How to Catch Food Cost Thieves

Alright, quick question. And here's a, here's one I use in interviews a lot and it helps me understand behavioral traits. It's an easy one you can use. I tell people, answer this question, don't overthink it real quick. Rules are made to be. Everyone in here is usually low conformity. Low conformity people usually answer rules are made to be broken. People that are high conformity tend to answer rules made to be followed. It's a great way to find out what kind of conformity level they are. Someone says rules are made to be broken, I want them to be a chef in my restaurant. Is low conformity a good thing or a bad thing? Because they don't have attention to detail, they're going to break their own rules. All right, now here's the thing I always say too is awareness proceeds choice. Choice proceeds change. If you're aware of how you're wired, you can take steps to kind of counteract it and also work so you don't have that problem. I'm low conformity. I use, you know, you've probably heard my phone go off on alarms, I use alarms, I use reminders. I use notes all the time to keep myself on track. But I know those things about myself today. This afternoon we're going to kick off with probably one of the things that most people have struggles with. And I'm always shocked when I go to a restaurant or actually when I do. Speaking especially, I'll ask a crowd. Doesn't matter how big the crowd is. I've done crowds, you know, small groups like this. I've done nightclub and bar show. I'll have 700,000 people in a room. It's crazy. I'll ask everyone this question. How many people in here know the cost of everything on their menu down to the penny and 3% of people raise their hand. Doesn't matter how big the crowd is, it's always sad. One of the things I tell all my clients, all my members, if you don't know your numbers, you don't know your business. In fact, you don't have a business. What you have is a hobby, a very, very expensive hobby. So food cost is one of those things that you should know. And I make the joke all the time. You think Apple doesn't know the cost of everything that goes into making this phone down to the penny? They know exactly. And what happens when the price of stuff goes up, your phone goes up, or they scale back production and it make it harder to get one and your wait times go out longer? And longer. So there's nothing wrong with scaling back production. To make the cost work, you got to make the numbers work. If the numbers don't work, the numbers don't work. But there's always. Usually there's a way you can make the numbers work. And the number one thing we're going to work on today is talking about food costing. Now, I talked about this before food cost. And the food cost boot camp is one of the many kind of workshops and sub workshops I do in the restaurant accelerator. This one goes into the product phase. And we're in the restaurant accelerator and especially the boot camp. This one has quite a few different workshops. There's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 workshops in the food cost boot camp. Today we're going to talk about the very first one. So people are in the accelerator program. You're gonna get a refresher course. So this is a good one because we're gonna talk about what I've known as the 40 Thieves of Food Cost. The 40 Thieves of Food Cost is my number one tool for understanding where your food cost problems lie. And I almost. I actually, I use it almost like a checklist. Cause it's that valuable. And here's a beautiful thing this. And what I'm really Sad about this. 40 Thieves of Food cost has been around since the 70s. A professor at a university came with this 40 Thieves of Food cost. And he's been teaching it since the 70s. And I'm always really shocked when most restaurant owners go, I never heard of it before. It's been around like 1970 something. It's huge. Start off with a quote. Of course, when you know the impact of the little expenses, you'll realize that there's nothing little in this world. Candy, do the pennies add up quite quickly? Right? Death by a thousand, death by a thousand cuts, Right? Yeah. And he talked about the problem. The thing about compounding, if you're a good golfer and you took the 10 cents a hole compounded comp kind of bet with him, you'd end up paying a lot at the end on the 18th hole. Same thing. Little things in your business do matter. And there's some simple things that you might see every day that you do not really pay attention to in the sense that you might not think it's a big deal. Hashtag, everything's a big deal. We talked about this week, the last couple days. We talked about, you know, raising your standards, holding your team accountable. We talked about accountability, we talked about culture, talked about a lot of things. And the biggest thing you got to do is you got to get your bar back up to what your standards are. Talk about the daily five sermon. I talk about my mission, my core values, my vision, my standards, my expectations, and also words of appreciation. Hashtag, write this down. God know your numbers. God know your numbers. You want to know your numbers better than anybody. Remember Bo talked a little bit about food service distribution. When you go to try to negotiate a pva, a prime vendor agreement, or a food service contract with your new negotiator, with your vendors, there's certain numbers you need to know. What's your average case cost? There's certain things you need to know, because when you know the numbers, you are the expert. If I walked up to anyone on your team, especially anyone in your kitchen, and I asked them, and I think some of the other guys said this. You know, what does a spatula cost? What is a, you know, ladle cost to replace that? Nobody knows. No one knows. All that stuff is most guys in your kitchen. What's the case of romaine cost today? Nobody in your kitchen knows. These are things you want to educate people. One of the things I'm huge on is transparency. I want to share my numbers with my team. Now, some people get a little angsty about sharing all their financials. Like, you know, the bottom line, how much you're putting in a bank. They don't want people to know because what does everyone think? Because you're a restaurant owner, you're rich. You're a restaurant owner, you must be rich. He must be rolling it. If you own a business, you're rich. Oh, my God. I know. The Armor car must show up at the back door and just take the bags of cash out of here every night. So many bags of cash. I know. Ryan's just like, I had to hire extra people. Just to pack the bags. Yeah. Just to pack the bags of cash. Yeah. Now I do. I did work for a client who used to do concessions at, like, the fairgrounds. Now, that guy actually did have bags of cash. Yeah. He had, like, 8 12, those money counter machines in the back, and they were, like, stuffing it in bags as fast as they could, and they had Armor trucks pulling up. It was crazy. That's, like the most cash I've ever seen made. Tons of banker. Yeah, yeah. And. But nicely. It's only short time, though. Yeah. But they rank into cash. The 40 Thieves of Food cost in the members area. You will see a copy of this. This is the 40 thieves of food cost. They're broken down by categories. Purchasing, receiving, storage, preparation, production, service, sales. If you notice on the 40 thieves of food cost, there's only one about paying too much for a product. But what's the number one thing we bitch about to our vendors all the time? It's too much, too high, too high. How much is your broccoli? Oh, it's too high. I'll go to somebody else. Right. We complain to them all the time. It's too high, too high, too high. Only one thing is cost. Everything else is totally within your control and most of it is in your control of your team in the sense that they're doing stuff that is not working right for your benefit. Kelly mentioned this to Jennifer, you know, and he mentioned a quote from Joe Baum about, you know, yeah, my, my bartenders are my business partners. I just hope I make more money than they do. You know, you might have some people. Food cost thieves are rampant. Sometimes people are food cost thieves, but they might not actually be the thief itself, but they might be an accessory. You got a lot of people on your team that are accessories to theft and not in a sense that they're taking stuff, but they're not aware of what they're doing is wrong because no one's ever trained them properly. What's our rule about training? We don't train them until they get it right. We train them till they can't get it wrong. So you guys should learn. It's good. I'm going to break these down individually, one by one, and I want you, while we're going through these slide decks and if you've been through this program, you know, some of my accelerator people are here. If you already been through this, go back and look. From what we've talked about before, have you taken corrective action to fix these things? Remember, to take no action is an action. It's just stupid action. Right. Tools are just potential. I have given you and Kelly and Bo and Zach, we've given you a lot of tools over the last three days. The question now is after we've gone here and everyone's all pumped up, I got these new things, I got these new tools. Are you going to pick up that tool and use it? Tools are just potential. You have to actually pick them up and apply them for them to work. We talked about this too. You know, a lot of times you know exactly what to do. But do you do what? You know, I love coming to sessions like this and I bring my friends who are super, super talented experts and consultants because they have different viewpoints of stuff. And I'm telling you, most of stuff has been around the industry for a long time. But I have tons of notes because I get stimulated. Oh, my God. Yeah, I forgot about that. Oh, my God. The great one to bring up. I learned, too. Restaurants become better when the people in it become. See, you guys are learning really well. I like that. Okay, so let's break it down one by one. First one is your purchasing. Of course, purchasing too much is usually a problem. Purchasing for too high of a cost, that's the only thing that's really out of your control. If you don't measure, monitor, and ask about it. Okay? No detailed specifications when you're buying. Detailed specs for purchasing. Like, just send me some ribeyes. You didn't say what kind of ribeyes. What type of ribeyes you want. Especially when we get into other subprimal cuts. We got like zero by ones, one by ones. On New York's. We got all different kinds of grades of stuff. Okay. No purchasing budget. Who here has a purchasing budget? Two people. You should have a budget. You got to have a purchasing budget. Every week. Should be doing projections. Like next week, let's say. I'm just going to use an example. Next week, my sales. I'm projecting 10 grand for next week. If I want to hit an average 30% food cost. If I can only spend 30%, that's $3,000. I tell my chef, my culinary team, hey, guys, you got $3,000 to spend next week. That's all you got. You know, that's all you got. It's just like your personal budget. I mean, what happens when you're out of money? What do you do? Call Mom? No, Zach. Credit. Yeah, right. But see, here's what happens when your team gets used to spending more than their means or spending more of your money than they're used to or told to. They just expect you to pay it. Oh, don't worry about it. Jennifer's got tons of money. Oh, don't worry. Candy will pay for it. No, don't worry. We'll go over, but it's fine. No, hold them accountable. I'm curious because I've heard you say this multiple times now. In today's world, to me, that seems impossible. What? Because last week bacon was $65 a case, and this week it's $80 a case. You know, where I'm from. And that goes for everything I buy right now. I mean, every week it's a different price. 