How To Build Profits in the Post COVID-19 Economy with Darren Manzari

Here we are. Hello, Facebook. Want to say. Also a shouting out to all of my YouTube followers and also on Periscope. I am very honored to have a special guest on the show today, friend and actually business partner of mine, Darren Mansari. Welcome to Facebook Live, Darren.

Thank you, Donald. Pleasure to be here.

And you're up in South Dakota?

I am. If you're familiar with South Dakota. I'm up in the Black Hills, so I'm in the mountains of South Dakota. You know, a lot of South Dakota is very flat, so the Black Hills is up in the northwestern part, and it's very mountainous. We enjoy nature, lots of mountain biking, hiking, things like that. Small town living and over.

The weather up there is so, like, turbulent. I mean, the other day you and I were talking, like, one day you're out mountain biking, next day you had what, like, eight. Eight inches of snow?

I mean, that's correct. South Dakota is like that. You never know what you're gonna get. And this time of year, it could be 70 degrees and you could be mountain biking in shorts and a T shirt. And the very next day, we get a foot of snow.

Yeah. Crazy. Crazy. Yeah. And. And we met because you. You and I got together because you and your wife opened up a. A restaurant in Spearfish called Nona's Kitchen. And then we. You and I started talking about numbers and KPIs. And that just got us really onto this kind of like. Kind of like this whole tangent about how KPRs are so important. And then you kind of revealed to me that you actually, you are. You're an expert in KPIs and efficiency. And so we started brainstorming some more stuff, and now we're launching a new program called Restaurant KPI Mastery. Tell us a little bit about how you got involved in KPIs.

Okay, well, KPIs I got involved in many years ago. So my wife and I, we were childhood sweethearts. We met when we were 12 years old. We were engaged when we were 17 and married when we were 20. And from there, we moved upstate New York to the Adirondack Mountains. So we've always tried to live in mountainous areas. We just love it. And that's where we raised our two children, Darren and Matthew. And at the time, we were in the automotive industry. So when I went to school, I majored in computer programming for my dad because he thought computers were the way to the future. And I guess he was right, looking back. But I loved cars. I loved working in the automotive field. So when I Graduated from college. I was in a unique position because cars were just becoming controlled by computers. And I understood computer programming, I understood how computers think, and I also understood how cars work. So I was in a very unique position. And we opened our first business when we were 21 years old. And by the time I reached 30, let's say, or 31, that had grown into just, you know, we had originally one shop with one bay with, you know, you know, me as the only person working there. And, you know, before we had kids, my wife would help me answer the phones and things like that. So now we had three businesses. We probably had 80 people at that time working for us and three very large facilities. Think like dealership size. So the Lord blessed and grew the business very quickly, and life got very, very busy very quickly, as you could imagine. So I was working a lot of hours, and my children were around the age of 10 years old, so they're 20 months apart. So let's say one was nine and one was 11 or something like that, but we were in that range. And Nancy said to me one night, she said, hey, you know, I want to have a talk with you. And, you know, there was just that little tone of seriousness in it that I knew this was more important than just a normal talk. So I said, sure, what's up, honey? And she told me, she said, you know, you're a great husband, you're a great provider, you're a great father to the kids, but, you know, there's always a but that follows that but you'll work a lot of hours. She said. And I said, well, yeah, I said, if we have three businesses, we have almost 100 people. You know, that's. That's respond that we're responsible for. So I do work a lot of hours. And she says, well, it's no problem. She said. She goes, but the kids are 10 years old. She said, and in 10 more years, they're going to be married and out of the house. And I don't want you to look back at that point and say, hey, you know what? Where did this time go? Like, I missed this whole time with my children growing up. So she said it was a halftime warning. And I took heed to that. And I said, you know what? She's really right. I have to figure this out. I have to figure out a way to run my businesses efficiently, but yet not be so tied to the business. So because of that, I did a deep dive into key performance metrics. And I said, where is exactly the profitability coming from in my businesses and realize each businesses was different. So one was automotive repair, but one was a full service transmission shop. You know, totally different KPIs, totally different way of making profitability in each of those businesses. And it took me about a year to really figure out exactly what was going on there. But once I did, I was able to reduce my working hours to the point where I didn't even have to come into work anymore. So I went from working 80 hours a week to working maybe 8 hours a month or 10 hours a month at the physical locations. We packed our family up, we moved to Florida, leaving all three businesses in upstate New York. I spent the next year or two just coaching baseball teams and hanging out with the kids and doing all sorts of things. It was great. It was really a great time for, for the family, for me, for everything. And I realized that I was able to increase the profitability while reducing working hours by understanding how to efficiently run a business and how to really look at the. The details, right? They say the devil's in the details, right? But where are the details? Where is that profitability actually coming from? And what jobs are profitable and what jobs aren't profitable. So I built this whole matrix on my computer to analyze the daily KPIs. And then what happened one day is I was at a meeting with a company that was kind of like affiliated with General Motors. And they said, Darren, we've never seen anything like this before. You know, they asked me how is it I was running my shops from Florida, living in Florida, running shops in New York. They said, you just don't do that in our industry. And when I showed it to them, they had never seen anything like it. And that kind of moved me into a new direction where I then went into a consulting business to teach KPIs because they asked me if I could teach it to their dealers. And next thing I knew, I found myself in over 20 plus countries teaching KPIs around the world, teaching dealerships, vehicle importers, and all other types of businesses have how to really understand and monitor KPIs and how to build that profitability out of their business.

