If you know what you WANT and you know WHY you want it, you can endure almost any HOW

A Restaurant Manager’s Guide to Continued Success

By Alex Munford

After working my way from the very bottom of the Food & Beverage industry to leading my own teams and sites, I have learned more knowledge and skills than I know what to do with! I have therefore decided to share all of these key experiences with others on the ascension, to offer insight from experience and hopefully guide some of you through the many different opportunities & challenges that come with running any successful restaurant.

As you’ve probably seen already in previous issues, at the end of February of this year we opened up a new restaurant in my local town.

And boy has it been an adventure!

We’ve recruited a whole new team, and even re-recruited some of them.?

We’ve had arguments and fall outs as well as group hugs and make ups,

We’ve seen crazy busy bank holidays followed by tumbleweed tuesdays,

We’ve taken part in a mountain of training, run countless sessions for our team and spent far more time away from family than most of us would like to.?

I even sat myself down for a pep talk at one stage -?

‘You wanted a challenge, well, this is what challenging feels like’.?

I think I lost that for a while. We all say we are prepared to put in the hard work but when it comes to that byproduct called pain, we back down.?

Kind of like wanting a baby but complaining about the weeks of sickness… It’s part of the process. Either suck it up and move forwards, or don’t do it.?

But it has got me thinking

What is it that makes us do it?

It’s no secret that the hospitality industry comes with euphoric highs but also devastating lows.?

We get to create and give experiences to people that they would never have created themselves. I don’t believe you can achieve this sort of job satisfaction working in many other industries.?

Equally, we get to feel the full force of a guest’s wrath when we don’t quite get it right, or sometimes if they’re just having a bad day too. (You will encounter both and you won’t always know which it is…so just be kind)

Couple that with the unsocial hours, the constant complaining from family that you’ll never make it to another mother’s day meal or even the fact that you’ll be nodding off over christmas dinner and it suddenly all looks very unappealing.?

So why do so many of us devote our working lives to it?

Well, and this is just Alex’s 2 cents worth, I believe that if you know WHAT you want and you know WHY you want it then you can endure almost any HOW.

What I mean is - if you are crystal clear (and only absolute clarity will do) on exactly WHAT you want from your career and you know WHY you want it then you will be willing to do whatever it takes to get there. (The HOW).

In essence - I think it’s about making the short term sacrifice for the long term gain. In an age where fewer and fewer people are willing to sacrifice anything without instant gratification, those who are, really have an edge over the competition.?

Whenever you are chasing any ambition, any goal or any WHAT, the result is never guaranteed. What is guaranteed however, is the struggle. The pain. It won’t be easy , it never is.?

If it was then you’d have it already.?

In other words, if your WHAT is worth chasing (and only you can be the judge) the HOW will be tough.?

It will hurt,?

It will get difficult.?

But with a big enough WHY the pursuit becomes manageable.?Tolerable even.

Pain is inevitable - suffering is optional.

I know what I want for my life, my personal goals, my business goals and my growth and development goals. I know where I want to be in 1, 3, 5, 10 and even 25 years. Down to every last detail.

But what about the why?

As a father of 4 and a half kids, (not sawn in 2, just not quite fully baked yet) I know exactly why I do what I do...

To create opportunities for my children.?

I don’t wish to leave them billions of dollar bucks or millions in assets.?

I simply desire for them to have as many doors open to them as I can get my feet in.?

That’s it. That’s my WHY.

And if the HOW requires that I sacrifice a few additional hours today to ensure that they have options tomorrow, then sign me up. I’ll take that exchange everyday of the week.

Therefore, the long and unsocial hours make sense to me. Every angry guest is just another obstacle to overcome to get my kids the opportunities I wish for them to have.

One of the tricks I use to help minimise this sacrifice is that every 24 hour day is split into 3 separate days. Not always evenly split, but 3 separate ‘days’.

A work day, a family day, and an everything else day.?

During my family ‘day’, I do nothing else. No work, no phones, no distractions. Just family. The greatest gift we can give another human (in my opinion) is our undivided attention, so I try to give my family this as often as possible.

During my work 'day', I do nothing else. This entire ‘day’ is devoted towards the job. Essentially - generating profits.?

Completing only the tasks that move us closer towards our revenue goals. (Everything else we do is just in pursuit of these profits but that’s a topic of conversation for another day).

And everything else just gets taken care of on my ‘everything else’ day. All of the chores associated with being an adult human as well as anything else. The clothes, dishes, cooking, other chores etc. Oh, and sleeping fits in here too.?

The very concept of what constitutes an hour, or a day, was clarified thousands of years ago, before electronics, instant communication and air travel. A journey to a neighbouring village might have taken a whole day, but now it takes 10 minutes. Everything we want or do now is instant, or at very least same day.?

So why do we still think of time in the same way as we did before computers, or planes or cars?

Why not play with it, reassign a meaning that better suits your needs?

Why not put 3 days into every earth orbit? Or even just 2??

I’m not sure it will work for everybody, but it works for me and mine. Having these boundaries and structure actually gives me more freedom to focus on deep work and what matters at any given time.?And this makes my HOW a whole lot easier.

Ciao, x