20 bucks higher or it's 10 bucks less or so. How do you do a budget with that? I still do a budget. I just have. So understanding my. What I pay for is only one aspect of the elements. Understanding my menu, understanding where I'm using ingredients across the board is another element. And understanding if I need to substitute items or change items on my menu as I go is another option. Right. Just because you have a menu has 20 things on there that have bacon doesn't mean you have to have bacon on everything. You can easily change the menu. Everyone here is an independent restaurant. You're not a chain. Right. I mean, you have free will on whatever you put on the menu. Take off the menu. You can do it the hell you want. Just because bacon goes up doesn't mean I have to play the game. I could actually change some stuff around. I remember there was a time, remember, like last year, when avocados went through the roof, 100 bucks a case. There's times when limes went through the roof. You know, a lot of places, like, started just changing their stuff. Bacon's an upcharge. You know, instead of having a bacon normally on a burger, I might take that burger off the menu, like, not having my bacon cheeseburger on it. But someone comes in and says, well, I don't want to have bacon on my burger. Sure. But just let you know there is an upcharge for it because of the. The rise in, you know, pricing. And just tell people up front, you still like bacon. That's fine. It's. It's $4 upcharge. I love bacon. Sure. Sounds cool to me. I'm cool. Especially if I know you knew, use really good bacon. I know Ryan uses really good bacon. Right. Nothing wrong with changing. If you don't like the way the game is played, change it. Right. If you cannot control the prices of commodities, I cannot control food costs jumping up and down. I cannot cause bacon jumping up. You know, 50, 60 bucks a case in a week. I can't control that. What I can control is on my end. All right, what are we going to do about this, guys? That's why I should be having, you know, leadership teams meetings with my team and saying, hey, this is jumping up. What do we want to do? And give me productive, positive responses. Remember, every time I'm working for solutions, I'm always asking for three. If they say, well, we can do this or do that, that's a dilemma. I hate dilemmas. Give me three at three. I always have choice. And trust me, there's always three. You always have three options. Sometimes you might have to do some brains, you know, some brainstorming and searching. There's always three options. Two is choice. I mean, two is dilemma, three is choice. Always want to get the choice, always get the choice, always work it, always work the problem until you get three solutions. And then brainstorm and figure out which one's the best one for your option for you. Okay? All right. Purchasing too much means you're not setting up pars. You don't have par systems. They're not doing a physical inventory. This is the lazy chef or kitchen manager sitting in the office, you know, not managing his time properly. Most people don't manage their time properly. It's the, the deadline for my call in for my orders. 2 o', clock, it's 1:50. Fuck. He's scrambling around. He's on the phone. Yeah, yeah, just read down the order guide and I'll tell you what I need. Your bacon. Yeah, yeah, Bacon, yeah, send me a case. Tomatoes. Send me two. He's still got two in the cooler, but he's just making shit up on the fly because he thinks he knows, trust me, no one can remember what the fucks. Everything is in your inventory. I don't give a shit how good you are. Unless you got a photographic memory. Even then, that's crazy. I mean, shit gets used all the time. Yes. Hashtag. Write that down. What Lizza said. Always. Not to make you sound creepy or anything. Touch your product. Not in a weird way, not in a weird way, not in a creepy way, but touch your product. I used to put on all my order guides at the very bottom. Touch your product. Big bold letters. Touch your product. What that means is I go into the inventory, into the shelves. I actually open, I look at the box, I pull the box, I shake it, I look inside. Not just go in and see two boxes of tomatoes and thinking they're full. Because what happens, people grab a case, they start prepping out of it, they leave like three tomatoes in there. They put the box back up, Someone else comes in, grab the other box, use some of them. Now I think I got two full cases, but there's only actually six tomatoes in there. Then I was like, hey, somebody needs run the store, get tomatoes. We had two cases. Oh, well, they weren't full. Touch your products. That's where you get number one. Purchasing too much. If you're not using a order guide system with a par level and ordering to par, you're getting self killed. And the only person who should change the par is either someone in the leadership Team or the owner. No one at a, you know, a normal rate. You know, the line cooks and the prep cooks should not be able to change pars without consulting someone. Okay. No purchasing budget. Everyone's going to have a purchasing budget. No audit of invoices and payments. Candy, is that a big no? No. Always like, yeah, always double check. Because I'm telling you, they're like you. They're busy. Especially a lot of times when drivers drop off stuff and you want to credit. Oh, hey, this was damaged. Can I get a half credit on a case? All right. When I send this back, was the wrong product. Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. They write it down and then they forget. Right. Because they're dropping off 30 trucks or 30, you know, 30 stops that day, and things just get lost sometimes. Make sure. Always inspect what you expect. Yes. Do not let the truck drivers hold you hostage. Of, I got 10 more stops. I don't. I don't care until I'm done weighing every single freaking stake that came into this. Exactly. We'll talk about it in receiving. How do you guys feel about Dark drops? Does our orders come in often? On days that we're closed, Dark drops are fine. But again, I'm going to inspect it. As soon as I get in, the first thing I do is I'm going to inspect it. I'm going to call right away. Okay. You're going to have more credit issues with dark drops, but you got to have some system to keep track of it. So I would take photos, take photos of the product. I take photos of the label. I take photos of the invoice, and I send them to my sales rep immediately, as soon as they happen. And then I put a note on my calendar, follow up on credit from Monday delivery on Thursday. I set a reminder for myself because I know, like, I know how you get. You get busy and you forget. Yes, I know Core. I get busy and forget. Never. Everyone gets busy and forgets. I forget, too. If I don't put reminders in my phone, I forget shit. The worst thing in the world is I get a reminder from AT&T that my phone bills pass due. I'm like, oh, shit, she just set up an autopay. I just always forget to set up on auto pay, too. Too many vendors. Bo talked about this. There's a cost for every time you write in, every time you do an order, every time you have a vendor. There's a cost. Cost to that. Having too many vendors is costing. You want to kind of streamline it down. I'm Like BO, I believe in two. I should have a primary vendor, and I have at least one backup. Okay? That's usually my deal. I usually have a primary vendor, and I have a backup vendor, and I let them all both know they do. I love. Be honest. You know, transparency is huge with one of your core values is. Here's the thing also, too, about core values. Core values just don't apply to your restaurant. It should be how you run your business. If you have integrity, communication, respect as your core values, it should be with everyone you interact with, not just your team, not just the way you want your team to act to your guests, not just your guests. It should be everybody you're involved with. That should go down to your. I mean, your core value should. Especially since they generate from you, from your personal life. They should be a representation of who you are as a person in the world. I don't know if I ever mentioned that, but that should be the way we should always conduct our business with anybody, is acting incongruency with our core values. Got receiving chef mentioned this right here. You know, theft by receiving personnel. And it's not that. My team, again, I trust my team, but I always just double check stuff. I remember one time I was working as. I was hired as a consultant for a big hotel. I was the corporate. I was like, a corporate chef for. At the time. This is back. Back before I opened my own restaurant. I was doing some chef consulting stuff, and I noticed, like, shit, man, we use a lot of shrimp. God damn. Seems like, hey, I buy a case of shrimp. And I'm always. I'm buying, like, a case of shrimp every other day almost. So then I got kind of curious, and I, like, came in, and I noticed, like, they had one of the dishwashers putting the order away. He's