Yeah, and you and I really connected because we started like talking about how there's certain KPIs in restaurants.

Exactly.

You were actually asking me questions because you wanted to understand the restaurant business from the KPI standpoint. So we got to talking and we actually started building out this really cool model. And then we decided this is a great tool because the things you, you kind of felt that you were faced up against, you know, in the automotive industry with three shops running your life, you know, not having any time for what mattered to you. Those are the same things that most independent restaurant owners face, especially if they have one, you know, one to four, you know, one to three to one to four different locations. They feel like all they're doing is just running back and forth all the time. And we, we definitely want to make sure that we don't ever get like that.

No. And, and, you know, it doesn't have to be like that. I'll tell them a funny story from when you and I first met, but we, we opened the restaurant here in Spearfish, South Dakota. Not because it's like a great business that, that, you know, like, we make our family, makes our money in other ways, so it doesn't need to support us, but it's always been a dream of my wife. My, my wife, from a very young age, has always been fascinated by cooking. She's a wonderful cook. Our boys were homeschooled and in the professional athlete circuit, so they would show up with 20 friends at any given time. And Nancy would always love to cook. Let's say it's her love language. Feeding people is her love language. And she's a fantastic chef. She's really, really good. So it was a dream of her to open a restaurant. So I said, you know what? Let's open a restaurant. That's what you want to do. Let's open an Italian restaurant. And so we opened this restaurant called Nona's Kitchen. And it was the third day. So first of all, I met Donald prior to opening because I believe in consulting. That's what I do for a living. So I'm like, well, if I'm going to open a restaurant, I'm going to go find the expert in the field to figure out how to do these things. And Donald helped me with that initial ramp up and understanding what I have to do and what training I have to do. And he came up and actually did some training for us. And then it was day three of our opening, and I called Donald and I said, you know, I'm analyzing the KPIs and I'm not liking this number. And Donald laughed. He said, darren, this is your third day. I have restaurant owners that, you know, Never look at KPIs, they've been in business years. And I said, well, to me, it's day three. I'm already two days too late. I should have looked at this on day one. So he was laughing. We got A good chuckle out of it. But I'm finding the restaurant industry not difficult at all. If you follow the model and if you follow what you're supposed to do. In the automotive industry and in many industries, people just, they equate working harder and getting more business to making more money. A lot of times automotive repair shops will say, if I could just do 10 more cars a day. Not realizing their whole problem is they're already doing too many cars a day. So you can't, you can't be profitable like that. And the restaurant industry is no different. You know, the restaurant industry might think, you know, if I could just get more customers equal more money. More customers equal more money. But that's not always true because more customers, if your kitchen's not keeping up with it, is delaying the food times out to. Out to the customers. Right? So your guest check waiting time or your guest waiting time is actually lowering because you're backing up your kitchen by too much. And then if you do that, you're not only aggravating your customers, but you're delaying turnover time. So it's not a matter of more customers, it's a matter of where do those metrics need to be and what are those indicators need to read? And then once I understand them and analyze them, how do I then build that into profitability?

Yeah, that was one of the problems we had when Nona's first open. Remember, you open the doors and kitchen was getting blasted overwhelmed. Ticket times were like an hour long. And then you got on the phone with me, I think around 11 o' clock or midnight, you got on the phone with me. It's like, what do we do? And it's like, okay, first thing we got to control the flow. And then we put in reservation system. And then as soon as we put in the reservation system, you were saying you could maximize capacity and still keep the tickets really at a good time.

That's exactly right. And it's just getting an understanding of how that all works. Where is that balance? Some people, like when I talk about KPIs, some of your listeners right now, or some of the people watching might be saying, well, what is a KPI? Or they might be saying, I heard KPIs and I do monitor KPIs and some of them might actually actively track KPIs. But what's important to understand is that KPIs is like a very general term, right? KPIs for the automotive industry aren't the same as KPIs for the restaurant industry. And even in the restaurant industry, we have what you call global KPIs. And what I call global KPIs is they work for the whole restaurant industry. It doesn't matter if you're an Olive Garden or if you're a Nona's Kitchen or If you're a TGI Fridays. There are certain KPIs that you want to check, right? Global KPIs that they might be like guest count or guest check average, or what are your net sales, things like that. But then there's also local KPIs that I want to measure something specific to known as kitchen. Right. It has nothing to do with these old other industries. It has to do with, with my restaurant. So, so let's say, let me give you some examples here. So the restaurant or the front of house, you might have KPIs like guest count, you might have net sales, you might have guest check average, discounts and comps. Those are, those are all items that you want to measure, right? Oh, if you're staying on track for the front of house. Now the back of house might have average order time, average ticket time. The restaurant as a whole might have, you know, KPIs, such as, what is your food cost percentage? What is your beverage cost percentage, what is your cash flow? Those are all what I call global KPIs. They're very general. Every restaurant should be looking at them. And not only looking at them, but trying to figure out how do I understand them, what does this mean and what do I have to do if this is out of range, let's say. But then you have more specific KPIs, you have KPIs like prime cost. You have KPIs like rev patch, you have resource utilization, which now you're getting more into the details.

I'll share on the screen right away so people can see. So restaurant KPI master. These are some of the, the KPIs that we look at.

