Category: Blog

By Inez Silva Reyes

 

It’s been 9 years since I left the corporate world to help Frank re-engineer, professionalize and grow the Reyes Barbecue business he created.

Today we are moving towards our 55th store, and I think that if you ask us the question  “how did you grow the business?, we can happily share some nuggets of wisdom.

For us, there is only one key lesson to share:

       “A business is not about the product, or the marketing campaigns, or the sales, or even the customers. For us, the business is about PEOPLE. The people in our organization.”

How did we learn this?

Here’s a thought. Businessmen typically say: “Hire good people and they will grow your business for you.” This was not true at all for us.

In my first three years of managing Reyes Barbecue, as Frank and I were building the organization, we would prioritize all applicants for the positions of store operation supervisors and managers if they had experience from the major fast food chains – Jollibee, Chowking, Greenwich. Because I had worked for Jollibee, I personally witnessed the high caliber of the organization and I expected that by hiring people from Jollibee and its sister companies, they would infect our organization with a strong performance culture.

Not only did this not happen, hiring people from the major fast food chains was a complete disaster for us. We aggressively opened new stores during this time, but the operations people we hired from the major fast food chains were ineffective: sales were low, standards were not being followed, morale declined, there were integrity problems, etc – eventually, these people we hired had to go, and we would start from zero again.

After 3 years of doing this, we concluded that people who came from big companies have great difficulty in adjusting to smaller companies and therefore will not be effective. So we changed our hiring strategy. We then hired from second level chains like Cravings, Congo Grill, Domino’s.

With this new crop of operations people from second level food chains, our sales and morale improved, but only temporarily, and still far from the levels we desired. After two years of this, our business situation became so bad we ended up closing a lot of stores.

Then suddenly, it was 2012 – the 10th anniversary of Frank’s founding and creating the Reyes Barbecue brand.

Realizing the significant occasion, plus the fact that with all our mistakes the business had actually reached ten years, Frank and I stopped, took a step back and started to think again. This time, we realized we needed to think about the FUTURE.

We recognized that while we had a business with a huge potential, we would not be here forever to manage it. So it dawned on us to ask ourselves two important questions:

1. Who will manage our business 10 years from now?
2. Who will manage our business 100 years from now?

It was these questions that forced us to think more deeply about PEOPLE – particularly, the next generation of Reyes Barbecue management. Our two sons were out of the question – ten years from now they would only be in their twenties, hardly qualified to manage an operation of our scale. Realizing this, more questions were now pouring into our minds:

1. What are we doing wrong about hiring and deploying people? What do we need to change?
2. What do we need to do to build a strong organization for the future?
3. How do we build a strong organization for the future when today 90% of our people are only high school graduates?

We then decided that we needed to focus our attention and energies on ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT. So we took action on the basic organizational needs  : 1) immediately set up a Succession Planning Program; 2) re-organized and promoted the few good performers we had; and 3) re-engineered and improved our internal training programs. These moves were all well received by our people, and morale improved.

But so what if we had all these organizational programs? Is this it? Could we expect better performance from our people solely from these initiatives? Why do Starbucks employees perform so well, across the world, even when their bosses are not looking? Why do Uniqlo store staff across the world attend to their customers in the same energetic way without their bosses looking?

Then it hit us: we needed to do one more thing if we wanted to achieve the sales growth, organizational stability and consistency we aimed for: we needed to CREATE and BUILD a strong COMPANY CULTURE!

This realization in early 2013 that we needed to purposely create and build our own company culture gave us the “aha” breakthrough moment and pushed our minds to overdrive mode!

We were now very excited … So we asked ourselves another question: HOW do we create and build our own company culture? Facing a blank wall, the only thing we could do at this point was to research – by the way, we are avid readers so we enjoy research – we took a look at our library and reread the many books we had on building company cultures ; we went out and for weeks bought and read a lot of books on how organizations developed themselves or how entrepreneurs grew their businesses, hoping we would find some inspiration …

The more you read, the more ideas enter your mind, the more ideas in your mind, the more iterations happen in your mind, resulting to even more and better ideas … then slowly, but surely, the good ideas begin to get refined, enhanced, and suddenly, boom! The solutions just hit you.

Here are, what to us are, our GAME CHANGER IDEAS :

1st Big Idea : Stop Being Bosses. Instead, be TEACHERS.

We could not afford to hire topnotch executives to develop our people so we decided to stop being the bosses and instead take the role of TEACHERS in our organization.