putting the order away. I just kind of sat back, and I didn't like, oh, I wasn't hovering on top of him, but kind of stayed back, and I noticed he was, you know, putting some stuff away. He went over and grabbed a trash bag, went back in the receiving area. Then a couple minutes later, he took a small, small bag. You know, most trash cans, most bags and kitchens are full, right? A small, small bag of trash tied up really nice, went out to the dumpster, threw it in the dumpster. I was like, chip was something damaged, you know, Shit, I should check that. I should make sure it's not, you know, like, maybe it's something leaking or something like that. I want to get credit, right? So I go out do some, I do some dumpster diving. Get in there, pull the thing out, open it up. Two boxes, 16, 20 shrimp, frozen. He had been throwing them in a garbage bag, throwing me in the trash can. Then telling his family, come pick him up. He was having a little shrimp fiesta on my dime. Right, yeah. Again, remember, inspect what you expect. Now, does that mean everybody does that? No, of course not. I've also seen this too, where receiving personnel could be like sometimes the driver. I've worked for restaurants where we order pre cut steaks. Maybe I don't have a team that's very experienced in cutting or fabricating meats. So maybe I'm buying pre cut steaks. And I've seen this before. So I'm ordering New York strips and I also notice there's 14 in a box. The box comes in. Most time, the box comes in a pre cut steaks. Thank you. You sign off, you take the box, you throw it on the shelf and the team just goes at it. Team should also receive it and check it and double count it. So I'm looking through the box. Hmm, 12. Supposed to be 14. Says in a box, 14, 1412 ounces. I look at the other box. 1412 ouncers. Count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 12. Found out the driver was taking one or two steaks out of pre cut boxes on his route to finance his little summer barbecue. He had. Yeah, guy had a nice little stash of like T bones, ribeyes, New York top sirloins, flat irons. He had a nice little, little stash going. Okay, again, it's not that I expect everyone to be dishonest, but I'm just inspecting what I expect. If I don't check it, I don't know. Yeah, that's it. Trust, verify. No system for credits. You got to have a system for credits. Make sure you're always following up with your vendors about your credits. When am I getting my credits, how my credits coming back. When are we going to see this on my account? Right? Ask questions. No system for checking in orders. Again, you got to have some kind of standardized procedure for checking in. Like Omar mentioned. Do not let the driver rush you. So many times they'll, you know, and they're in a rush. I mean, they got 40 stops and they got the big, you know, you know, dolly of stuff and they roll it in, they're pulling the dolly and they throw you the invoice. Here, sign this. I gotta get going. I don't work for you, you work for me. You're, you know, you're My vendor, you work for me. I'm going to do my thing like I normally do. I'm going to take my time. I'm going to check my quality, check my product, make sure I have the right item and the right portions, right temperature too, and then I'll be happy to sign it. But do not let the driver rush you. All it takes is one or two times training them. And trust me, they stop. They do it to personnel. They don't know. They don't know any better. And a lot of times they'll do it with personnel. Like, they'll just like, if you're not in the kitchen or have somebody responsible in the kitchen, they'll just like drop it off and go to like the. Usually the person they can get to right away, which usually the dishwasher. Double check that all your invoices are signed by a leadership team member, if possible. Now, maybe some scheduling. You might not be able to have that all the time, but it should be some. Somebody on the leadership team that's responsible, should be or should have signing authority. Like, if you have a morning prep cook who's like your opening guy that you trust to open, he should also be kind of trustworthy to sign stuff. But also teach him your policy for receiving orders so he knows exactly. Don't rush it. Go through everything, count everything, check everything. Once it's all verified, then you're authorized to sell to sign it. But don't let him get rushed either. We talked about the other day, remember we talked about job behavioral profiles. Most people who are good prep cooks are usually what we call high pace. High pace don't like conflict. So when that driver's in your face, hey, sign this, man. I gotta go on. Okay. They just do it. They don't want conflict. Just tell them, though, hey, part of your job is just be cool and calm and just like say, listen, right? And if the driver is really insistent about it and the person who's there receiving feels pressured, you need to have a talk with your salesperson, have a talk with the driver. Or I'm at the restaurant the next time the truck comes in and I have a little one on one in the walk in. Hey, can we talk real quick? I always talk in a walk. You know why? It's soundproof. That's why. You know what? No cameras. And it's soundproof. Let's go. Talking to walk in. See, there's no crying in the kitchen. You go cry in a walk in. Go crying and walk in. Yeah. Or worse. Or worse. I'VE walked into that before. I was like, oh, my God. I could tell you a really horrifying story about a celebrity. I did some consulting with one of his restaurants, and this is how I met the celebrity. I was like doing a walk and I walked in and opened a walk in cooler. Whoa. Love your stuff. Love your work. Yeah. Nice. Whoa. It's like, damn. Never look at your movies the same way again. Okay? And I don't think that's your wife. Okay, let's just keep going. Perishable items left out of proper storage. Remember this. A lot of times, you spend a lot of money on produce. Every hour that produce sits out at room temperature, not refrigerated, you lose a half a day of shelf life. So you just got that lettuce and that romaine. Just came in. Guy dropped it off. Eight o'. Clock. Guys are busy prepping. Got dropped off at 8 o'. Clock. 9, 10, 11, 3 hours it waits before someone puts it away. How much shelf life did you lose? Day and a half. And then we wonder like, shit, man. It seems like I'm blowing through produce really fast. A lot of that's preventable if your team just gets on putting that away as soon as it comes in. Do not leave shit sitting out. That's the number one thing I see. Order comes in. And I've seen this before as I, you know, I walk in the back door and there's an order stacked up by the walk in. Hey, what time does it get? Oh, it got dropped off a couple hours ago. That's a priority. It's like hot food to me. Hot food, hot, cold food. Cold order is a priority. Put that product away right away. Another thing, storage. Again, food stored improperly, food improperly in storage. Place storage at the wrong temperature and humidity. Double check your coolers all the time. There's certain things in your cooler that needs certain temperature zones. And if you have a pretty big walk in, your walk in has different temperature zones. Not everything's at that same 35 degrees all through the thing. It's like, different temperature zone. Closer to the fan has a different temperature zone. Higher shelves have a different temperature zone than lower shelves. You got to understand what is the best place. And I actually have charts for these things and I can actually upload to the members area. They're really, really great. No daily inspection of your dry goods or your store goods. Every day. Someone should walk the cooler. One of the things that coaching does is, and I talk about this a lot is coaching is about creating new habits. If Your team doesn't have a habit of checking the walk ins, walking the storage system. You want to start setting reminders for them. If I have a new kitchen manager who doesn't have a lot of experience, which I love, because I can trim the way I want him to, what I do is I set alarms on his phone. 9 o', clock, 11 o', clock, 2 o', clock, 4 o'. Clock. When the alarm goes off on the phone, it says walk the coolers. It's pretty easy. And then I know his phone goes off at 9, 11, 2, and 4. So what do you think I'm doing? I'm inspecting what I expect. I'm walking back there around 2 o' clock, and I know his alarm went off. And I'm seeing is he walking around checking the coolers? If he does, he gets appreciation number five on the daily five. If he doesn't, he gets number four. Standards and expectations. It's very, very critical that we walk to coolers to ensure that everything's running right. Also make sure that we're in on the zone for production. I need you to make sure you're committed to doing this. Are you with me on this? Yes. Perfect. Let's make sure we follow the schedule. Okay. Unorganized storage areas. Oh, yeah. You want to make sure everything's nice, neat, organized. One of the things I love to do is I put. I'm. I wouldn't say I'm ocd. I love labels, though. I will put little tags and labels on everything. So everything. Everybody knows where everything goes. Bucatini goes here. Paradelli goes here. Farfelli goes here. Olive oil goes here. I put everything on the shelves with tags. Everybody knows where everything goes. I do it also in the walk in too. I'm kind of anal about it. Unsalted butter goes here. Heavy whipping cream goes here. Inventory makes everything so easy. Remember, inspect what you expect, but help them out by helping them organize. Hey, guys, what we're gonna do is we're gonna. We're gonna basically radically organize all our storage areas. We're gonna get little tags and put everything out. I wouldn't call it a yet proofing, But you want to organize everything. Take some time. Telling you if you take some time on the front end, it makes the back end easier about, you know, managing inventory. Managing production just makes your life easy. Is it a little work in the front? Yeah. Is it worth it? Oh, hell yeah. You know, and then at times, there'll be times when you walk in even though. And even though you got stuff Labeled heavy cream goes here. You're gonna walk in, there's a be a gallon of milk sitting there. Like someone just got lazy and just put it there by mistake because they were just in a rush. Guys. Hey, milk goes over here. That's for heavy cream. That's for whole milk. It was heavy. Yeah, it was. It