Exactly. These are some of the things we look at on a global scale. But then you might want to look at, well, what is my rev pass for a certain section of my restaurant? So looking at rev pass on the whole restaurant, you might say it needs to come up. It needs to come up. So now you're trying as a business owner to try to figure out how to. How do I bring up rev patch for the restaurant when honestly my front section on my back section are doing fine. It's my upper section that wasn't doing fine with rev patch. Right. And what I Found was that my. My upper section or my second floor dining is being utilized at dinner time, but not at lunchtime. At lunchtime, we just don't have enough foot traffic, so it doesn't warrant opening up the upstairs. Well, when I heard that, I was like, boy, that doesn't make sense to me. The upstairs is so great because, you know, as a matter of fact, whenever I have business meetings and I have to do presentations, I always book the whole upstairs of my restaurant because I could set that up conducive to a business environment. I could, you know, I take this one painting down, I hang a screen up, I have a projector. And then I thought, well, you know what, maybe there's a lot of other businesses in town that would like to utilize this for a business lunch. And once we started looking in that direction, suddenly the rev pass for the upper dining section increased, which then brought the whole up. So rather than trying to understand why is the whole restaurant down, maybe the whole restaurant's not down, maybe just a section of your restaurant that is down. And that's where the analysis comes in. Right. So it's not just understanding what is a KPI and what does this mean, but it means it's in the understanding of the analysis of the KPIs and not just of the individual, but as the whole. Right. How do we look at the whole picture and not just one specific item in the picture? Right. Does that make sense?

And then like one of the things that you and I looked at because, you know, no one has shut down right now because of the, you know, COVID 19 and you decided it was best to not risk, you know, not only the public, but also your staff. So you, you guys made the conscious choice to shut down even before it was kind of mandated, which I thought was very. That was a very courageous move on your end to do that. And, you know, that also shows people that you're a community leader, that you're taking initiative and you're working out the stuff before people ask you to because you thought was the best move. But one of the things that we talked about with Ref Pastures, we talked about, you know, probably people here haven't been to Nonas but notice has a huge table right in the middle of the dining room, big one, seats eight people. And one of the things that we talked about how to increase our rev pass is because, you know, we get people that kind of just. They book that table on a Friday, Saturday, and they sit there for three hours. They do what I call as the gilligan which they sit there forever and they order like, you know, just a normal meal and they're having a great time. But we thought, you know, how can we increase the ref pass for that table? And you and I came up with this kind of idea about doing a chef's table. Correct. Doing a chef's table, which would actually help our rev passion quite a bit for that table.

Correct. And that's a great example of not looking at the restaurant as a whole, but saying, how could we increase the rev passion? That table's in our front dining room. So as that works, then we might say, well, how do we increase the rev passure in the back dining room? How do we increase the rev passure of the upper dining room? And what we're trying to do is now we're trying to micromanage. We're trying to really hone in on this to maximize the profitability of just that one indicator.

Exactly.

Right now, there's a dozen indicators. And that's another thing, I guess that's important to understand is that when I go into a company and I help them with their efficiency, that's really what I am. I'm an efficiency consultant. And I say, you know, I look at a company and their resource utilization is at 60%. And I want to get it, you know, in some industries, I know the restaurant industry, we aim for 80%, but some industries, we actually aim for 112%.

Right.

And, you know, it's not. If you're operating at 60 and you want to go to 80, it's not like you're doing one thing wrong that's affecting 20% of your business.

Right.

You're probably doing 20 things wrong. And each one, you know, this one's affecting a half a percentage point. This one's affecting one percentage. Right. And understanding that, you realize that it's a process. And we're going to fix these one at a time. We're going to use the 80, 20 rule. We're going to fix the biggest, you know, offenders first. This way we can maximize your profitability right away. But then we're going to get into the finer details. You know, it's almost like, you know, someone our age anyway would remember when cars had radios that had dials on them, right? Oh, yeah. Half the people probably don't know what I'm talking about right now. But you used to have an analog radio and used to take the main dial and used to move it, and it would move the dial, the indicator, very quickly, and you would come up to a station, but the station wasn't perfectly clear. And then there was another dial behind that that if you move that, that was the fine tuning and you could really, you could really focus in on that frequency. That's kind of like what we do as efficiency consultants, where we come in and we find out what are those, what's the big dial? Let's move things quick to just get everything up to a certain level. And then from there we could begin fine tuning it with it with the other dial and really maximize that profitability. And I shouldn't talk in just times, in just profitability as an efficiency consultant. Most people call me when they're financially not meeting their targets. But it has to do with more than that. It has to do with maximizing your time off. Because when people go into business, a lot of times they don't go into business to say, hey, I want to make a lot of money. They go into business because this is what I love to do. Right? In the automotive field, they were a good mechanic. And in the restaurant field, they're a great chef. They love feeding. Like my wife, like, that's her love language. She loves to feed people. Yes, she wants to make a profit, but that's not her. That's not her focus at all. Her focus is, are the people happy? Are they enjoying the food, are they leaving? Do they feel like they've come to a family restaurant? So I have to let her experience that while at the same time building a profitable restaurant so we could continue to run it that way. So it has to do with a lot more than just the financial end of it. It has to do with your satisfaction in living. Right? Do you have the life that you dreamed when you opened this restaurant? What were those goals you were looking for? Do you have enough time with your family? Are you keeping your family life and your business life and your worship life all imbalance or in some sort of harmony with each other?

Right? And you and I talked about that. Most restaurant owners, they go to the only tool they know and that's throw more work at it.