But how would we “teach” culture? We remembered our MBA classes – the CASE METHOD was a more effective teaching method than pure lecture. So we decided to use CASE STUDIES as the method of teaching our people how to THINK, DECIDE AND ACT. We personally crafted our first case study and tried it out on our 6 operations heads. The response was very positive.

So in the first Monday of January 2014 we integrated a 3 hour Case Study Learning Module into our Monday Operations Review, during which all key operations people would be present. This was now a big group of 50 people – but again the response to the Case Study Learning Module was so positive that we made a personal commitment to create and teach a new case study to our key people every Monday of every week, January 1 to December 15 of every year without fail. (We are now on Year 4.)

The Case Studies we created were based on actual store issues – ex. anomalies, theft, insubordination, customer handling, leadership, etc. We spent time to carefully craft these so that our Case Studies were presented more as a story telling session, much like Jesus’ way of narrating the parables, but we packaged these in an “infotainment” style (ie “tele-serye” style), so that our people would be engaged and really listen as we discussed each case.

We would present the Case Study, then pose questions to the audience – the questions were actually an exercise for them in critical thinking and judgment – and we aimed to have the case solutions derived through the audience, through the discussions, through their own thinking  – NOT dictated on by the teacher-owners.

During these sessions we would have bowls with the names of everyone in attendance and draw these names randomly for each question. This way, everyone would have to be alert and listen – because you could be called to recite and think. Groups would be formed to meet and make on-the-spot presentations. Assignments were given and results shared in the following session. We would conduct our Case Study sessions in pretty much the same way teachers at universities would … Our aim was to create a culture within operations where leaders would think, decide and act correctly. To motivate our people, we would give tokens to recognize the best assignments and group presentations. Mondays then became our “Culture Building Day.”

From January 2014 up to the present we have created over 80 case studies, continuously conducted our Monday culture building sessions and we intend to do this in the company forever.

2nd Big Idea : Use Books As The Foundation Of The Company Culture. Their principles will be the company’s principles or “Commandments.”

Our thinking here was that rather than impose only our own personal values, beliefs and principles as the basis of our company culture, we decided to rely on selected books as our source of company “Commandments.”

We identified 5 books to be read by ALL leaders in Reyes   

Barbecue (from Operations, Head Office and Commissary):

1. Good To Great by Stanford Professor Jim Collins
2. Setting the Table by New York Restaurateur Danny Meyer
3. Food Service for the Professional by David Mizer
4. Rubies In The Orchard by Advertising Executive and Entrepreneur Lynda Resnick
5. Man’s Search For Meaning by Psychiatrist and Holocaust Survivor Viktor Frankl

The working plan was for all RBnian leaders to read all 5 books.

• One book a year
• One chapter a month
• Monthly workshop per chapter conducted by Owner –Teachers
• Exams after every workshop – results included in the Performance Appraisal

I’m happy to tell you that as of this date (May 2017) we are now on the last few chapters of our third book (Mizer).

Aside from books, we summarized key principles from the selected academic and literary materials and included these as part of our “Commandments.”:

1. Marks Of An Educated Man by Nobel Peace Prize winner and former Columbia University President Nicholas M. Butler
2. Articles on Integrity by various authors
3. Articles on Managing Up by various authors
4. Articles on Total Quality Management by W. Edwards Deming, the leading world thinker on quality management

What is the connection or relationship between the Monday Case Studies and the reading of our 5 books and other articles ?

We establish this connection by strictly implementing this rule during the sessions : In solving the issues and answering the questions of the Monday Case Studies, ONLY the principles from the 5 books and the additional identified materials shall be used. No other opinions or principles are allowed.

Through the practice of this rule, we establish the mindset of “One Company. One Language. One Way of Doing Things.” Any new person in the organization is immediately advised to “Forget whatever you learned in your previous company culture as none of it will be applicable here.”

3rd Big Idea : Mentoring As A Key Metric For Performance

We believe that it is the company culture that binds the organization and sets it apart from other companies. The best way to ensure that the company culture is passed on from one generation to another is to institute the practice of mentoring down the line.

For us, “mentoring” means “teaching the person reporting to you, everything that you know about your job, and everything you learn from the Monday Case Study sessions.”

We promote people on the basis of how many and how well they mentor, and we discovered that with good mentoring, our internally developed high school graduates can be better store supervisors than college graduates with store experience learned from a different company culture. Our greatest satisfaction as Owner-Teachers is seeing our own students become teacher-mentors.

