From In The Black: In the trenches
Achieving an effective level of management is a fairly universal story no matter what business you work in or run. Just look at the restaurant industry. It’s a microcosm of the business world, picky customers and tight deadlines. And the man who has highlighted it, warts and all, is internationally recognised chef and restaurant owner, Gordon Ramsay.
His UK and US TV series Kitchen Nightmares has made his name as a straight-talking, business ‘fix-it’ guru. Google lists 56,200 search results for Gordon Ramsay and management.
As a long-time observer of the international food industry, it would be easy to zero in on Ramsay’s food lessons, or get sucked in by his liberal use of the expletives and insults that entice even non-food buffs to tune in. But underpinning all of that is the fact that Ramsay confronts some embarrassingly bad businesses to deliver his ‘reality’ show and they’re all on the edge of failure.
He drops into fresh seafood restaurants, where nothing is fresh. He finds chefs who don’t want to taste the food they serve. The pesto is mouldy. And the filth in some kitchens is unspeakable.
It would be voyeuristic enough for many to simply tune in to these extreme examples and laugh at Ramsay’s entertaining ragging of bad managers and indolent staff, and conclude that they deserve to go under, but the viewer in search of education will realise that Ramsay isn’t just dealing with and attempting to solve kitchen nightmares. He’s addressing business and management hell too.
There are restaurants that miss an obvious target market, others that don’t even have signposts to tell customers they are there, bosses taking advantage of staff and staff taking advantage of bosses.
Long before television fame, Ramsay was an expert at running a single restaurant, but now he runs an empire. In his own businesses he inspires fierce loyalty and team spirit, so much so that in 1998 when he left Aubergine in London’s Notting Hill to establish his own restaurant, Gordon Ramsay, at Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea, all the staff moved with him.
He now boasts a staff retention rate of over 80 per cent. To put that in perspective, the retention rate in Australian restaurants is under 30 per cent.
When Ramsay walks into a kitchen nightmare he has less than a week to turn it around. And we wonder about his directness and fierce efficiency.
Russell Hobby, an associate director at the consulting firm Hay Group, recently told The Times in London that ‘If you look at what he does when he’s in a kitchen, there’s a huge amount of really honest feedback. He thinks about people’s vision for their restaurant and helps them to reach their goals; it’s not about him saying what he would do.’
So, if we sideline the full-on personality and the shock tactics, there are, from my observations, seven main lessons that any business or management team can learn from Ramsay.
Somebody has got to be put in charge. Time and time again, Ramsay shows how multiple bosses simply make it confusing for staff to know what’s going on. People end up chasing each other’s tails rather than focusing on specific, clearly articulated tasks and goals.
At one restaurant, Ramsay confronts three business partners who are all trying to manage the place. He makes them appoint one to take charge and that person makes it absolutely clear to each member of staff what their responsibilities are.
He tells Sebastian, who has a misguided vision for a wannabe pizza franchise called Sebastian’s in LA: ‘Control it! As those orders come in, push them out. Get on top of it, and make sure everyone isn’t shouting across each other. One person controlling it.’
And to Peter, the owner of the fish restaurant Seascape: ‘You have got to make the biggest decision you’ve ever made since your father passed away. Whether you continue to work with the dead wood that has drifted into your business, or whether to wake up and get a grip and be the boss.’
A common mistake many restaurants and businesses make is to overcomplicate what they offer. For restaurants, this means fussy menus and dishes. Often there are simply too many choices on a menu. Or chefs try too hard to bring together improbable combinations of food, such as lamb with a mint chocolate sauce.
At the Curry Lounge in the UK’s Nottingham, customers can design their own curry with more than 100 variations on the menu. Ramsay points out that if a customer has to design the product, then the company obviously doesn’t do a very good job in trying to provide what the customer wants. All an extensive menu choice does is slow service by creating too much extra work for the kitchen staff. This frustrates customers who have to wait for the end product.
Ramsay often talks about the fundamental need for people to have pride and passion in what they are doing. In the television series, many of the restaurant owners and chefs have obviously lost their drive. There are restaurants serving food on chipped plates and pouring wine into dirty glasses.
The reality is, a restaurant needs to be inviting if it is to motivate and retain staff and to present the correct image to customers. If something looks old fashioned and shabby, customers will probably assume the food and service is as well.
Ramsay is brutally honest about how much first impressions count. Some of the more printable ones include an instance where he asks the owner of a curry restaurant whether ‘he got his inspiration from a lap dancing club’. Or the French chef and owner of another restaurant who was hit with: ‘Look around. This is like walking into a funeral parlour.’
A common failing in the restaurant business, and for many other businesses, is trying to copy what everybody else is doing, or allowing the competition to sneak up on them.
Ramsay found that in ten years, one neighbourhood had gone from just four restaurants to more than 41. Ramsay works with the dumbstruck owner of one of the originals, seeking out a point of difference that he can use to recover his standing.