Correct? Correct. And that's not going to work. You know, and another thing that businesses do wrong, and I'm not pointing fingers at anybody, this is just the way it is in business, is they wait till the end of the month and at the end of the month they run their reports to see how they did. And they say, boy, we didn't meet our objectives. Like, you know, there never seems to be, there always seems to be too much month at the end of the Money. Right. And now they're trying to figure out, how am I going to pay this bill? How am I going to pay this bill? How am I going to do this? And next month I'm going to try harder. Next month, what we're going to do is we're going to run a special on Fridays. Right?

Right.

That's not the answer. Right. You can't look at things at the end of the month and then try to figure out what went wrong. What you're doing is you're running your business in reaction. You have to run your business in action and anticipation of what's going to happen. And what I love about KPIs is I know exactly what each day is going to bring because I'm tracking them day by day by day. So I know what my Mondays are, I know what my Tuesdays are. So if I want to try something on a Monday night, I could try it. And by the end of Monday night, by Tuesday morning, I know if that worked or not. I don't have to wait till the end of the month to know if that worked because I'm in anticipation. I'm always trying to figure out, okay, I'm going to try this, monitor the results, try this, monitor the result. I'm not going to wait till the end of the month.

And I got excited when you showed me in real time some of your, you know, some of your clients that are using your KPIs for their businesses, and you were showing me, look, and you said, you rewarded me, say, don't touch anything because this is like real time stuff. Don't mess with anything because it messes their numbers up. But you were like showing me their dashboard because I was like the biggest frustration I have with my clients. And even when I go around the world speaking and I ask every audience, how many people in the audience know down to the penny what everything on your menu costs? And I'm always shocked. 5% at the most. 5%, sometimes less in any audience. Doesn't matter If I'm speaking 100 people, 700 people, a thousand people, only 5% know the cost of everything on their menu. And so I was like, I'm always totally instructed. I was like, you know, if people just had a way they could constantly look at a dashboard and maybe it's just dials and stuff like that. And then you show me this KPI and I'm going to share with everybody. Now, this is a, this is not like a finished one. This is like our, you know, this is our work. In progress. 1. But you can see, you know, this is like so cool for an owner to be able to just walk every day, log into the system to restaurant KPI mastery, and right away you can see where I'm at with utilization, cash flow, guest check average, you know, guest guess of the day versus what our, you know, we're trying to maximize 80% what our prime costs are now. This is Nona's, but, you know, Nona's closed down. So our prime cost is out of whack right now.

Yeah. And also what we're doing is we're just putting in some real numbers, but some false numbers to try to get the programming down and get everything ready. What you're looking at here is really the back end. This is like what we look at actually on the system, on the user interface. It'll actually be cleaner than this. But this gives you an idea of how simple it is where you're looking at a gauge. Just get the needles to the green and. And again, I guess that's easier said than done in a sense where if I said to an owner, just move that one needle to the green. Well, the question comes in, how do I move it? If we look at one needle and try to move it, you're not really getting a good picture because each KPI is affected by another KPI. The example that you gave earlier is if you have too much flow coming into the kitchen, so your guest count, your average daily guest coming into the restaurant, is too high. It affects the time it backs up the kitchen, and it affects the time that the food gets out to the tables, which then affects your table turns. If I was a restaurant owner and I was just looking at table turns, I would be like, we got to turn these tables quicker. And what would you do? You'd probably look at your server staff and you would say, you, you got to clear these tables quicker so we could turn them. That's not the problem at all. So then you would look at the kitchen and say, you know, our table turns are down because you're not getting the food out quick enough. That's not the problem either. The problem is the intake into the door. The problem is the host stand. It's not any of those things. So if you look at one KPI and try to fix it without looking at a group of KPIs as a whole, you're really, you're not doing the analysis correctly. And probably what you try to implement to fix it isn't going to work.

Exactly. I mean, that's the biggest thing, and the thing I love about this is that, you know, the system that, you know, that you created, it's so cool because, I mean, five, ten minutes a day, just putting in some basic numbers. Because, you know, the biggest problem I hear from restaurants, I didn't know, oh, my God, I don't have two hours to sit at my computer. Computer in the office and put in numbers all day. It's like, no, you don't. If you do it, if you manage it. Now, what we're trying to do with, with KPI Mastery is develop new habits. If you develop a new habit of putting in numbers every day, five, 10 minutes, it will spit out huge information for you.

Oh, it's incredible. It will. And it changes the whole way you look at your business. You go from, you know, just being a passenger. Think of it like a ship, right? Like a boat. You can either be a passenger of the boat and the wind and the tides will take that boat where it wants to go, or you could be the captain and you could actually plot the course and you could drive the boat to the destination you want it to be at, right? And that's what happens. And again, don't take that the wrong way. If you're a business owner and you're not your KPIs, I'm not saying you're just totally along for the ride. You're doing the best you can to control the business and control the profitability and things like that. But there's so much more you could do. You know, I live in South Dakota and Donald lives in New Mexico, right. Which is kind of like southwest of me, right? So if I wanted to drive to Donald's house, I could either get in my car and just head in the general direction of southwest, and I probably eventually run into eventually New Mexico eventually. Or I could go to the GPS of my car and I could say, look, I'm at this point and I want to go to this point, and what's the most efficient way to get there? And the GPS would tell me and it would say, darren, we want you to take this highway. We want you to take this road. And I would start going down that path. But then what would happen is the GPS in the background is continuing continuously analyzing my progress. And it's looking at road conditions and it's looking at traffic patterns. And all of a sudden, you're on the highway that it told me to be on, and you get a little message that says, hey, you could save 10 minutes by taking this exit because it's routing you around some traffic. That's what analyzing KPIs is like for your business. It's saying, number one, where are you? And I like to use the words define reality. Like, where are you right now? Exactly. Because if we know where you are and we know where you're going, we could plot the course to get there. At first, we're going to plot a general course. This is the best highway that we know that's going to get you there quickly. And we're going to start along that course. But by monitoring the KPIs, it's like monitoring traffic conditions along the way. We might say, hey, you know what? We wanted to do this, but let's just lower it by two points. Let's just make a slight adjustment here. And we're constantly adjusting those needles, adjusting those dials to get you as efficiently as possible to the destination. That's what KPI Mastery does.