By persevering in our Monday culture-building sessions and constantly emphasizing the role of mentoring, , we have witnessed the steady transformation of the Operations organization into a smarter, more focused, more aggressive, more results driven one, whose members take pride in being a Reyes Barbecue “RBnian.”

We started our Monday culture building sessions in January 2014. That year we had a sales growth of 20%. For every year after that,  up to this year, 2017, we continue to have double digit sales growth rates.

Please note further that we achieved these sustained annual double-digit growth rates without tv advertising, without consumer promotions, without product discounts, without price increases, without offering unlimited rice or unlimited whatever, without increasing salaries across the board annually, without adding any benefits across the board. We achieved this by focusing on PEOPLE and CULTURE.

On the people side, anomalies like theft, absences and resignations were all significantly reduced, and company-wide morale has increased and has given the company stability.

While most companies like to claim that they treat and regard each other as part of a “Family,” we ask our people to see our company not as a family but as a “University” – where one needs to LOVE CONTINUOUS LEARNING, where one can pass or fail, graduate with honors or get kicked out – so to speak – depending on how much effort is put into studying and learning. For us it is critical to develop in the organization the attitude and mindset that loves continuous learning.

Because of the success of our culture building strategy, we now see the future for Reyes Barbecue as being very bright and exciting.

But beyond the business, we are even more pleased to see the improvement in our brand health, as monitored through our annual focus group discussion series among eat-out customers.

While we have always been noted for our good taste and quality, and are labeled as the “sosyal na barbecue,” for the first time in the 5 years we have been monitoring brand health, we now hear customers say two important things:

1. “Kapag barbecue ang crave ko, sa Reyes ako.” 
   Meaning : we are the current standard for barbecue taste.
2. “Consistent ang Reyes dahil may sistema sila. Pareho ang lasa at portion nila sa lahat ng stores – hindi gaya ng ibang brands.” 
   Meaning : we not only have high quality – our quality is reliable and consistent, which means we are a professionally run organization.

We consider this feedback as a positive acknowledgment of our taste and quality dependability, and we believe that our earning this reputation is a direct result of our consistent culture-building initiatives.

We are not saying that our culture is perfect, but we believe that it is strong. And we will continue to make it stronger.

Being in the food business, I love to eat out, and do so nearly every day. My routine takes me occasionally to fine dining, often to casual dining, and even more often to simple (ie carinderia or hole in the wall) dining. From this routine of mine, I’ve seen a whole range of service levels, and I’ve personally witnessed how many establishments handle “difficult” customers with both difficulty and success.

We’ve had our own share of these “difficult” customers in our Reyes Barbecue chain of stores. This is part and parcel of the business we are in. For us, every “difficult” customer is a great source of new learning on what we need to improve on to take our organization’s service culture to the next level. But to develop a good service culture requires a lot of thinking and hard work – from hiring, to the development and enforcement of systems and procedures, to constant customer feedback sourcing and analysis, to systematic documentation, and finally to constant upgrading of internal training systems.

Our story starts with customer feedback. Have you ever experienced a waiter or server replying with these tactless statements and excuses when you raise a valid complaint to them about your meal or the speed of service :  

• “Trainee lang po ako.”
• “Sunog daw po talaga iyan sabi ng manuals namin.”
• “Ewan ko po Ma’m, di ko kasalanan iyan. Tinanggap lamang po namin mula sa commissary iyan.”
• “Absent po kasi ang supervisor namin.”
• “Binyag po kasi ng anak ng isang waiter, nag-ninong yung supervisor kaya tatlo lang kami dito at hindi lima.”
• “Yan lang po kasi ang turo ng head office namin sa amin.”

Or were you ever in this situation in a hole in the wall restaurant or food court stall :

Customer : “Pahingi ng extra sabaw please.” (As the broth was quite tasty). Server (with a glare) : “May bayad po yan!” – as if the customer  could not pay for a measly cup of clear broth … Why could the server not have simply smiled instead and said “P25.00 lang po, isa po ba ?”

During the early stages of Reyes Barbecue, this was the way some of our service staff would handle customers. Because we were a new brand and wanted to tap all opportunities available, we expanded very quickly, not realizing that our organization’s service skills development could not keep up with the speed of our store expansion.

Thankfully, because we have always prominently displayed our company contact emails and numbers in our stores, customers did give us the feedback I mentioned earlier. Reviewing all these negative customer feedback on how we handled those situations really made my hair turn white. We immediately decided to slow down our store expansion and focus all our efforts on fine-tuning our organizational training system.

