A P&L is a history document. It measures the past. You make or lose money in real time during The Shift.
Think of The Shift as a car and the Pre-Shift Meeting as the engine that powers, drives and steers where that Shift will go.
Every Shift needs clear goals, that are energetically presented and shared by the manager. If you don’t share goals with your team before every shift they will presume you don’t have any goals.
If you want store managers to execute pre-shifts daily, here’s a suggested Action Plan:
Tie your manager’s bonuses to doing Pre-Shift Meetings. What gets measured and rewarded gets done.
Be optimistic, not pessimistic. Stop focusing on why you “can’t” do pre-shifts and focus instead on HOW you’d benefit from doing them. Be a possibility thinker not a probability thinker. The probability thinker says “If I try a pre-shift meeting there’s a probability they might not succeed,” and so they don’t try. A possibility thinker says “There’s a 50% probability the pre-shift meeting might not work, but a 100% possibility that it will!”
Pre-shift meetings save time, they don’t take time. Pre-shift meetings lets store managers lead shifts, set goals, and get the team focused. It allows managers to spread energy and get habitually consistent results.
Start with a benchmark. Measure same store sales, service scores, margin, sales per labor hour, food costs etc before you execute pre-shift Sales Meetings. Measure again 30 days later. Share the improved numbers at Manager meetings and underscore the role Pre-Shift Sales Meetings had in the improved outcome.
Co-create focus areas. At your next manager meeting, co-create a list of specific pre-shift topics for the next 30 days so they can get started and sustain momentum. Have each manager contribute one new pre-shift topic at each manager meeting (and share their success stories around pre-shifts) so you continually have new ideas to share.
K.I.S.S. Keep each Pre-Shift meeting to under 3 minutes, always keep it positive, set clear and attainable goals, skinny the monologue, fatten the dialogue, keep it interactive, and used “spaced repetition” to drive home the key goals (see our one-hour thumb-drive video called Jumpstart at http://store.sullivision.com for video examples on the art of pre-shift meetings)
Practice pre-shift meetings at your manager meetings with each other before you roll it out with your hourly team. Never practice on your crew. Every month solicit and share best practices relative to pre-shift meetings. Have the manager who has the most success doing them teach their colleagues how he or she does it. Area Directors should attend as many of pre-shifts as possible as an observer. Schedule your store visits to be there when the pre-shift meetings take place. Take notes, record the meeting on your mobile device, praise the manager’s progress, then offer advice on how to improve the meeting (more interaction, energy, etc.) If you couldn’t attend their pre-shift Sales Meetings when you visit your operations, be sure to ask your managers how the pre-shift/Sales meeting went BEFORE you ask about anything else. What you reinforce is what you get. What you don’t is what you lose.
DON’T GIVE UP. Pre-Shift Meetings take time to take root and produce results, usually about three weeks (remember, you’re fighting habits here.)
Post the daily goal(s) for each shift on a brightly-colored piece of paper or on a digital monitor in the same place everyday so that team members who clock in at staggered times know where to find the goals.
Managers should conduct 30 second one-on-one pre-shift Meetings with associates who are scheduled to arrive in later at staggered times. Share shift goals, ask questions and reinforce that the team member is clear on the focus.
Coach to the goals DURING the shift as you monitor progress. Encourage team members to hit and exceed goals through recognition and suggestions.
ALWAYS FOLLOW UP ON THE GOAL(S) AT THE END OF EACH SHIFT. As team members clock out, teach your managers to let every team member know how they did against the goals, and how their efforts related to the goal’s achievement. “Re-recruit”.
Video the Pre-Shift Sales Meetings with your smartphone and share with your other managers. If a picture’s worth a thousand words, a moving picture is worth 10,000.
Download the FREE pre-shift meeting planning template on our homepage at www.Sullivision.com so you can customize and adapt the concepts to your restaurant.
Remember, you have 14 shifts per week per restaurant, 56 per month, 168 per quarter, 672 shifts per year. What if you just got a little better in each pre-shift each day???
