the process. Entry-level employees should be 80% process and 20% art while senior employees should be 80% art and 20% process.?

Translated into a boba store with hundreds of potential customers walking past their door, it means that while it's not OK to change the price of the product, or the recipe, or the cleanup process, it is OK to sometimes open 20 minutes early. It may feel scary, but even teenagers can sometimes be trusted to make the right decisions!