Yeah, it's gonna be an awesome program. In fact, we're kind of rolling it out with our. With restaurant, you know, and everyone. A lot of people know. I had a Restaurant Mastermind group up until last year, and I was traveling so much, like, three weeks, three weeks out of the month on the road, it was really hard for me to maintain the quality I wanted and the integrity of the group. So I had to shut it down. But now, just like a lot of people, COVID 19 made me reassess my business model. And we're actually reopening Restaurant Masterminds. We're starting on Monday. And I wanted to share this real quick for people so they can see this is like our restaurant, Rebound Planet. And Darren mentioned this. You know, step number one is define your reality. You want to talk about that? Yeah.

And that's so important. You know, when so many times people, they just look at the destination, right? And they say, you know, I just need. Need to get more customers in so I can make more money. Like, that's their mindset, and they know that because, you know, they're just not profitable. They want to run the business, they want to sell food, they want to feed people because that's their love, that's their dream, that's their passion. But they have to do it in a profitable format, so stay in business. And their thought process is, feed more people, make more money. Feed more people, make more money. Without realizing that that's a completely wrong way to look at it. Right. What you need to look at is, are your numbers in line? So the first thing we have to do is define Reality and say, where are you? What are your resources? What are you doing right now? What do the KPIs look like today? And then from there, like your thought or the owner's thought process might be get more people in? My thought process might be, no, not at all. Let's slow this down. We're bringing in too many people. Your kitchen can't handle it. You know, one thing we just did is we had to make an adjustment in our kitchen, and Donald's helped me to understand this, where our menu. And maybe, Donald, you could expand on this a little bit. But 80% of our menu items were happening on the saute grill on saute, and only 20% were happening on the grill. And we're trying to figure out a way to get more food, more product out to the customers quicker. So the reality is I can't get a bigger stove. So Donald said, well, why don't we rearrange the menu to put a greater percentage onto the. Onto the actual grill and ease up on saute a little bit. We. We're still feeding. We still have the same number of menu items, but now we're doing a better separation in the kitchen, and now we're going to get more food out. So you might want to expand on that a little bit. But that's one simple way.

A lot of restaurants, they design menus. They design menus for what they like, you know, oh, I love this dish. I love this dish. I love this dish on there. And fantastic, you know, but then when we start looking at the station flow, it's really. It gets crazy. And, you know, and I was like, okay, we got a lot of saute stuff. At the time, we had a guy who's, you know, pretty good on saute, but we didn't know he was going to step. Step away and try to let other people do the saute. And they didn't have the skill sets he had. So we found ourselves in trouble quickly. So we again, we looked at this opportunity to reset a lot of the things that Nona's. Because we had been open for a little while, not too long, but we also learned what we had done right. And also some things that needed to be improved. And we definitely looked at the menu, and we've restructured. Our new menu now has a lot more items off the grill. I think before, I don't think we had anything really off the grill. Chicken breast was it? I think it was it.

Yeah. We had this big grill, and we were hardly using it. You know, we had one. One Steak dish that we offered, Right. Because we're an Italian restaurant, we're not a steakhouse. A couple of grilled chicken dishes, but hard got used at all.

Yeah. And now our menu is actually a little more probably, like, probably 55% saute. And, you know, the rest is grill. Now, before it was like 90% saute.

Correct? Correct.

Yeah.

You know, and you said something good. You said, we realized that this could be improved and realized that even though we're improving it now, we're going to improve it again. We're going to improve it again. Because, you know, I live my life with a term that I learned when I was 24 years old, right. And it comes from watching Tony Robbins. And he has a term called kanai, which stands for constant and never ending improvement. And that's really a takeaway from the Japanese word kaizen, which in the Japanese culture, this is built into their culture, that there's always a better way to do things. There's always, always room for improvement. So even when we fix that, we balance saute with the grill. That's great. But I'm still going to look for ways to improve. There's always a better way. There's always improvements you can make. And that's like. My wife's passion is in feeding people. My passion is improving processes. I love to do that. I love to look at a process and say, how could this be better? How could this be improved? You know, I love that. I got a call this morning from an overseas dealership and it's a Toyota dealer. And Toyota corporate just came in and they're introducing. They want people to start looking at KPIs this year. The 2020 goal is to have service departments start looking at KPIs. And he was laughing because they showed him what they were introducing to the dealerships. And, you know, he's from England. And he told the guy, he goes, this is rubbish. He said, he said. He said, darren has me looking at KPIs for the last 15 years. And he showed him one of the, you know, one of the sheets that we use overseas to track KPIs. And Toyota was like, this is amazing. Could we get a copy of this? And he goes, well, I'll put you in touch with Darren. He says, but. But, yeah, it's amazing how many industries, how many businesses, KPIs and realize that it is determining the success or failure of your business, Right. There's a great saying that say businesses don't usually go out of business by one catastrophic event. Even though COVID 19 is now one catastrophic event. So this will be the one that does put some people out of business. But businesses usually go out of business by $5 a day, and it's such a small amount that they can't realize that it's happening. And before you know it, you know, they finish one month and they're behind. Then they finish another month that they're behind, and they get to a point where they just can't catch up. And then they start doing things out of desperation. Well, maybe if I lower prices, I'll get more people in. Well, lowering prices isn't going to help because already that KPI is way out of whack. So that's not the answer. Maybe if I just bring more people in. No, that might not be the answer either. Right. So the only way you're going to understand the answer is to be able to look at all these indicators and do a proper analysis and figure out exactly where does the problem lie.