was heavy milk. No, it's not heavy cream. See, for them doing this easier, effective. As long as I get the same results, and if it's easier, I'm going to do it because I am a lazy person. Everybody, people are. Most people are lazy. Yeah. Makes it easier for everybody. And I'm telling you, the systems you set up transfer to any concept. I have people that have one concept multiple times. I have. Some people have five, six different concepts. The beautiful thing about everything I teach is that the concepts, the systems work in any concept, whether you're a burger place, pizza place, you know, sushi place, doesn't matter. Organizations, organization, you can transfer these systems. The same thing Wolfgang Puck had the same way. We had Chinois in Maine. We have Wolfgang Puck Bar and Grill. We had Cut Steakhouse. We had. We had Spagos. We had everything. But the systems were all the same. Only thing I think Bo and I think those guys talked about, all I had to learn was just the menu. He could plug, I could take. We could take any chef from any Wolfgang Puck concept, put them into another concept, and it'd be up and running in a week. All they had to learn was the menu. How you process a recipe was the same. No matter where you went. You got the recipe card you put in front of you, you grabbed all your mise en place, you measured everything out. We all had the same process for everything we did. We all had the same process how we did recipes, we all had the same process, how we did production. We all had the same process for ordering. We had the same process for inventory, same process for production. You could take any chef from any location, plug them in. It was beautiful because the systems are the same. Didn't matter. Remember we Talked about the 3P framework? People, product, process, people feed the process, process feeds the people. When you work on that process part and have it so nailed down that they can't make a mistake, not idiot proof, but it's. It's basically unfallible or bulletproof. Another way I like to. I like to tell people, like, I want to make it bulletproof. Yeah, let's make it bulletproof. So we're all good. Always, all the time. Make it bulletproof. And then when you have the right people in place, that system works over and over a place. It's a beautiful thing once you get it dialed in. Does it take some work on the front end? Yeah, of course. But anything worthwhile takes a little bit of work. No single lack of. Single responsibility for food storage. Somebody's got to be in charge. If it's everyone's responsibility, no one has accountability. I always have one person accountable at all times. One person is my go to. Always has to be that way. Okay. No control or record of food issues from storeroom again. Sometimes things fall, things break. I'm back in the dry storage room. I'm reaching for a bottle of vinegar and I accidentally hit a bottle of olive oil. It's glass and it breaks in the floor. Most of the time, that stuff just goes in the trash. No one knows it happened. There should be some record, some kind of waste log available for the team. And they have to understand, I just want to know what happens to it. You're not in trouble. Waste logs are never a punishment. They're a training tool. So let's use that for an example. I got vinegar on the top shelf that we use a lot for production, but I also have these glass bottle olive oils on the top shelf too. Noticed that during the month, I've broken four bottles of olive oil. Hmm. What's the training opportunity here? Move the fucking olive oil. Exactly. If they keep reaching up and knocking over a bottle of glass olive oil, you know, I should probably move the glass stuff on the bottom shelf. Training opportunity. Everything's an opportunity. Remember? Sometimes it's just simple observation. When you see threads or trends in your waist locks, that's something to work on. I've seen this before too, and it's pretty common. I walk in the kitchen and I walk in the back door and there's like a tray or two of bacon burned beyond recognition. What happened? Oh, I just forgot. Okay, cool. Next day, I come in, another tray of bacon burn. Hey, what happened? Oh, I just forgot. Training opportunity. What should I do? Either you set them a timer, buy them timers, or tell them to use their phone. Most guys in the kitchen have their damn smartphone. They're usually listening to rap music anyway. Nothing against rap music if you like that kind of stuff, you know, I like a little Jay Z, but just tell them, hey, use a timer, dude. All right? You don't have to remember everything. Use timers. Most time I'll buy those little hand wound up things, right? Remember the old ones, you know, now they got the digital Ones that you can set. My father. This is to tell you what kind of tyrant my father was. If you burn something in the oven and we had those old fashioned timers and you burned something in the oven, did not use a timer. He got one of those timers. He had one specially done with a rope around it that you wore around your neck. And you wore it all day. Flavor Flav in old school. I mean, back in the 70s, I think maybe Flavor Flav worked for my dad and that's where he got the idea. But you wore this damn timer around your neck all day. The other thing my father would do to embarrass you, to get you to comply. Not commitment, but compliance is if you have your station dirty, he would have you chant out loud until he got tired of hearing it. Clean as you go. Clean as you go. Clean as you go. Clean as you go. Clean as you go. Clean as you go. Can you imagine working in a kitchen? There's one guy who's an idiot. I'm going to use the word idiot. Some guy who's like a moron, can't keep a station clean. And all he's doing is standing in a corner chanting for an hour. Clean as you go. Clean as you go. You're like, oh, my God. You want to talk about how this is. This is like the power of peer pressure. People start working to help him keep his station clean. Dude, I do not want to hear you chanting that shit another day. Dude, let me help you. Let me, let me help you out, brother. Let's put your mis. Like this. You want to put a towel here. Put your, you know, put your tools right here. Keep your sanitation bucket right there. Every time you use it, clean this thing. And please, please, I'm begging you, please. If you can't do it, come get me. I'll clean it for you. It's going to hurt me more than it hurts you. Kind of. Yeah. I mean, you're sitting there in a kitchen, one guy just chanting over and over for an hour in a monotonous tone like that too. Clean as you go, clean as you go. It was like, rad rhyme, rad rhyme, rad rhyme, rad rhyme. Red rhyme, red rhyme. He's like, oh, I think there was one time I was just like, it won't hurt that much, you know, it won't hurt that bad. It'll be over soon. That was. Yeah. When he told me, like, you know, it's in your blood. I'm like this. I want a transfusion. Wow. Preparation. Another huge Area of food cost waste. Food cost thieves. Is production preparation excessive. Trim on vegetables and meat. Not checking the raw yield. No secondary usage of items. Bo mentioned this too. If you only have one item that you bring in just for one dish, that's a waste. I remember a place, like, I walked in the cooler. I don't know if everybody. There's, like, different types of microgreens. Some microgreens have longer shelf life than there are. Some microgreens, like bull's blood, don't last that long. Yeah, like a day or two. This guy had. He was a chef. He wanted bull's blood on top of his tuna tartar tower. Now, they didn't sell a lot of tuna tartar towers, so we did not use a lot of bull's blood. And every day, I'd look in the trash can, and there'd be two or three little receptacles of bull's blood that were wasted. And at what, like 20 bucks a pop? Not cheap. At 20 bucks a pop. I started to do the math. That's 20, 40, 60, 80, 100. I mean, like, almost like 200 bucks a week just in throwing away microgreens. So we quickly said, chef, what can we do different as a garnish? Well, I really like the red microgreens. What can we do that's red? That might be a cool garnish that we could put on top. Hmm. I don't know. Hmm. How about beet threads? Well, we get some raw beets. You know, we put them through one of those spiral slicers. We make some beet threads, we put them in a little cornstarch, we fry them up. We have this nice little crispy tower we can put on top. Actually give it a little more height than the bull's blood. I like that idea. So do I. Because we already have beets on the menu, because we have a beet salad. Perfect solution. You know, at first he fought a little bit, but I want bull's blood. But, Jeff, we're throwing away, like, 100, 200 bucks a week. But I want bull's blood. Jeff, work with me here. Yeah, work with me here, man. Work with me. Excessive trim on vegetables means most of the time if the guys aren't trained properly. And this is how my. Again, my father. I hate to use my father. Sorry, dad. Well, actually, sorry, dad, My father. Like, you're cutting zucchini. Like, you know, there's a. There's a stem end, and there's the end of the zucchini. When you cut off the ends he would come by and inspect how much end of the zucchini you cut off. If it was more than, like, the size, the more of the thickness of a quarter, you were in trouble. Yeah, food waste. The funniest thing you'll see now is like, I am so accurate. Like, my girlfriend freaks out. Like, I'm doing zucchini at the house, and I just pull the zucchini out and take my knife like that real quick, and I leave, like, that much off the edge. She goes, wow, how'd you do? I go, that's like five years of hell. Muscle memory. I never forget that. It's like every time. Yeah, you get that kind of muscle memory. You never forget. Preparation is huge. Production is the next biggest one. Production over production. Hashtag, write this down. Do not let your team decide how much to prep. You should be telling them how much to prep. Someone on your culinary team who's in charge should be telling them how much to prep. Every time I've ever gone into the kitchen, I'll ask it. Every time I've done this. You guys set up for lunch? Yeah, yeah, we're ready. We're ready. All right, awesome. Let's go. Hour into lunch. 