Every store does it a different way.
In a group, the problem is rarely that managers cannot do the thing. It is that eleven capable people each solved it separately, so you have eleven versions of the period-end report and no two of them agree.
You find out at period close, which is the most expensive possible moment to find out.
One session across every store closes more of that gap than a tour of them does, because the fix is everybody hearing the same thing on the same day rather than each store being visited in turn and drifting again afterwards.
The cost is in the divergence
A single store doing something inefficiently costs you the inefficiency. Eleven stores doing it eleven different ways costs you that plus the reconciliation, and the reconciliation is the expensive half.
It is why period close takes an afternoon at one store and three days at another. Nobody is doing anything wrong. The processes simply do not match, so every number has to be argued into the same shape before anyone can read it.
The same is true of the thing that goes right. When one GM builds something genuinely good, nothing carries it to the other ten. Good ideas do not spread through a group on their own; they sit in one back office until somebody goes looking.
Eleven capable people, eleven answers, and nothing connecting them.
How a rollout actually goes
Find what already works. Somebody in the group has solved a version of this. Starting there rather than with a blank page means the first thing you standardise is a thing that has already survived a real week.
Pick one process, not all of them. The period-end report, or the prep list, or the invoices. A rollout that tries to change five things at once changes none of them, because no manager has five things worth of attention during service.
Do it once, with everyone. Not a tour. A tour means store one has been running the new process for six weeks by the time store eleven hears about it, and they have already diverged again.
Name an owner per store. Not the office. Someone in the building who runs it and who is asked about it, or it lasts three weeks.
Agree the number you will check in ninety days. If nobody wrote down what was supposed to improve, everyone will remember it as having worked and nothing will change next quarter.
Start smaller if you want to
A pilot at one store for four weeks costs you almost nothing and produces the thing that actually moves a group: a number from one of your own buildings rather than a promise from outside it.
If you would rather see the shape of the work before committing to anything, the tools I built for my own stores are on the site, and one of them runs in the page on your own figures.
More on working with a group
- Private AI training for restaurant groups
A day with your own team, on your own numbers.
- What a private engagement costs
From $5,000, and exactly what moves the number.
- Bring someone in, or use the person you have?
Including when the answer is your own spreadsheet guy.
- Implementation and building
When the answer is that somebody has to build it.
- Public workshops
The cheaper way in, if you have one or two to train.
Questions people actually ask
- Do all our locations have to be in one place for this?
- No, and usually they should not be. Remote sessions mean your GMs join from their own stores rather than eleven managers leaving the floor on the same day. Everyone still hears the same thing at the same time, which is the actual point.
- Should we pilot at one store first?
- Often yes. One store, one process, four weeks, and a number at the end you can show the others. A pilot that proves something is far more persuasive to the eleventh GM than a directive from the office.
- What if some of our managers are not technical?
- Most are not. Nobody installs anything or writes any code. The test I hold myself to is whether it survives a Friday: if a manager needs to think about it during a rush, it was built wrong.
- How do we stop it falling over after training day?
- By naming who owns each thing before anybody leaves the room. A tool nobody is responsible for stops being used in about three weeks, and that is a management problem rather than a training one.
- One of our GMs already built a spreadsheet that works. Do we throw it out?
- No. Usually that person is the best thing in the group and nobody has ever asked them to show anyone. A rollout that ignores the thing already working loses the one person whose buy-in you needed.
- How many locations does this make sense for?
- Roughly three to twenty. Below three, buy seats at a public workshop instead. Above twenty you probably have someone internal who should own this, and I would rather help you brief them than sell you a day.
Still deciding?
Take the free check first. Eight questions, no email, and you get the two things I’d fix in your building before I ask you for anything.