Loaded

🤔 Improving labour costs in a bar or restaurant is often seen as the antithesis to a happy productive hospitality team. However, - I'd argue that the inverse is actually true. It seems to me the best hospitality teams thrive on the challenge of being more productive, and then being rewarded well (both financially and with development) for all of their hard work. Yes this hard work is about making sure customers have a great time, but also that the business is hugely successful. If we genuinely care about the future of our team, then we have no choice but to find more efficient and productive ways to operate. It's this efficiency that creates the future profitability that can be shared with our team in terms of how well we pay them and look after them. Where else can it come from? We've been working with small groups of our Loaded customers, looking to emulate some of the best performance improvements we have seen from our long terms customers, and it's been amazing to watch just how much progress the Loaded team has been able to make with them over four short weeks. I've detailed the biggest learnings out of this to date in the article below in the comments.

Dream team 😎

Bring on the summer season, team! 😎

What a spot, and what a group of people 😍 Thanks for bringing us in on the panel, team - what a great chat 🤗

Not even a cancelled Queenstown flight, a 500km overnight drive to Christchurch for the next available seats, and then a 5am flight out this morning could stop us from getting to Fine Food Australia 😅 If you're heading to see Richard McLeod on the Crunch stage at 1:30pm, maybe take him a coffee or two ☕️ ☕️ 😂

Who’s going to the Fine Food Australia event in Melbourne next week?! Richard McLeod, Poppy Gresson, and Graham will all be heading along, with Rich hitting the Crunch stage to speak on both the Tuesday (sharing daily habits that will level up your efficiency big time) and Wednesday (helping you get a handle on your costs). Those talks are both at 1:30pm, so mark them in your diaries because they’re going to be goooooood. If you need help spotting Rich, he’ll be the guy doing all the gesticulating (oh and he’ll be wearing a Loaded shirt).

First, grab this free guide to hospitality management incentives that *actually* work: https://lnkd.in/gPHxA4ip And then go shout Rich a lunch. Based on the feedback we're getting so far, he'll be eating free for months 🍔

The truely sensational hospitality experiences i've had as a customer are definitely more art than science............. I love walking into a venue and not being able to put my finger on exactly why it’s so great, but just knowing and feeling that it has something special in its DNA. It’s always an important reminder to me that delivering great hospitality is more art than it is science. But it’s not ALL art, and the problem I see over and over again is the hospitality artist being put through the wringer because they’re not controlling the science part of their business. That is, the managing and controlling of systems and finances. Solve that, and you earn the opportunity to spend your time working on the bits of hospitality you love. All the things you got into this industry for in the first place. Often the Hospitality artist doesn't believe they can actually understand and control the numbers, but i've learnt after having trained a tonne of managers and worked with even more owners, that if you can understand the story your financials are telling you, then you'll actually see that the maths part is crazy simple. Our team has put the story of your financials into a super useful (and I think quite pretty) guide, so that you can hopefully use it to refer to and even better take your team through it, so that everyone in your business can start to understand what the numbers are trying to tell you. I hope it's useful. Link to guide in the comments.

Did you see the latest 2024 hospitality benchmarks? 😮 If you want to know how your bar, restaurant, or cafe compares, take a look 👇 https://lnkd.in/dNa-ScJD #hospitalitymanagement #hospitalityindustry #hospitalitytech

Turns out it is 20 years this month since I dropped out of Otago University and Dave, James, Ben and I, ended up rather fortuitously as the Owners of the Mighty Captain Cook Tavern in Dunedin. That somehow evolved into Cook Brothers Bars and Construction, and i've somehow ended up running a tech business despite my obvious lack of credentials. To celebrate this personal milestone the kind people at Foodservice Australia have asked me to join the legendary Adam Theobald and Ivan Brewer for a chat on enhancing customer experience through technology at this years National Restaurant Conference in Sydney. If you want to join from New Zealand I understand Air New Zealand is likely to be putting more flights on for this, much like they did for Taylor Swift, so don't all go out and start panic buying. #foodserviceaustralia #nationalrestaurantconference