86 this. 86 at. Hey, what happened? I thought you guys said we had. I thought you said you were set. We had plenty. I thought. I thought I had enough. Yeah, well, there you go. Eliminate the thinking for your team. You want to do the thinking for them? Tell them I want 12 quarts of marinara. Because here's another thing, too. People are creatures of habit. I'm a prep cook. I've been with your restaurant for this Italian restaurant. I've been with your restaurant for four years. Every Monday, I come in and I make 10 gallons of marinara sauce. I make 300 meatballs. I may. I shredded 50 pounds of mozzarella every Monday. I've been doing this for four years. Business kind of drops off. I don't really know. What do you think I make on Monday? Same amount. Same amount, Same amount. And all of a sudden, it's like, wow, you know, we got a lot of meatball shit. We got a lot of cheeses. Some of the cheese is going moldy, you know, because our volume dropped down a little bit because we're in between summer and winter. No one adjusted the pars. No one told them to cut back on production. People are creatures of habit. They do the same thing all the time. You have to tell them, hey, guys, we're going into a slower period. We need to cut back A little bit. Now you might be saying, well, Donald, what if I tell them to cut back and we get slammed? Which you probably could. Then you readjust your par. There's nothing wrong with 86ing an item. Also, just because you have a full menu doesn't mean you have to have everything on the menu all the time. It's okay to say, we're gonna have to 86 this for tonight, not run it tonight. Okay. How do you feel about. This is something my dad and I used to get into at his restaurant, and now I can still get into it to this day when I set my pars. Let's say they're using the wrong needle for a sauce on the dish. All of a sudden, they're out of the sauce. And so I'm like, all right, 86 a dish. My dad will come in like, but we still have 30 servings of chicken, but we don't have the sauce, so we're 80 sixing it. Well, we'll just serve it with this sauce instead. Like, no, that's not my dish. And then I'll leave the kitchen, and I come back 15 minutes later and I'm serving. Yeah. Just gotta say, it's not negotiable. It's not negotiable. I appreciate your input, Father. I really do, but it's not negotiable, and it's not consistent. It's not consistent. I always got to think about, remember. Here's the thing you want to remember, too. The ends do not justify the means sometimes, especially when it comes to keeping my brand integrity. Brand integrity above everything else, keeping your brand intact. And the lack of brand integrity is the number one thing. Kills. Kills restaurants. Number one. You ever heard of brand dilution? Brand dilution is a common phenomenon. Brand dilution is this. And this is. I see it all the time because I've worked thousands, thousands of restaurants. You start off with your restaurant concept. It's great. You launch, you open up. Everyone loves it. Place is packed. All of a sudden, just like everything else in life, there's a cycle of business. It starts declining, right? What happens when your business starts declining? What do you do? You panic, right? Oh, my God. What do we do? What we do wrong? Oh, my God. Business is dropped. What we do? You didn't do anything. It's just a natural cycle of business. People, you have to understand, everything in life has ebbs and flows, and so does the cycle of your business. Even if you're the most popular place in the world, you will have a slower time. It's just natural. Now when you hit that ebb and it comes down, two things happen. You can either just ride it through, which it will eventually self correct and eventually you'll go back up, or you can do what you should be doing a long time ago. It shouldn't be constantly marketing anyway. Because most, most people do is when it's really busy, they don't market. And then they wonder why it's not busy. When it's starting to slow down, they start slowing down. They think something they did with their food or service, but it's not, it's just not. You're keeping your brand top of mind with marketing, which it should always be. Should always be marketing. Always be recruiting. Okay. Always be what? Always what? Always be training, right? I got three things I say tell everyone. Always be, always be training. Always be marketing. Always be recruiting. The three A's. Always, always, always those three. So if I'm not telling people to adjust my part and this what happens at Brand Dilution. So the brand starts slopping down. They don't have any, they don't have anybody to help guide them. So they don't understand the ebbs and flows, so they panic. So they start adding new stuff to the menu. Oh my God. What if we. And then of course you get that friend, you know what you need? You need a pizza. People love pizza. Shit, you're right. Even though we're a high end burger place, a pizza sounds like a good fucking idea. Okay, that sounds good. So then you put pizza on the menu. Now you get some sales because you market a little bit, you know, you get some sales people. Oh my God, we're back up, we're back up, we're doing great again. But then again starts ebbing down again. And then your friend says, you know what you need Greek food. People love a fucking euro. God damn, you're right. Fucking everyone loves euros. God damn, I need a euro. So you put a euro on the menu, sales go back up. It just keeps doing this thing up and down, up and down. But then the problem is now your menu is a hodgepodge of burgers and pizzas and euros. And now you do Italian night on Friday nights. Now you got pastas, now you, oh, now you're, you decided to do a couple high end steaks too. Now you're just a kind of a barrage of all kinds of stuff. And now you lose what is known as brand identity. The guests don't even know who you are anymore. And what happens when the guest is not sure who you are. They just stop coming. Yeah. I had a place like that in Albuquerque. It was probably one of my first consulting jobs in Albuquerque. This is 2009. And the place was a really, really famous. Been around since the 70s. Long time. The menu had become a hodgepodge. There was, like, Greek food. There was Mexican food. There was steaks, there was pizzas. There was all kinds of stuff on there. And I said, tell me your story. Tell me your backstory. Oh, we started out, you know, there was no. Everything was Mexican in the area. And so we decided, you know, we wanted to do a steakhouse. So we were like, the original Old Town Steakhouse. I'm like, duh, let's just go back to being the original Old Town Steakhouse. That was actually the tagline I came up with. The original Old Town steakhouse wasn't rock science. So we can dump all the stuff out of the way. We dumped all the old crap out of the way, got rid of all the Greek food, all the really crazy shit. We started doing our own kind of contemporary steakhouse kind of thing. And then what happened was we marketed properly. The sales took off their roof. Yeah, brand dilution is real, and it happens every day. And you don't know what's happening because you're just trying to keep your business alive. And I understand that when you're trying to protect something, you. You do throw everything at you. Can you try to keep it going? You want to keep it on. You know, it might be on life support, but you're going to keep it going no matter what. Sometimes you got to change the model, and you got to get just real basic with it. Wrong method of cooking. I've seen this before, too. Chef can tell you, too, certain things that are great for yield. Some cooking methods will, like, just kill stuff, you know, chicken, a lot of fish. You know, I've seen braised stuff. I've seen roasted stuff. There's lots of different cooking methods. You want to make sure you're using the right cooking method for your menus. Cooking at the incorrect temperatures. Again, I tell all my line cooks this, just because it goes up on high doesn't mean you have to cook it on high. Everyone stick that goddamn saute pan, crank that flame up, and then, oh, shit, it's burning. You know. You know what the difference between smoke point and Flashpoint is? About 2 seconds goes from smoke, and all of a sudden, whoa, she boosts into flames. And then that's usually, like, my first lesson for guys. Like, and I can see it happen. I'M like, it's gonna. It's gonna burst into flames. Any. There it goes. You know, I'd sit right warm, right? How long? From smoke point to flashpoint, Instantly. It's like two seconds. Seriously. And I can see a guy when he's got his pan on, he's got his oil in there, and I see it start smoking. I'm like, yep, that's gonna be a poof in a second. And you'll know. You have a problem with that. Ask your dishwasher. His pans are always coming with, like, burnt on. Burnt at the bottom. Yeah. He's not happy. Yeah. And what's the number one thing they do when they do it? Grab the pan, Just throw it in the bus tub real quick, right? And they usually melt the bus tub because the pan's smoking hot. And they throw it in the bus stop. Smoking hot, and it melts the bus tube. I always, like. I can always tell who's, like, working by. When I walk the line and I look in the. In the bus tub on the line, I see the pans. No. Yeah. Why would you do that? Hey, hey, Cora. Hey, Cora, Cora. You know, if you stick a knife in a light socket, you'll kill yourself. Do you think so? You want to try it? Stop putting your pans in water. Yeah. One of your chefs. Yeah, he's special. He's at the bakery. Here's. Oh, here's the number. Number five. And number six, the biggest one. No food production schedule. Oh, let's go back to number four. Cooking or holding products for too long of a time period. I see this. Also, the guys in the line, a lot of times, they tend to be lazy. You got maybe a mashed potato or some rice on a steam table that you're using as a pickup, right? Pickup station. You got mashed potatoes, rice. What do they do? They get the biggest freaking pan they can, the 6 inch half pan, and they fill that sucker up, and then they mound it on top. Because I don't want to stop and reload potatoes during dinner. That would be stupid, right? What happens? They're scooping off the top the cold potatoes. The stuff in the bottom is getting burnt, overcooked. Now the starch is all leaching out. Now it becomes like soup in the bottom. So when they finally start stirring up all that stuff, all that bad potatoes now in your good potato, and people are like, you know, the potatoes, they taste burnt to you? I don't know. They taste burnt. And then, you know, the manager comes, how's everything? It's fine. Once I review. Potatoes tastes like