What is a Difficult Customer

To us, a difficult customer is one who is :

• A person who goes to Reyes Barbecue to have an enjoyable time with our food, service and ambience.
• A human being with feelings and emotions, not just cash in our cash register.
• A great potential ally.
• The reason why we are in business.

In fact, isn’t it a likely fact that the country with a relatively high proportion of difficult, demanding customers, will also be the country that will create the better brands ?

When a customer has already become angry or upset, for one reason or another, we can only control this anger to a certain extent. But as a food service brand, what is most important for us is to ensure that this customer’s anger has not been in vain – for him/her and for our organization.  We need to make sure that from this experience, our organization will adapt, adjust and improve.

CRISIS MANAGEMENT MANUAL

Acronym For Handling Difficult Customers – “L-R-E-A-A-R-D”

LISTEN – RESTATE – EMPATHIZE – APOLOGIZE – ACT – RELAY – DOCUMENT

After a number of years of being in the food service business, we’ve managed to develop a systematic internal process for handling customers, which in itself is also in a constant state of evolution and improvement. These are the key elements :

 

LISTEN.

 

• Do not focus on the cursing and yelling.

 

“The best people in service operations are also the best listeners. They deal with upset customers every day, and sometimes call after call. They do not focus on the cursing or yelling, but instead they go deeper to understand the reason for the frustration and strive to find a solution within their own toolbox. These skills are extremely relevant throughout an organization.”

Frank Eliason (SVP for Social Media of Citibank New York)

• • Look the customer in the eye.
  • Listen intently.
  • Listen with the intent to fix the system. Do not pretend to listen while preparing in your mind the alibi that you shall declare to the customer, in an effort to protect your own image. We reiterate to our crew the value of always thinking of the bigger picture : think of the company’s lost image and goodwill, and the effects on your job, rather than on that temporary bruise on your personal ego by the customer.
  • Do not interrupt. Let the customer vent it all up.

 

 

 

 

RESTATE.

 

• Restate only after the customer has finished speaking.
• Repeat the words of the customer verbatim to show that you understood and cared about what the customer said.
• Never argue, never point fingers to the kitchen or commissary or anyone else. Own up to the mistake even if it was not your own fault but that of your co-employee.

 

In the rare but possible situation where a complaint actually has no basis, and the customer is in reality attempting to use his/her stature to intimidate the server and pull a fast extortion on the store, this could be an effectve way to handle the situation (a true story) :

Problem: A policeman in uniform ordered and paid for a Boneless Chicken Barbecue Meal. After consuming three fourths of the entire meal, he calls the crew and demands that the meal be replaced “because the skin was burnt,“ brandishing his police badge for the crew to see.

Solution: Crew must say “Parang awa niyo na po, Sir. Ako po ang sisingilin ng company auditor para sa meal na hindi nabayaran.”

Result: Immediately the police smiled, agreed not to pursue his replacement demand, finished his meal, and left the store feeling good he had helped the server and “forgiven” the store.

EMPATHIZE.

• • While you are restating the complaint, it is best to put yourself in the shoes of the customer.
  • Make the customer feel you and the company are on his side.
  • Share in the customer’s suffering. Share in the customer’s feelings.
  • Remove the line separating yourself from the customer. Imagine that you and the customer both love Reyes Barbecue and are just having a “meeting” on how to improve Reyes Barbecue’s service.

 

 

From our experience, the only problem with empathizing is the situation in which a particular customer insists that we “overcook” our Boneless Chicken Barbecue or Pork Barbecue (ie a deviation from the company standard). To us, eating overcooked meat is like eating cardboard. But we also have to recognize that there is a segment of the Pinoy eat-out population that is culturaly inclined to have their meat cooked “well done.”

How do we resolve this ? Chefs all over the world recommend a little pink in the middle as the right doneness for meat. The Japanese even have sashimi which they don’t cook at all. Five-star restaurants serve steak tartare which is like beef sashimi. According to our resident Food Technology Consultant Dean Teofilo Mejia, the inner part of meat is aseptic, meaning there is no harm in having the middle part a little pink so long as the outside is blackened well.

My wife, Inez, also prefers her steak cooked well-done. What I notice is that when she makes this request in fine dining restaurants, the restaurant does not do an actual “well done,” but cooks the meat just a few seconds more from medium. This is a happy compromise, and my wife is usually satisfied.

