A chef earning $15 per hour shouldn’t be making box lunches
that sell for $7 each; a kitchen staffer that earns $8 per hour should be
making the box lunches. The $15 an hour, higher skilled chef should not work at
all on the box lunches, but rather concentrate on the more costly menu items
being prepared for the day. This is at the core of the manufacturing process:
Labor costs need to be correctly applied by skill and cost to functions.
To go one step further: The $8 per hour lower-skilled person
should start their day at 6 a.m. and leave by 2 p.m. The $15 per hour chef,
unless needed early for some special reason, should start later in the day.
Staff should be brought into the kitchen on an as-needed basis by level of
skills and orders. Your first reaction might be that is not possible in the
real world. The answer lies in the numbers associated with the dollars spent
for producing your menu items in relation to your profit picture.
A manufacturer hires more staff when it has more business and
doesn’t hesitate to let staff go when business is down. Caterers tend to
maintain constant staff levels most of the year, even when business is slow,
because they believe that if they don’t keep their staff busy and paid on a
regular basis, the staff will leave and go elsewhere. In essence, many caterers
are subsidizing the welfare of their staff with profitability from the company.
The answer to what is right or wrong in this matter is up to you.
Caterers, like manufacturers, create events that were sold
weeks or months earlier. They know what they need to buy for these events and
how many kitchen staff they will need for any given day in the future. This is
a huge advantage over restaurateurs, who can never be sure of what they will
sell on a given day. Caterers should be able to increase profits by minimizing
wasted purchases and staffing based on need.
Whenever possible, eliminate kitchen overtime. By forecasting staff
requirements, you can budget your costs and monitor sales to insure that
overtime is eliminated. If you have a wonderful future day filled with properly
sold events with correct profit margins, why should a salesperson be permitted
to take another event that now requires the culinary team to stay past eight
hours and incur additional costs that can only be covered by taking profit away
form the other properly priced events? From a business point of view this makes
no sense.
Close dates that already have reached the point of maximum
profitability within an eight-hour period. Once the event booking calendar
closes a date, it can only be opened again if additional sales for that date
are sold at higher than normal prices to cover any overtime costs. Another way
to avoid paying overtime is to stagger scheduled shifts, so as one eight-hour
shift is ending, another one is beginning or overlapping.