they were burnt. Shit. No. Keep your stuff fresh. Right. Holding stuff too long. Do not. I'm going to tell you right now, hashtag, write this down. Most restaurant operate for what's easiest for the team, not what's best for the guest. Change that dynamic, do what's best for the guests. Now what's easiest for the team. How many people are open at what's your hours for opening? Till what do you open till till 10 o' clock at night. What time do you serve restaurant to people to? 9:45. Yeah, my rule is always this. I'm open till 9. I was open at 9 till 9pm if you came in at 9pm, you got sat, you got full service just like you were just came at five o'. Clock. We never cut corners. I don't care how many times have people on. I've seen people on the team come in at 9 o' clock and I think Bo talked to us or Kelly talked about this and everyone's like, oh, another table. Oh my God, that's not my reservations early. Yeah, but if someone walks in at 9 o', clock, I'm open till 9 o'. Clock. It says 9 o'. Clock. You come in at 9 o'. Clock. Actually, if you walk in at 9:02, I'll still give you the full service. Still doing it, man. I'm still doing it, man. I'm open. I used to when my team first got upset about that, I said, you know what you guys getting upset about? People coming in at clothes to order food is like being a shoe salesman. And someone could be being pissed off if somebody want to come and buy shoes. That's the stupidest thing in the world. That's how we make our money. Yeah, yeah. You get more hours, you get everything. You gotta stop that. That's a cultural thing. And I usually tell them, hey, listen man, I know, I know that party you're going to later is going to be off the hook, but it can wait and you'll still be there. And people trust me, by the time you get there, everybody drunk, they'll think you're funny. It's gonna be better for you if it takes them an hour to close the kitchen. Right. And if one table walks in, just that closed seat, that table, serve them, guess what? You can close the rest of the kitchen. Inventory done. So all you have left to do is just the line. Just the line. That's it. It's easy to do. They can help the kitchen close at my restaurant they do what? When your friends come in? No, no, the front of house. Oh, the front house, yeah, yeah. She's like, what are you doing? It takes more than one person. I'm not going to argue with you that it's bad practice or good practice because I think it's good practice. What you're saying it's good business practice, right? Yes. But when you're losing money and you have five people on and you have that one guest walk in, you know. Yeah, well, we got to re, we got to reconfigure your, your business model, that's all. Look at the piano, right? No food production schedules. That's not having prep lists, production sheets. You got to have a production sheet. I have all my members of all my coaching programs. You have to have a production sheet with pars. And also I tell you to put times on there too. Most people, again, I mentioned this quite a few times. They suck at time management. There's a thing in management theory called Parkinson's law. Parkinson's law is very simple work. Expansion contracts meet time obligated. If Ryan's a prep cook for me and he's been doing the same job for years, Ryan comes in at 8 o' clock every morning. He has a production sheet. He works till 5 o'. Clock. I give him an average of 10 items a day. Ryan will work from 8 to 5 and do the 10 items because that's how he does. He works at a pace, his own pace. Everyone has their own internal clock. Now let's say one day, I have a huge catering that day, but I need everything done by two o' clock and I go to Ryan. Dude, I know it's the same workload but I really need you to get on this today and I really need it done by 2 o' clock because I need the kitchen for a big huge plate up. Ryan would jump on it, push a little harder and get done by two. What changed the constraint of time? Just the constraint of time. Again, most people shitty at managing their time. If you give them free will to manage their time, they're not going to manage their time very well. Just look at the average person online uses what looks at their phone 150 times a day. They're on social media, TikTok for an hour a day. Average person watches TV for four hours a day. People suck at managing their own time yet what's the number one thing? I'm so busy, I'm stressed out, I'm overwhelmed, I'm overworked, I'm stressed. No you're not. You're just not managing your life. Time management is life management. Plain, simple. Time management is life management. Not. Oh, this is my number one pet peeve. Not using standardized recipes. That goes back to my chef days. You have to have a recipe. It has to be standardized. I've been working with a client for a while. We are still. And we haven't really talked to each other much because the last time I had a talk with him, I kind of went kind of bad Chef on him, kind of snapped. And I usually don't snap, but I kind of got to the point where I was just like, all right, I gotta put the line in the sand. Hard, I say. And I said, listen, I've been on you for seven months now to get standardized recipes. Do not call me again until you have recipes done. Standardized recipes. You gotta have recipes. You don't have standardized recipes in your restaurant. You are. Again, you're not in business for a restaurant. It's just a free for all. Everyone wants to do the creative shit. Guys who want to go in the kitchen, they want to come in the kitchen because they want to cook. I love that. I love that you want to come and cook, but you got to teach them a process too. There's a process to how we cook. No one makes anything in my restaurants without number one, writing a recipe. Because if I like it, I want to be able to duplicate it. And trust me, we've all done. Omar can attest to this. We've all done our fair share of. We're playing in the kitchen, getting creative, turns out really great, and all of a sudden it's, oh, shit, what did I do? Right? The Hail Mary. What was that? Oh, my God. How much was that coriander or cumin? A tablespoon or a teaspoon, right? Yeah, we've all done that. Nowadays, I try to, especially if I'm going into test recipe development. I have a notepad next to me, and I'm writing stuff down. I'm making adjustments. All right, Gotta have recipes. Who has recipes for everything in their restaurant? Written out, typed out, not written, not handwritten, scribbled notes. And then I'm gonna ask you the other qualifying thing I know chef does. Gotta have a written recipe. So it has to have the amount, has to have the process, how they put together. And it also has to have a yield. How much that recipe makes if you don't have yield? Hold out your left hand. Take your right hand. Bad owner. Thank you. I'm working on it. I'm Working on it. No waste logs used. We talked about waste logs quite a few times already. Okay, service. Again, no standard portion size portion here. I'll tell you. Of all the food cost killers, the 40 thieves, the number, the three number one, waste, portion and production. The number three. I look at the 40 thieves, I usually go through it check by check. But the first three I always look at is your waste. I look at your production, I look at your portioning. And Omar mentioned this. If you know you make a gallon of sauce and it's supposed to be a 6 ounce ladle, how many ladles of sauce do you have for servings? If you're using a six ounce ladle into a gallon of sauce, I'm gonna use that Jeopardy theme. 12. What? What? Nine. Nine. So worse. 17. Huh? All right. You can easily go to Google and you put in how many ounces in a gallon? How many ounces in a gallon? How many ounces a gallon? One gallon. Is it like 128? Yeah, I was gonna say is that 128. All right, there you go. So if you know you have a gallon which you have to convert, number one, you have to convert to ounces, which is 128 ounces. And if I have a six ounce ladle I'm using, I have how many 21 portions of sauce right now? It's supposed to be a 6 ounce ladle. I go back on the line and I see they're using an 8 ounce ladle. Am I going to blow through my sauce faster? Oh, hell yeah. And that's usually where problems go wrong. If I don't have standard specifications for how everything's supposed to be portioned and used and I don't give them the right tools and I've done this before. I walk back in the kitchen, hey, guys. Hey. It's supposed to be a six ounce ladle. How come you're using eight? We don't have any six ounce ladles. All right, that's owners guy. Buy them some six ounce ladles so they'll stop, you know, using the eight ounce ladle, you know, or six ounce ladles dirty or I've seen them like use the opposite too. Hey, it's a four ounce ladle. You guys know you have six ounce ladles? Oh, we do, yeah. You do? Yeah, Just use one half. I'm good at measuring. Anytime everyone says they're good at guessing, here's what I tell them. And I've had this actual, this actual conversation with an actual sous chef of mine. I Walk in the back door of my restaurant. We had tenderloins. He's cutting tenderloins. He's trimming them up. And that's usually a high cost product that has a lot of waste. Usually. He's cutting the steaks. I go, where's the scale? He goes, I'm pretty good at guessing. That's cool. You know, I'm good at guessing, too. I'm gonna guess your hours next week, okay? He's like, what? I go, yeah, What? You had 20, right? What? No, no. I said, hey, man, you mess with my money, I'm gonna mess with your money. It's only fair, right? Working relationships have to be win win. Scale on the table. Plastic wrap, steaks. Every time I've ever walked in, ever since then, scales on the table, weighing the steaks. Exactly. Whenever you're talking to your team, relate it into ways that they understand pain. You know, what do we say? Pain versus pleasure. Hey, man, you're good at guessing. Yeah, that's cool, man. I'm good at guessing, too. What'd you work, five hours last week? What? You want to see someone's eyes open up? Like what exactly? No standardized servings things. We just talked about that. Carelessness, spillage, waste food, you know, cold food, stuff sitting out at room temperature too long. Got to monitor this stuff. Remember, inspect what you expect. And then the last one here, sales. Food taken out of the building, unrecorded. Sales are incorrect pricing. The no charge or, you know, the cash not turned in. That's usually the no sale thing. That's usually