Yeah, I have restaurants like that a lot. Like, I just need more marketing. I just need to get more people, you know, butts in seats. Well, if you got, you know, if you got bad service and bad food and it doesn't matter. Just, it's like, I call it the hole in the bucket mentality. A lot of places like that, you have so many holes in the bucket that you feel, I just. If I keep filling the bucket up, I'll have enough overflow to save some. But then what happens is there's, like, more holes in the bucket, so more is leaking out. My is, let's plug the holes up first and then let's fill the bucket up.

Correct.

Restaurant masterminds like, this is a kind of our. Our first 10 weeks is going through this plan, this restaurant rebound plan. So, number one, we're going to define the reality for people. Number two, we're really. And I'm always. Again, this is like the number two thing I'm shocked about is people, number one, don't know their food cost or their cost of everything on the menu. Number two, they have not defined their core values. And what was, like, the first exercise you and I made you and Nancy.

Go through was our core values. Absolutely. And, you know, not only did you have us go through the core values and realize, you know, what are those core values and what do we want to make for the core values of donors, but then how do we instill them into the staff so that the staff is not just preaching our core values, but is exhibiting? They're demonstrating our Core values in everything they do, in the way they talk to the customers and the way they serve the customers in every aspect of their job. How are you demonstrating our core values? And one thing we did is a lot of businesses will put it, like, in a plaque and they'll hang it up somewhere, but we put it in, like, a dozen plaques. We have it in the dining room. We have it in the bathrooms. We have it in the cupboard everywhere. You can't be in any place at no one's kitchen without turning your head and seeing our core values. And you can't imagine the feedback. I get so much feedback from customers about that on, you know, they'll talk to me about my core values. They'll say, we love the fact that it's everywhere. We love the fact that you're instilling it. So it really is good to do that, right?

No, it's huge. And then, like, you know, and words we use are so powerful. Like, we don't call it the floor, we call it the stage.

Correct?

Yeah. And then what's the sign in the kitchen as you're going out from the kitchen?

Yes. We put a big sign as you leave the kitchen to go into the main dining room. It says, you're on stage. And we do that because we want people to realize, like, as you're walking out of that kitchen, you have to have a smile on your face. You have to be welcoming. You have to be approachable. You have to be friendly. A customer should see you from six feet away and get a good feeling. They shouldn't say, oh, boy, look at that. I mean, we've all had the experience where you go into a restaurant and the waitress or the server or the waiter comes over to you, and you could tell just by the expression on their face that they're having a really bad day. And you don't even want to put in your order because you think your order is going to bother them and make their day that much worse. Oh, I'll take it with the cheese. I'm lactose intolerant, but I don't want to bother you. Right. So. But you can't do that. You know, your customers are there for an experience. We bring customers into Nona's. What we try to do is make people feel like they're coming to our house for dinner. Like, we. In our. In our family, dinner time was always really important to us. And we would sit around the table with the kids and, you know, we would talk and talk about our day, and it's a Time to really sit down and, and build that relationship with one another. And that's what Nona's Kitchen is all about, right, Is building that relationship and having time to sit. We're not into very fast table turns. We're not going to rush you out at all. And we have some unique things that actually take more time than the normal restaurants do. But we do that because we're building our brand on the experience.

Exactly. And then step three is reevaluate your team. Jim Collins has a great quote in good to great, right?

Absolutely.

Which one is it? You know it.

Yes. It says, you know, the first step of a great business is getting the right people on the bus, but more importantly, it's getting the right people in the right seats on the bus. Right. And that's so true, you know, and I've been using that for, I don't know, 20 years now in my consulting. And what I do is when I go into businesses and you do the same thing, Donald, because, you know, you asked me about this is we give out personality tests, a personality profile, you know, and I shouldn't even call it a test. It's. It's more of, you know, just a survey. And what it does is it tells us what are your natural strengths and your personality. You know, like my wife, if you met my wife, she's a sanguine personality, which is like an extrovert. She's never met a stranger. She loves people. She loves to talk where I'm the opposite. Like, even though I'm talking here, I'm not a. I'm not just like a social talker, you know, I'm a subject talker. So if you put me on a subject, I could talk for hours and hours, no problem at all. But if you just, you know, put me in a situation where I'm like, hey, how you doing today? It's just not in my strength zone. So you don't want someone like me as a host in your restaurant. Like, if you hired me in your restaurant to be your host, you're probably going to fire me inside of a week. But if you hire me to run in the background and I could sit behind a computer and I can analyze your numbers and I can analyze your profitability and I could help you streamline processes, I'm going to be the most valuable person to you. So it's not just a matter of getting me on the bus, it's getting me in the right seat on the bus. And we've experienced that, you know, at Nona's kitchen. We've had, you know, we have this one girl, and her name is Brooke, and she came to us originally to be a server, and it just. That was the wrong seat for her. And she ended up being a hostess, and she excelled. Like, I can't even tell you. And now. Now she's really being moved into front of house manager. She's been excelling so much for the company.

