Page 24 - foodservice magazine April 2019

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MANAGEMENT
TONY ELDRED
FOOD SERVICE
Over the past thirty years, my company has been engaged by plenty of hospitality
owners who wanted help restructuring their businesses, and I’ve noticed a few things along the way.
Our job is to help an owner make the transition from a small business to a well-structured company.
Imagine you’ve been in the industry for a while and decide to go it alone. Through long hours, hard work and creative endeavours, you’ve grown your business to the point where you wake up one day and realise you’ve created a monster. Financially, you’re ok, but your work-life balance is practically non-existent.
Unfortunately this scenario is all too frequent, because the skills necessary to run a large business are quite different to
the skills needed to run a small one. Small businesses need supervising, large businesses need managing.
The transition from supervisor to manager can be a difficult process. In theory, it involves stepping back, letting go, and getting others to do what you once did. In reality, it’s not that easy. It involves taking on a plethora of new skills and accepting quite different ways of doing things. Most importantly, it requires a very high level of self-discipline.
You don’t have to be smart to be a good manager, but you do have to be disciplined. You can get away with all sorts of bizarre communication and goalpost- shifting when you have a small team and you deal with them directly, but when you sit at the top of a sizeable pyramid, this will prove very costly.
If you’re a business leader, you may not realise that
your staff watch everything you do. They take their cues from you and tend to reflect the values and behaviour
you demonstrate. If you are unclear or poorly organised, that lack of clarity and disorganisation will be echoed right through your team,
and can cause a huge loss in productivity and quality.
Being a good manager is a lot to do with being logical, systematic and thorough. For example, if you have three waiters, you may get by without documented service procedures and still show consistent performance if you supervise them; but if you have twenty, you can’t, and you’ll end-up with 15 interpretations of what should be done. It’s the same for a chef – you can directly
Tony Eldred operates Eldred Hospitality, The Hospitality Management Specialists. Contact him on (03) 9813 3311 or at www.eldtrain.com.au
FROM LITTLE THINGS, BIG THINGS GROW
MANAGEMENT STYLE DEPENDS ON BUSINESS SIZE, WRITES TONY ELDRED. TRANSITIONING FROM A SMALL TO A BIG BUSINESS REQUIRES A NEW SKILL SET; AND MANAGING, RATHER THAN SUPERVISING, TAKES DISCIPLINE. PAY ATTENTION.
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