at bars a lot. Guy comes up, buys a draft beer. It's for something. Gives you a five. Bartender takes a five hits, no sale pocsa. Five. You lost a draft beer. He just made five bucks. If you're a busy bar, he does that 50 times a night. How much money you think he just made? He made a lot of bank. Right again. Now he's your business partner, but he's not telling you he's a business partner. And you're basically paying for the product. He's taking the profit. You're like, what the hell, man? How come my profits suck? I can tell you exactly why. Yeah, you can give them no access to it. Yeah, you can restrict Aztecs for sure. Yeah, another huge one too, is. I think it's on here. Maybe it's not unrecorded. So incorrect price, incorrect pricing. Is there one? A lot of times when I run people, I'll say, give me your product mix report. Let me see your pmix Report. The number one thing I look at right away is your you're basically open food button. Every server. I don't know why. Every server in the world, when they're charging something, it's always a buck. I don't know why. What was that for? Oh, that was for a crab cake. A dollar. Open food. A dollar. It was. It was for bacon. That really expensive, you know, neck. You know, that really expensive handcrafted bacon. We buy a dollar. Yeah, yeah. How much was that? What was that Odin food for? Oh, it's for avocado. The avocados. I just paid a hundred dollars for a case. Chicken wings. It was a dollar. Yeah. You want to watch. Monitor your open food all the time. Because I'm telling you, they go in and just start ringing in all the time. Yeah, Yeah, yeah. There's. Wait. Remember, remember, inspect what you expect. Ryan will tell you from firsthand experience. He's in my accelerator program. One of the things we do is, you know, he has toast. I look at toast and I. He has. I have access to his toast. And a lot of times I'll be like, dude, what's this? What's this? What's this? He's like, oh, here we go. You know, but he ask questions and you go ask this team, and then you know what? We stop the bleeding. Yeah. Our big problem. Voids and comps are huge. Voids are a big one. And what I didn't take advantage of on TER until actually this past week, we started doing it. But you can enter as many different reasons. Different reasons as you want. You got to also. Yeah. Do. But only two staff members do it with their numbers. The trick is if someone else is snagging their number. Yeah. The voice only complimented words of me. And it's put in their void. And then it's like in the abyss of. That was the first one that we had to put in was like, where did that cost go? Yeah. Another thing, like, Ryan noticed too, is like he had some voids under his number and he liked. It's like, well, I didn't. Yeah, nice. He was in the other restaurant. The restaurant upstairs was using voids for as he was there. It's like, dude, you've learned to clone yourself. That's pretty cool. That's awesome, dude. You stay home. He can work both restaurants same time. His name pops up in the POS system all the time. It's amazing, The concepts. That's illegal. Big time. Yeah. You can't charge anything. A lot of people do it. You just might. You Just gotta watch it. Yeah, here's another one, too. And this, this goes back to production. No Food Popularity indexer comparison of sales to IND inventory consumption. This is where I'm looking at my par sheets. And let's use that gallon of. I'm going to say it's a gallon of marinara sauce, and I have what, 21 orders out of it, right? And let's say on an average night, we do 18 orders of marinara. But then it starts jumping up to, you know, I'm doing 30 orders of marinara a night. Is that one gallon of marinara going to make it through a night? Of course not. Now I got up my par, right? So a lot of times I want to look at my menu and see what. And then also gets where it gets crazy. Let's say I have four dishes that use marinara. I got marinara on a meatball appetizer. I got a penne, a lavaca that uses marinara with some cream. I got the meat, a meatball and spaghetti dish. I also got a lasagna dish that use marinara. Now I've got five dishes on my menu that use marinara at 6 ounces. Now I have to look at all my menu items and see what is my standard usage for every item that uses marinara sauce. Now I have to. That helps me calculate a perfect, proper production level. I'm telling you right now, production is all just math. That's all it really is. You just got to dig into the numbers and they'll tell you everything. The data tells you everything. If you just know where to look. If you don't know where to look, contact me and I'll show you where to look. It's easy to find. It's all in your POS system. Poor pricing and menu items. Another huge thing, too. I get this from a lot of places. I just don't want to. I don't think I, you know, I don't want to charge that much. You need to charge what you need to charge to stay in business. Everyone here is a for profit. No one's a charity. Jennifer's on the verge of being a charity, but. Her staff thinks she's a nonprofit. That's it. Not running special items and stuff that overproduced. I'm not a big fan of the word specials. I like to use word feature. Again, I'm a big power of words. Special to me is something I'm just trying to get rid of. A feature means I'm trying to showcase something. Go ahead. Employee meals. How do you all do that. How do you all feel? Because I do personal. Okay, we do that. But there's like, Chef gets really pissed because he's like, I feel like all I'm doing is cooking and fully meal all day. She only has, like, 15. Yeah, tell off. What was that, Cora? No one heard you in the back. Your chef sounds very needy. And for. And for. I know what you pay him. That's very. He's very needy for what he gets paid. You guys are only hearing the highlight. Yeah. Don't have Donald out first. No, definitely have Donald. I will definitely have Donald come out for a site visit. Definitely have me come. But our employees get a free meal, but we limit them. Like, right now, chicken wings are a no because they're impossible to get. So we want our customers to have a. Burgers are almost always a no because of the time that it takes if we're busy. If it's super busy on a Friday night, it's no employee meal. And we'll put some pizzas in the back and they can, you know, so we have to kind of manipulate it like that. We've done that. I think it just has to do with, like, prep day is Thursday. It's shitty. It's Monday. It's, like slammed. And you have an employee walk in the door and be like, oh, I'm gonna wear my food. He's like, why didn't you just bring something? Like, he walked in the door. No, that's. I'll tell you right now, you know what? That's. That's culture. Yeah. That's toxic culture. What's the perk of working there? Yeah. What's a perk? Yeah. Fuck, yeah. Hours from now, I'm going to go. I'm going to go fire that. Four hours from now, this person wants a chicken sandwich. So it gives us some time to build that in. You know, the only time. The only time that I. I do a free meal is if people work a double shift. Otherwise you get a 30% off your meal. I usually do a free meal. If they work a double. Yeah, yeah. But certain items, too, I'm not going to give them. Like, you can't get steak off the menu. But, you know, I'll give you something. I'll give you a double. I'll give it. Work a double. Give you me. All right, here's what. Here's what I want you to do on the group chat, type in what your food policy is for employees. How's that? That way everyone can see and everyone can sort through the data, we don't have this kind of talking on top of each other. Sound cool? How's that? All right, bottom line, Foucault sleeves are real and they happen all the time. If, again, if you don't have awareness, you can't make better choices. If you don't make better choices, you're going to be stuck doing the same thing you do over and over and expecting different results, which is called insanity. Exactly. Doing the same thing and expecting different results is insanity. And unfortunately, most restaurants just like to do the same thing over and expect different things. If I don't train my team properly, and I'm telling you, like 99% of the food, 40 thieves of food cost is all proper training. That's all it really is. It's just training them the way you want it done and then holding them accountable to your expectations. And then remember the five, the daily five sermon. One is. Number four is standards. Like, that's not the way we do it. We do it like this. They're going to push back. No, I don't want, you know, no, no. You know, it's easier for. No, this is our standard, guys. This is how we do things. I'm always calm about that. That's how we do things. That's our standard. It's not, and I usually use the word, it's not negotiable. As soon as I say it's not negotiable. What's that usually mean? It's not negotiable? Okay, you stop talking. It's non negotiable. It's like, right then I just shut the door. It's not negotiable. It's the way we do it. I shut them down right away. It's non negotiable. It's the way we do it. It's our way. It's non negotiable. It's not a discussion. It's not open for debate. It's not open for discussion. It's just the way it is, you know, and I'm really polite about it, I'm calm about it, but I'm just like, it's not open for debate. I don't have to, like, you know, I've seen those owners, like, you know, Jesus Christ, I told you. No, no, no, we're not doing like that. We're doing like, don't lose your cool when you elevate stuff. And we talked about emotions over the last three days. Talk about emotional management, emotional intelligence, managing your emotional, emotional energy. Energy levels. We talked about all These things, you have to maintain the culture, you have to maintain the balance, you have to maintain the energy level that you want all the time. You either run the restaurant or it runs you right now. And we talk about this working in your business stuff on your business. When you're working in your business, you're establishing those 3P framework, people, product, process. When you have that solid and you know, it's basically a self fulfilling circle. The people in the process feed each other and they protect the product which is the brand. Now you can take yourself out of the equation and be the operator and just manage it, but I'm still teaching the Daily 5 sermon. Even when you're not even in your restaurant every day when you're on the phone to