No, exactly. And sometimes you have to have those hard. Those hard conversations, not only with yourself, but with your team.

You do have to. But when it comes to those hard conversations, I just look at it like this. Let's say I'm going to bring back to the automotive industry, right? Let's say your car had a tire that was losing air. Well, you know, you could look at that tire and go, well, you know what? Every morning I'll just stop at the gas station. I'll put air in the tire. And, you know, I don't want to upset the tire. It's really trying hard. It's trying to be a tire. It's trying to hold it there. It's really. Or you could just say, no, that's crazy. Change the tire right. Or have this tire fixed right. Have the problem fixed right. You wouldn't just feel bad. You would just handle the situation. And your company is no different than that. Your company is really a machine that needs to work for you, and the people are part of that machine. So if someone's not doing their job, don't feel bad about having the conversation. Have the conversation. I'm not saying fire the person. You know, maybe just in the wrong position. Maybe there's something that's. That's affecting them in that position. Right. And they're just afraid to talk to you about it. But open communication is huge.

It's very huge. So what are some things that you're excited about with the. With this kind of downtime, about kind of restructuring and getting ready for the reopening?

You know, the COVID 19 has affected so many people different. And I would say that the majority of the people are very upset by COVID 19. They're like, my business is shut down. My life is put on hold. And you might think that this is strange, but I almost think it's a good thing because this has given me a chance to reevaluate my business, reevaluate the staff, make changes, reposition our restaurant differently for the reopening. You know, so many people I talk to, they're like, I can't wait for this whole thing. To be over. Just. I want things to go back to normal. Well, if you think things are going back to normal, you're going to be in for a rude awakening when things open up here in the country. Because what you knew is normal is not going to. It's gone. Like, just forget that. Just erase that. You. You know, Tony Robbins talks about changing habits. Because our life is run really by habitual emotions. Right? We wake up in the morning, we do the same things every morning. We get dressed the same way. We make coffee the same way. We go to work the same way. Your whole life is being run by habits that are in your subconscious. Well, it takes 30 days to break a habit. Well, COVID 19 is going way past 30 days. We're on 45 days. We might be 60 or 90 days. And now you've went from, you know, your sleep times are changing. You're probably going to bed later because you're watching tv. You're waking up in the morning later. You wake up in the morning and you say to yourself, I got to get all this stuff done, but why? My business isn't even open. So all of a sudden, your habits are changing. You know, I found my habits changing When I go to the supermarket, if I have to know, run down to the local store to get some food, Usually you just go through. And I could. I could just grab things, 1, 1, 1, 1,1. And I'm out of there really quick. Now, if there's someone in the aisle, I wait for them to leave the aisle because I don't want to get within six feet of them. And the aisle doesn't allow for room to pass someone in less than six feet. So I could see my habits changing already. So how am I going to feel when I go back to a restaurant that, you know, has a capacity of 100 people? I don't know if I want to be around 100 people. Right. So that restaurant, knowing that I'm thinking this way now, you might want to reset your floors up. You might want to space your tables different. Yeah, your capacity is 100, but you might want to just bring in 70 people, give people a little bit more breathing room. And you might say to me, well, Darren, I can't survive with 70 people. I need 100. Do you really know that for sure? Maybe that would be the best thing that ever happened to you, is lowering your inflow, because now your kitchen will run more efficiently. You know, I found this in one of my own businesses that was working. It was open six days a week. And I Decided to close one day a week and make it a five day a week because my wife asked me to do that for more time for us. And I remember thinking at the time, I was saying, you know, if I close every Saturday, it's 52 Saturdays. That's like closing for two months. That's like two months of work. When you think about it. I don't know if our business is going to survive. Well, not only did it survive, but because I wasn't paying the overtime because my staff was working more efficiently in the five days we made less gross but higher profits. So our gross sales did decrease, but our profitability increased. We, we made more money working less hours.

Isn't that crazy? Reason would say no. That's like, no, it can't. Right?

Correct. Correct.

But you don't know. You actually run the numbers and run the system, run the KPIs.

Correct. There are so many people out there, business consultants, that say, pay rent 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You should run your operation 24 hours, seven days a week. Just do it multiple shifts. It's not always the answer.

No, it's definitely not the answer.

No, it's industry specific. It's people specific. I'm not saying that that can't work. In an automated factory, that would work. But when you're dealing with people and staffing and logistics, it doesn't always work that way.

So I also want to bring up real quick that you're going to be a co host with me at the Conquer Summit, which is coming up in May. May 17th, 19th. I'm really excited about this. Yeah. And actually you're doing a whole presentation just on KPIs, right?

Yep, I'm going to do a whole presentation on KPIs, because even though we've talked about it here, there's still a lot of people that they don't even know what a KPI is. Like. You and I haven't even defined it here in this conversation. Right. We could define. Yeah, we could define it as a key performance indicator. But then again, what does that mean? Right. If you look it up online, I think Kiplio gives the best definition of it. And they say a key performance indicator is a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving business objectives. And I think that's a great definition. But even that definition is missing so much because they're looking at the company as a whole. Where I like to look at KPIs as departmental specific. Right. And process specific. Like I might have Just one process within one department. And I want to know KPI to measure that, to know if that's working or not. So there's a lot I'm going to talk about. I'm going to talk about the difference of KPI's metrics. What do the differences mean? I'll get more specific into this. So yeah, it'll be. And it'll be restaurants, industry specific. Where here. I've been talking about a couple different industries with this.

