Editor's Note: David Scott Peters is a restaurant expert, speaker, coach, trainer for independent restaurant owners and founder of TheRestaurantExpert.com www.TheRestaurantExpert.com. He will be presenting at the Nightclub & Bar Convention and Trade Show about How to Unlock the Secrets to Your Business’s Key Number on March 19.
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To help restaurant owners find ways to improve their business operations, I created what I call the Restaurant Owner Matrix and it ultimately determines if you are a Crazy Maker, a Pencil Pusher, a Head Coach or a Social Worker.
This matrix is a compilation of nearly a decade of my work with hundreds of independent restaurant owners and managers. It looks at who you are as a restaurant owner or manager, how you communicate and lead your team and how you work in your restaurant. It’s a window into who you are and how to use learned behaviors to compliment your personality, allowing you to get more out of your team and make more money in your restaurant. The ultimate goal is to help you run a more successful business.
The Restaurant Owner Matrix has an X (situational) and Y (behavioral) axis.
The X axis represents how much an owner manages their business based on systems and accountability. Think about this axis as representing learned behaviors and tasks, or actions you take when running your business.
The Y axis represents how much an owner manages based on their people, their needs and training. Think about this axis as representing who you are and how you communicate. This is more about your personality and communication style.
The more you rely on systems and hold people accountable for those systems, the higher you place yourself on the Y axis. The more you communicate, train and care about your people, the farther you fall to the right on the matrix.
The Head Coach quadrant is where we all want to fall on the matrix, as a person who is a systems-driven decision maker who leads people. The more learned systems and behaviors an owner has in place to manage by the numbers and the better they are at communicating, the better operator they are, falling into the Head Coach quadrant.
The complete opposite is the Crazy Maker, the emotion-driven decision maker who runs their business without systems and doesn’t communicate well with their team, often playing the role of a victim trapped in their business. I can’t tell you how many restaurant owners and managers I come across who so specifically fall into this quadrant.
Now it is very important to understand that we tend to “hang out” in our comfort zones, especially in times of stress or crisis. That means we can move around in any quadrant as we learn how to effectively use communication and systems as our tools. Again, our goal is to ultimately become a Head Coach.
When you know where you fall on the matrix, you will be able to find ways to run your business more successfully and make more money. Request a copy of the Restaurant Owner Matrix with a complete description and list of strengths and weaknesses for each style of restaurant owner. Read each of the quadrant labels and descriptions and I promise, you will know exactly where you stand. Once you know who you are, the easier it will be to change your behaviors and realize how systems WILL help you become a better leader and an even more successful restaurant.