anybody on your team, it's always a daily five. We talk about our mission, our core values. You following the core values, you following the vision, you follow the mission statements. Hey, our standards, expectations, I know it's on the P and L. We do this and this and this I need you to do, you know, make sure we're watching this, follow the budgets, make sure we're following you, you know, doing this, make sure we're doing the production right, make sure we're adjusting pars. I'm holding always my standards, my expectations, I'm setting goals for them and then I'm also giving appreciate. Hey man, I really appreciate all the work you do. You can get to that level where you don't have to have your restaurant run your life. Okay, hashtag, write this down. Somebody's texting me like crazy. You must know where the bleeding is to stop it. You must know where the bleeding is to stop it. You have to know where the bleeding is. If you don't know where the bleeding is, it's just going to keep going. When I was in pararescue, part of the pararescue training is basically paramedic training. First thing you do when you walk up on an unconscious person, we call it ABC airway bleeding. Then we check circulation, we walk up airway, are they breathing? We check bleeding. We usually do this hand sweep to see if there's any blood pooled or anywhere and they have blood coming out. Then we check their circulation, make sure sure they got a great how strong their pulse is. Same thing. You got to know where the bleeding is that 40 thieves of food cost. If you have a food cost problem, it's in the 40 Thieves, trust me, always is. 40 years in the restaurant business, I can tell you with a shout out 100% certainty. Any food cost problem is hidden in that 40 thieves in the top three are production, portion and waste. That's the top three. And usually it's portion. If I had to pick one of the three, it's usually portion control. It's usually number one thing. You know, you have this beautiful design pizza and it's supposed to be like, you know, six ounces of cheese. And then you got monster gorilla guy back down the line and he's got a hand and it's like his standard size cheese is 12 ounces. And he made a monster monster cheese, man, you know? You know, and he's like dumping cheese on there and cheese. I don't know about you, but cheese right now is really expensive. You're like, oh my God, I see my cheese prices drop, you know, jumping up. My invoices are jumping up every week. That's what's kicking your ass. It's like you don't have any portion control measurements, you know, and then the guys will as soon as you try to enforce it. Remember we talked about this resistance curve? You start something and then they give you resistance or pushback. Well, you know, man, I love to weigh out the cheese, but man, it's really going to slow me down, you know, I won't be able to cook as many pizzas. That's just a story you're telling yourself. That's just bullshit. That's a lie. Yeah, yeah. Usually. Yeah. After they kind of, that goes into the buying part. After they kind of, they push back because again, it's a nurse step for them. Now. I got to get a scale or I got to have a thing and I got to weigh the cheese out or put it in a cup and fill it to the top. Oh, my God. You know how much is going to slow me down? Oh, my God. You know how much it kills me to write your paycheck every week? You know how much I got to sit down, I got to pull up the payroll, I got to calculate your hours, I got to sit over the account, I got to sit over the payroll company. The checks got come back, I got have them signed. You know how much that pain in the ass it is for me. But I do it every time. Yeah, it's just part of the job. And again, it goes back to. This is the way we operate. It's non negotiable. We measure our cheese, we measure our portions. That's how we operate. Guys, let's just, you know, listen, I know there's other restaurants that don't care. We do care. We want a consistent product for our guests. To do that, we have to have some consistency rules, rules of engagement in place. One of those things is proper portioning. Proper portioning, proper plates. Another thing too is look at the size of your plates. I know a lot of chefs and I've chefed it up too. Chefs like to chef shit up. I don't know why. Well, they chef shit up. Like, chef, when we chef shit up, we like these really cool, fucking huge plates. But the problem is, a lot of times we have this really cool plate, don't we? We like to chef shit up, we have this really cool, huge plate. I got a whole collection of these fucking plates at home. My girlfriend thinks, and I got one offs. You know, it's like, I don't have a set. I got like 25 huge fucking really cool, edgy, really cool, like, plates for plating. But we have this, like, really cool plate. And then we put this food in there really nice. You know, we make this nice, beautiful frame. But then we put those same plates on the line with the guys, and they're like putting stuff together and they're like, it looks empty. I'm gonna put more potatoes on here. Oh, wait, now it looks unbalanced. I need more vegetables on here. Oh, wait. Probably needs more sauce to fill in this empty spot. Now my nice little tight plate becomes this huge over portioned shit. Right? 60% food cost. Yeah, I see this especially on steaks. I don't know why. It's like, I don't know why guys think that the bigger steak, I gotta put more potatoes on it. Why? It just looks better. Why? You know, like chop house last night, the steak was a la carte. The steak comes out on its own plate. All anything. The sides that you order, sides, they're portioned out specifically. And I don't remember which video it is that you have, but you're talking about when you're doing your food cost. Okay, so I've got my steak, I've got my mashed potatoes. I've got my truffle butter. I've got my. It was Bo. Was it Bo yesterday. Talking about the menu matrix. Have a video talking about it too, where you're talking about you've got your food cost written out for. Oh, yeah, yeah. But then you go and you throw all of these extra on there. Yeah. Down there for garnish. Because that looks cool. Let's put some hibiscus on it. Whatever. But you're not portioning out. You're not costing out. That yeah. All the extra garnish, which actually starts kicking your ass. Oh, these numbers are off. Yep. Anything goes on the plate has to be costed. Yeah. If I'm doing like a chive oil, I want to make a recipe for chive oil. I want to cost out the ounce, I want to measure it out and see how much is that little streak on the plate of chive oil. If I'm doing a sprig of rosemary that goes on the recipe card, anything that goes on the plate has to go on the recipe card. Has to. Those little hidden costs. And then remember, inspect what you expect. If my recipe cost card says it's, you know, it's 4 ounces of starch, you know, 3 ounces of potato or veggies, and it's portion protein at this size, I'm going back and I'm randomly weighing proteins. Sometimes I'm making sure they're using the right scoopers and dishers on the line to make sure the portions are right. I don't know how many times I've walked back in the kitchen and instead of using a disher, you know, for potatoes and trust me, a lot of people say, well, I don't want to use a disher because it looks like those old fashioned scoop mashed potatoes from school. Right. Just because I use the disher doesn't mean you have to leave it like a disher. I can put it on the disher and I can use the other end and swirl it around and make it look different. I can use a spoon and draw a line through it. Now it has some presentation. Just because I use that scooper doesn't mean I have to leave it like that doesn't have to look like high school cafeteria food. Right. I can play with it. That's why I love having spoons. Take the spoon. Oh my God. Different. You take a scoop of mashed potatoes, put them on a plate. I tell you, take the back of a serving spoon, put it in the mashed potatoes, drag it through, totally looks different. And also makes a nice little trough for your gravy. It's easy stuff. All right, here's what I want you to do for homework. Bum, bum, bum. You're going to go in the members area. When I upload the 40 Thieves of Food cost checklist, you're going to use it to identify your weaknesses and what you need to work on in your create an action plan to correct them. Trust me, of the forty thieves of food cost, you will have. Not many that you do. You'll probably have probably. Of the 40 Thieves of Food cost, I'm probably going to say at least. Have at least 50% that you're not doing. At least you're not doing 100% because you have an open chip. Yeah. You don't have a building. Yeah. Yeah. You and Liz are in the same boat. You guys get a pass on homework. So Liz and Candy, Caitlyn and Mary do not have to do homework, but they have to do tequila shots corresponding to the number of food costs thieves there are. So there's four of them. There's 40 thieves of food cost, Liz. My husband says I'm the mean drunk, so I can't. That's not my. That's not. That's not on me. Liz, Liz, Liz, Mary, Candy and Caitlin. Between the four of them. Half Aunt Cora. What do you mean? Well, Cora wants to throw herself in there because she's a good sport. Between the five of you, you have. And I don't care what the distribution is. 40 shots between the five of you between now and the next bathroom break. No, I'm kidding. What? Yeah. So Liz and Kora are both mean drunks from what I hear. See around, find out. Find out. Cora has a tattoo on her arm. It says fuck around and find out. I don't think it's on her arm actually, but she won't tell me where exactly it's at. But that's okay. Chris says that he learned firsthand. Fuck around and find out. Chris can't hear out of one ear because of her. Yeah, see? Exactly. It was a pencil. All right. Any other questions about that? Final thoughts. Food cost is huge. If you do not know your numbers, again, you don't know your business. Basically, you don't even have a business. What you have is a hobby. Very, very expensive hobby. All right. I wonder if Bo's coming. Was Bo here? Bo this morning? I haven't seen Bo at all this morning. Right. All right, here's what we'll do. We got it. We got another Ava video to watch. I'm going to give you a five minute break to take a bathroom break real quick. We'll watch, come back, watch the Ava video. Her videos are like 20 minutes. It's going to be about social media marketing.