With healthy food as a niche, he can promote his restaurant to people in gyms. ‘Give the neighbourhood what it wants,’ he advises. Marketing the point of difference is also part of the big picture.
In New Jersey in the US, Ramsay helps another restaurant reinvent itself and compete by aiming to serve the best meatballs in the area, and letting everybody know about it.
In the UK, he introduces the ‘campaign for real gravy’ to help reinvigorate and get customers into the Fenwick Arms. At another restaurant he introduces a chowder competition judged by the town mayor. ‘Customers won’t just walk in the door. You must go to customers.’ Simple, but still so easily overlooked, even by established businesses.
Most workplaces can get caught up in their own industry, weasel words, acronyms and management speak. Ramsay refuses to play that game and is brutally direct and efficient in his communication. If somebody is doing a bad job, he just says so. His approach is to ensure that everybody knows where they stand and that they are given a fair chance to improve their performance.
As he tells Dean, the owner of The Olde Mill: ‘If you think you are going to continue running this business serving that … you may as well turn this place into a museum. No one’s going to come back for this stuff.’
Ramsay also uses good theatre to help make his points. During a friendly staff cricket match, he ties a manager’s hand behind his back to show him the disadvantage he has been asking his staff to work under. At another restaurant, he feeds a discount sign into a wood chipper as he says: ‘It’s time to say goodbye to Valentine’s Day.’ Even though Valentine’s Day is usually a full house, if it isn’t working then change it or lose it.
We all take pride in the positive customer feedback and backslapping but Ramsay constantly points out that the best feedback is the negative stuff because it helps you to make products better.
‘I’m not interested in the positives. My staff in my restaurants listen for the negatives,’ says Ramsay. The fact is that customers of restaurants, or most other businesses, rarely complain when directly asked if they don’t like something, unless they have been to personal assertiveness courses.
When did you last tell a waiter that you didn’t really like a meal? You probably said, ‘Yes, very nice thank you,’ determined never to go back there, and told your friends to avoid it like the plague. Imagine the difference if you’d said, ‘Yuk, that was horrible’.
Ramsay also finds continually that the people producing the product, the chefs, are stuck in the kitchen and never placed in a position where they can hear from their customers. The same can be said for managers in their offices. Get out, meet customers and listen.
At Finn McCool’s in the Hamptons in the US, Ramsay asks the local fire department what the food is really like and they all complain about the fried food overkill. But the chef at the failing business doesn’t want to listen and justifies himself by saying that for someone to criticise him who doesn’t do it for a living, ‘They want to shut up’. Learning to turn criticisms into a positive is a constant Ramsay theme.
So much management training is devoted to creating workplace teams, but it takes very little observation of Ramsay’s adventures to realise that teamwork is more difficult to achieve than many owners and managers realise.
Again, Ramsay’s technique is to break it back to simple approaches. His message is to treat your staff with respect and to listen to them. He makes a point of learning the names of all staff, giving them the opportunity to speak and acknowledging that he has heard what they’re saying.
It is the people who work in a business who usually know what’s wrong with its products or have an opinion on how it is run. Time and time again, Ramsay points to bosses who don’t listen, or who rule with fear rather than examining their own behaviour.
One waitress at a restaurant tells Ramsay, straight up, what the problem is. The food takes far too long to be cooked and she must deal with the unhappy customers when it hits the table 25 minutes later.
As part of the team-building process in Ramsay’s own restaurants, the entire staff play football each month. All sections, waiters, cooks, chefs and managers, have to work together, rather than fight against each other.
‘My team don’t meet without the kitchen. The whole restaurant doesn’t meet without the kitchen because they are one.’
At Italian family restaurant, Peter’s, Ramsay puts this into practice by swapping front-of-house staff with the kitchen so the owner can see the kitchen’s poor state of repair and how it doesn’t work. Another restaurant owner, Sebastian, boasts that he’s fired 49 people in the past year. The staff say that Sebastian doesn’t do a very good job of running it.
In spite of his instantly recognisable face and name, Ramsay practises what he preaches when he says: ‘I’m only as good as my team. Building a team is a key part of the foundation of a good business.’
What business can learn from Gordon Ramsay
Who’s the boss? Somebody needs to be in charge. Multiple bosses keep staff chasing their tails instead of focusing on clearly articulated tasks.
Keep it simple. If there’s too much choice, the company doesn’t know what the customer wants.
Have passion and pride. It’s the best way to retain customers, and staff.
Know your market. If you’re copying the competition, you’re behind the eight ball.
Say what you mean. Clear communication lets everyone know where they stand.
Listen properly to your customers. The best feedback is negative because you learn the most from it.
Work as a team. Every member of the team has something useful to contribute: ask, listen and learn.