Donald Burns explains kaizen for restaurants: get 1% better every day through small, continuous improvements. Leadership sets the culture, and these incremental gains compound to transform your business over time.
All outstanding restaurants. They never settle for what was accomplished yesterday. You want to adopt this kind of philosophy of kaizen, and kaizen basically is this kind of. It's a word in Japanese. It basically means constant, never ending improvement. The way I have my clients all do it is we call it the 1% rule. We adopt this philosophy that we want to be 1% better today than we were yesterday. Just imagine if you just 1% better every day. A year from now, you'd have a whole different restaurant. This 1% rule starts with you. Culture flows down, it does not flow up. You as the owner, operators, your culture, your attitude, your mindset flows down to the team. When you have this kind of culture of this 1% improvement, you're going to enjoy the journey of success more.
If your restaurant only works because you work 80 hours a week, it doesn't work.
