It’s during induction that you need to introduce your rules. When we work through the formula we see that the passion has created the product with an exceptional taste and, hopefully, that has now been positioned correctly within the market. Later we’ll develop the systems and marketing to help promote and control this, but you need to create a strong set of rules that surround your business. What these rules do is help to distill all the work that you’ve done up to this stage into a clear and easy to understand format that can be effectively
drilled into a new starter’s brain. These rules, a little like the concept of Bob and Brenda, need to become the cornerstone of your business and something that your new staff regard as second nature. They need to quote them back to you just as often as you quote them in your day-to-day management.
So what are these rules? Well, they’re very different from your own personal rules that you established in the ‘begin with the end in mind’ section. Those rules govern how you behave within the business but your rules of operation need to govern how your employees work within the business. They are linked though. There will be aspects of your own rules and very strong elements of the passion that you originally developed to get you started within the rules.
If your original passion was based on outstanding coffee and a general and consistent frustration at the quality of the coffee, then this needs to become one of your rules. To be honest, any ‘coffee’ shop these days really has to have rules about coffee. But the point of these rules is not some glib statement like other coffee shops may come out with – they need to be backed up with your story and a strong sense of integrity, passion and authenticity. So if you proclaim that you will have the best coffee in the neighbourhood, then you really must have it. You have to live and breathe it and you can’t allow Mervyn to arrive at the back door and let you cut a few corners. You’ll lose all credibility with these rules if you allow them to be broken. That’s the equivalent of that infuriating statement that teachers and parents use ‘Do as I say, not as I do’. If you run your business like that then you’re heading towards an expensive fall.
‘No corner cutting’ is a great rule that we have used personally and with clients. It’s infuriating at times because we ALL want to cut corners but if you have laid out this rule and drummed it into everyone at induction (and in ongoing training) then you HAVE to stick to it – no matter how painful that may be in the short term. Not cutting corners is never painful in the long term because so few businesses adhere to standards like that.
Other rules can cover freshness, food quality, respect, customer service,
cleanliness – anything relating to the business that really is hugely important to you and drove you to establish the business in the first place. To come up with your rules you need to get out a blank sheet of paper and list out all the things that really matter to you. Once you have this list you need to look at all the potential problems that you’ll have within the business. This list, coupled with the ‘passion’ list, will help you to come up with a comprehensive list that
encapsulates both of these.
This new long list now needs to be distilled down into a number of key points that will form the ultimate rules. Ideally you want no more than three because you’ll find that people cannot consistently remember more than three without forcing themselves to remember, and that removes all the impetus from the process.
Once you have those three rules you can incorporate them into your induction (and all future training). But to get them to really stick you need to craft the story around how you came up with them. This story is what your staff will remember and it will also create a solid backbone to your business in terms of how they respect what you’re trying to do. So regardless of how important you might feel ‘making a huge amount of money’ is, it’s highly inadvisable to try to sell this as a rule to your staff. This is why the ‘money men’ who want to open coffee shops and chains will always struggle to create an environment that people want to work in (and by extension that customers want to purchase from). They cannot come up with rules that are authentic enough and ring true for employees. And never underestimate how many potential coffee shop employees actually see the job as a lifestyle option and will be put off by purely financial goals.
So your induction needs to be framed around these rules and must highlight and explain how they apply on a day-to-day basis. It needs to cover how staff should deal with customers, serve food, keep the store clean and also incredibly fine details like how the store should be left at the end of the night and include policies about, for example, opening in morning.