6 Questions with Jim Taylor of Benchmark Sixty on Why Restaurant Employees Quit, Labor Management, Investing In People
Read Time: 10 min
By Sophie Braker
Jim Taylor is the creator of Benchmark Sixty, a Canadian restaurant financial optimization agency that uses data, benchmarks, and metrics to increase profit margins and improve productivity. Before starting Benchmark Sixty, he worked for Cactus Club Cafe and helped them grow into the household name they are today in Canada. To learn more about Jim’s story, watch BSP392: Jim Taylor of Benchmark Sixty on Restaurant Employee Retention with Labor Management.
Number one reason restaurant employees quit?
The number one reason restaurant employees quit I believe is culture. Culture, in the way that I specifically believe there’s the most opportunity, is actually how hard people have to work in restaurants. It's always been something that people have talked about that restaurant work is hard work. Kitchen work is hard work. People have to work really, really hard to make a good living in restaurants. How many people working in restaurants have to work two jobs? The culture around how hard the work is is probably the biggest contributor for why people leave.
What is the least understood aspect of labor management?
The least commonly understood aspect of labor management is that labor cost as a percentage of revenue is the number one cause of stress and anxiety in the entire industry. If you really dig into that metric, there are so many parts of it that are out of the control of the people who are held accountable to the result. Average customer spend, average employee wage, promotions that are decided on by the business, time of day, day of the week, season, weather. All of these things factor into what the total revenue number is and then the manager is somehow supposed to figure out how to match up the labor payroll amount as a percentage to that total revenue. It’s a total guess. We did a case study on this and found that it was less than ten percent of the time in front of house or back of house that a manager on any given day actually hit their target. Hundreds of shifts it was less than ten percent of the time. Sometimes by the end of the week it looks the way you want it to, sometimes by the end of the month, it looks right on the P&L. Way more often it's: Why was it high? Why was it low? I don’t know. I was training. It was slow. Consciously and unconsciously managers and chefs, all the time, are making decisions to try to hit that number that’s almost an imaginary target. Sometimes it's to actually take care of themselves so they can hit their bonus. It usually negatively impacts customer experience, employee experience, revenue because they are trying to hit this target that is arbitrary.
What are some of the best ways restaurateurs can invest in their people?
Strategically, the best way for restaurants to invest in their people is investing in new ways of doing things. In education, like learning how to measure the employee work load side. Actually measure how hard your team has to work to achieve the result that you want to achieve. Not just go out and say hey, can you work a split this week? Or hey can you close and open back to back? Can you work a six day week? Can you work two stations? Can you take two sections? But actually measuring how hard the team has to work. Restaurants are the only industry in the world that don’t do this in one way or another. How many times have you heard from a manager or chef that they do their admin on their day off because they have to work so hard in the restaurant at work?
How do you see mental health affecting the restaurant professional right now?
It's front and center and needs to be even more front and center. Going back to thinking about how hard the work is in restaurants and it's getting harder. The industry is becoming more complicated and more complex. If you think about it for ten to fifteen years pre-pandemic, people just did the same thing, the same way and it just was what it was. Now we have pricing that's harder, wage, supply chain, wage structures, labor shortages that are all harder. All of this stuff is more complicated. I was talking to a restaurant yesterday. The manager is running a restaurant doing 6 million dollars in revenue. He’s the only manager and they’re open seven days a week from 11 am to midnight. If that doesn’t take a toll on your mental health, I don’t know what does. We talk about workload management. We talk to companies about understanding that protecting your employee experience through managing how hard your team has to work will actually help them stay longer, have a better work experience, a better life, and a better mental state. It's all connected.
What prompted one of your clients to start a home cleaning and laundering service for their employees?
It’s a restaurant company where their home office was connected to one of their locations, a full service restaurant. The head office team is in the restaurant all the time. There was a bartender who was serving one of the executives. He clearly didn’t smell very good. The executive could smell from across the bar that he didn’t smell very good. His shirt’s dirty. He’s looking disheveled. So the executive asks him, “Hey, you've worked here for a couple of years. I know you by name. Is everything okay? What’s going on?”
The bartender, a twenty two year old kid, said, “I'm exhausted. We're so short staffed. I'm working 65 hours a week. I closed last night. I opened this morning. I’m working six days a week. I don’t have time to do laundry. I only have one work shirt. And I got called in today. It was either do laundry or come to work and I’m here.”
So the executive thought we have to do something about this. We were in their executive meeting that day. The executive said we’re scrapping the entire agenda this morning. I think their team thought they were just going to give people raises or bonuses which is what they normally do.
The executive said, “We’re going to talk about how to take better care of our employees. We have to do something that is going to have a positive impact. Here’s the story of what just happened. I don’t want our team to have to worry about laundry anymore.”
It started as a BHAG, a big hairy audacious goal - At home cleaning and laundry service for two hours a week for every member of the company. They have 300 staff. The team asked how do we do that? They have accomplished it. It's a really good retention strategy but it's also become a killer recruiting strategy. I go tell my friends I don’t have to clean my house or do my laundry because I work for this company. When we actually backed it out, it was basically the equivalent of giving every employee two dollars more an hour.
Best advice for new restaurant owners?
“Retention is the new cool” started out as a conversation that we were having as a group on our team. It's actually not a labor shortage in our industry. It's a culture shortage. If you think about how our industry has operated for a long time, there’s always been a labor shortage. Turnover has always been really high. It's just been a labor shortage that has been masked by worker supply. Now there’s a labor shortage that's being exposed by a lack of culture. Through that conversation, someone on our team said, I think the cool kids are the ones that are focusing on retention. It just kind of stuck for us. Our team all has shirts that say Retention is the new cool.
Before going into business for himself, Jim had a long and successful career with Cactus Club Cafe restaurants. Operating in multiple roles and several markets, Jim took a lead role in both the growth and financial strategies that helped make Cactus restaurants a household name in Canada.
Jim is the creator of Benchmark Sixty - A one-of-a-kind restaurant financial optimization agency designed to support restaurateurs to dramatically increase their profit margins by understanding data, implementing benchmarks, and using metrics to improve productivity. This signature platform has helped hundreds of restaurants start on the right foot, land on their feet, or position for solid growth moving forward. It has also been battle-tested during the challenging COVID-19 restrictions.
Using a proprietary strategy, Jim and his team work with restaurant operators to navigate the new normal of the restaurant industry, where everything from wage structure to menu pricing and cost management has changed. Essentially, we bridge the gap between data and operations in order to support operations in turning otherwise useless information into winning strategies.
Jim’s business goals are focused primarily on doing what he can to improve the overall state of the restaurant industry. Having grown up in it and witnessing firsthand the challenges it and the people working in it face, he aspires to make it better for the next generation of restaurateurs.
Ultimately Jim aims to “Change the way the entire restaurant industry looks at labor costs in order to protect profit AND employee experience.”