Yeah. And I've gotten, I was so I'm so fortunate to have some great friends out there that agreed to be speakers at the Concord Summit. I got Kevin Bain, he's a James Beard Award winning restaurateur. He, him and his partner Rob last year won the James Beard Award for best outstanding restaurateurs. I got Craig Shum, another James Beard award winner, Andrew Freeman. I got Bruce Serving, Bo Bryant, Kelly Jones, I got Eva Bauerman from Spain speaking. I've got some great people and in fact an Mai, I got Leon Fom, Raymond Dios, Brian Duncan. What I'm kind of really excited to hear is your son.

Yeah, my son has a great story and you know, I don't want to give too much away, but his name is Matt Manzari. If you want to learn a little bit about it and it's. You could go online and look up his name, Matt Manzari. And he has a company, nonprofit called beyond the Burn. And it's Dot Life beyondtheburn Life. And if you look that up, you'll get some advanced information on his story. But he's gonna talk to you about challenges and how do we get through life with. When you're facing an instrumental approach, insurmountable challenge. Like what is your Goliath? Right. And for people in this day and age, it's COVID 19. Right. Like, how do we get past this Goliath? This is too much. We just can't get over this. No, you can, you know, and there are ways to do that. And Matt's got a great story that he's going to talk to you about with that and, and you're really going to enjoy that. You're going to be in for a treat. So I don't want to give too much away.

I've seen some of his talks. He's really dynamic speaker. His story is amazing. It's going to help. I mean I tell people right now, if you think you got problems, listen to Matt's story. And then you realize you don't really have that many problems. Just incredible. I mean, amazing, amazing stuff.

That's right. You know, and just to encourage people to attend that summit, you know, you can't get enough good information. It's kind of like I said with Kai, constant never ending improvement. And when it comes to, like you talked about your mastermind, you talked about the restaurant summit or the conquer summit. And some people might say, yeah, that's good. I don't know if I really need that. You do. Trust me, you do. You know, I was talking to Donald just a week or two ago and I said, hey, I'm going through a book study again. If you want to go through it with me, it's Think and Grow Rich right by Napoleon Hill.

Great book.

It's a great book. He's read the book. I've read the book multiple, multiple times. But there's a mastermind group that's put out by. And I'll give a shout out to Paul Martinelli and Roddy Galbraith. They have a business called Empowering Mentorship. And every year they do a study on this book, Think and Grow Rich. So I said to Donald, I go, yeah, this is their fourth or fifth year doing it. I do it every year. Every year I sign up for it. And he laughed. And it's because every year they add something new to it. Every year there's something different that I could learn. Even though I've read this book multiple, multiple times, I'll say dozens of times or many more times than that. I never don't learn something new from this mastermind group. And he's one of these mentors with me and I'm friends with Paul Martinelli on the side, personal friends with him through the John Maxwell group. And he said something great just the other day and it was in. It really is good for this reference for COVID 19. And he said, we stand tallest with our backs against the wall. And right now you might feel like your back is against the wall with COVID 19, like there's nothing you could do. You're being ordered to stay in your house. Like this is a true meaning of you're putting a corner with your back against the wall. But this is the time to stand tallest. This is a time where you've been busy working every day, every day, every day in your business. And as a result of that, you can't work on your business because you're working in your business. This is now a time to work on your business. This is a time to revamp your menu. This is a time to get help and understanding on KPIs, there's a time to listen to all these speakers in the Conquer Summit and learn and absorb what they're telling you. And by doing this, when COVID 19 is over and you relaunch into what Donald calls the post coronavirus environment or the economy, you're going to be stronger, more fit. Your restaurant is going to be ready to anticipate what this is going to look like, and you're going to be more profitable and more successful than you ever imagined doing. Whereas if you just sit there on your couch, you know, binge watching the next series, waiting for the President to say, hey, it's over. Go back to work. Beautiful. I'm gonna go down and unlock that restaurant. I'm gonna fire up those grills and people are gonna come roaring in like they used to. No, you're dead. You're completely wrong. And I'm sorry to say that, but you are. Yeah. And if that's your, your mindset, we need to change that right now or you're never gonna survive this.

Exactly. Well, Darren, I want to say thanks so much for stopping by today on Facebook Live. You know, the beautiful thing about this kind of stuff is like, I'm here in Albuquerque, you're in Spearfish. We're having a great conversation. This is amazing. Technology is really fantastic.

It's the truth. It really is. We live in a great time for this.

So thanks again. We'll be putting up links in the show notes for how to join restaurant masterminds. Right now we got a great deal. Join restaurant Masterminds, you're get access to restaurant KPI Mastery for four months. So it's a sweet deal, really is. And we understand that money's tight right now, so we also do have some great discounts available for people to make it affordable. The Conquer Summit, there is a free option. I know money's tight. If you, if you just want to show up on the day of the summit and just watch the, watch the presentations, there is a free option. If you want to have the replays and have that lifetime access, there is an upgrade. And I also get some pretty cool bonuses too. So check out both, see what's best for you. But here's the thing. Make a decision to make and take some action and sign up. You know, that's the best thing you can do today for yourself.

Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me, Donald. I appreciate it. And thanks all for tuning in.

Thank you. It's been a great everyone. Have a fantastic day. Please be safe out there and make sure to maintain your social distance.

Absolutely. So long. Thanks, Donald.