Since coming home from vegas things have been pretty chaotic.
The restaurant has provided some huge challenges, given i had time in Vegas to actually sit and think things through I came back with lots of ideas for the restaurant and realised what it is i needed to do and the errors we'd been making so far. The style of the service in the USA, Vegas in particular is just pure class, our CUSTOMER SERVICE is really really good but this is the actual service, the staff need to know the menu back to front, the drinks need to be perfect and served the same every time etc. However my plans to put this into practice were jolted pretty quickly by things that had happened in my absense...
Firstly the office that do our book-keeping have been down in my absense and casued mayhem, this promted a spell of high tension between myself and my partners who are the ones who insist that we use their office, then we had a falling out over opening times, budgets, marketing, websites pretty much everything. People who know me well know i'm a very unconfrontational guy but sometimes you gotta fight over stuff, I conceded on a few points where they made good sense and then got my way on most of the other things. The problems we have is that they are running 8 restaurants and i'm just running 1, tensions can get high and we have VERY different views on a lot of aspects. None of this matters really though as long as business blooms as a result.
My strategy with the staff has been a challenging one too, Ive invested a lot of faith into young and inexperienced people, trying to grow them into managers - the advantages to this are that i) you pay less wages, ii) you build a staff member to work in the way you like and iii) you gain some ingrained loyalty as you're the one who gave them the break. Strategy such as this though is not without it's problems, ego mixes with inexperience and this leads to some disputes, people do the job successfully under your supervision for a few months and now they believe genuinely that they are the finished article and should be paid the same as anyone else doing that job for 10+ years, it's a difficult conversation to have with someone you are trying to nuture to say "actually you are not there yet" you have to show some tough love sometimes, and of course the obvious one that you need to be on hand to pick up the pieces whenever things get a little OOH...
2 guys I really put faith into here, 1 is doing very very well and the other is not doing as well, I've taken the rather difficult decision to effectively demote him (bring someone else in above) it's been a tough one because the lad has really worked so hard and given it his all but he's just not there yet and on reflection it was too soon to make this move for him. I'm really hoping he'll respond positively to it and become stronger and stronger as a result.
Now Ive finally sorted that, and gotten August (traditionally awful month) out of the way I can finally start work on what i wanted to do after Vegas!
Just gonna spam some pictures at you now
Cool picture of me in action;
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We had a rockNroll band in last night was a brilliant evening, took 4x what we usually do on a tuesday!
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Lobster on the menu
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Charming some of our regular customers
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HAd people dancing too!
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THe Bar Area
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Finally got the website running too - after months of arguing about it, where the other two insisted that the restaurant go on their website
www.thefishermanswife.co.uk titled as "street lane outlet" (eurgh) I have finally persuaded them to break the terms of our arrangement at the start - that it would be branded as fishermans wife and we've broken away totally from that and stand alone... Here is the new website, you'll see a slight improvement...
ww.thefishermanslodge.co.uk
It's a battle but a fun one
Outside of this my application for a gaming license is in! Had to jump through some pretty tiny hoops to prove i am a person of good standing, makes me think I should start standing a bit better
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