Our standard is for our pork barbecue to be grilled to 90% of the internal temparature for medium doneness. Therefore, when faced with requests for “well-done” cooking from Reyes Barbecue customers, our crew is instructed not to immediately grill the pork barbecue to the “well-done” level (ie 110% of target internal temparature), but instead to cook it a little bit more, up to 95% of the medium-well temparature. With this, the customer is satisfied, and our pork barbecue is still very juicy, so it is a happy compromise. If, however, in the rarest circumstances the customer is still not satisfied at 95%, only then can the meat be grilled to the deviation level of 110% of doneness.

APOLOGIZE.

• An apology is necessary, but simply saying “sorry for what happened” to the customer is not enough.
• Apologize by replacing the item immediately, if that was the problem.
• If the store’s lapse was so major that the customer was justifiably upset, give the customer something extra, like a “peace offering,” such as free meals to take home or free dessert or drinks to go with their current meal.
• If the customer is hospitalized right after eating in the store for whatever reason, send someone there to assist and pay the bills immediately. Do not be stingy, as long as this is within reasonable bounds.
• What the customers are actually looking for is our corrective ACTION.
• Communicate with the aggrieved customers as soon as possible via email or social media to inform them of exactly what actions the organization is taking to address the service weaknesses they experienced.
• Remember that 93% of what we communicate is done through our non-verbal, unspoken actions or gestures. Actions are more important than words.

Most of the time it is a wiser move to give dissatisfied customers more tokens than necessary. Major complaints are very rare in occurrence and a company will not go out of business just because it was extra generous in giving free meals to these rare difficult customers.

 

In addition, other gestures that could turn such difficult customer situations around are :  1) ask for their email address and send them meal certificates on their birthdays – this way, you could convert a difficult customer into your most effective mystery customer ; 2) if these converted difficult customers happen to be students, you could even hire and actually pay them as your own mystery customer researchers.

ACTION – RELAY – DOCUMENT.

Future customers should benefit from a customer complaint. The point at which the customer is pacified and has left the store is just the starting point of Reyes Barbecue’s task to upgrade and improve its service level. At this point, Reyes Barbecue management processes and analyzes the store incident. A text broadcast to Store Team Leaders of all the other Reyes Barbecue stores is immediately sent so that the others will be alerted and enjoined to prevent a similar situation from happening in their respective stores. It is our strict rule that a complaint in one branch is texted by the concerned Store Team Leader to all the other branches within 1 hour.

Way back in 2006 we had a complaint about an allergic reaction to one of our seafood meals. The customer’s allergic reaction was so severe that she had to be hospitalized. We paid the bills accordingly and ordered the removal of the item from our menu pending the investigation and research on the allergic trigger. Interestingly, the hospitalized customer was with a group of five officemates, all of whom ordered the same seafood meal. But only one of the five had an allergic reaction. We researched and found out that the allergic reaction experienced has a 1 in 5000 chance of happening. Therefore, it is entirely possible that we would experience a similar situation again in our other stores. Thus, we took steps to educate our store teams on this matter, document the situation as well as the manner of handling, and incorporate these into our Operations Manual and training modules. Today, not only is our seafood handling manual enhanced, our teams better trained, our stores are also all prepared with the prescription of a simple allergy tablet as first aid, in case this situation happens again.

ACTION INCIDENT REPORTS

The detailed narratives, findings and advisories gathered from the Action-Relay-Document section of our crisis management process are chronicled in our our A.I.R. (Action Incident Report).

Here is our flowchart. It looks complicated, but rest assured, in terms of execution, it is not.

 

              (FLOWCHART)

 

If the case involves our service system, the Store Team Leader with the assistance of the Area Group Store Head emails an A.I.R. to the whole organization within 48 hours. The A.I.R. would contain management directives on how to handle the situation.

If the case involves our food, the analytical process is more complex, and thus the A.I.R. for this would not contain any immediate management directive on handling or resolving the concern.

We would typically take a month to study and process the report findings concerning any aspect of our products, as we would pull out the statistical and narrative records on similar or related complaints, and allow a reasonable period of time for our R&D to study and determine if there is a need to adjust anything on our product’s recipe, preparation, cooking, handling or storage procedures.

This is the advantage of having many stores. The mistake of one becomes the strength of all.

To win back the trust of the customer, we must email them, thank them for taking the time and effort to give us feedback, even if this was negative, and invite them to come back, to visit any store to see the improvement that was inspired by their feedback and concern.

How To Minimize Difficult Customers

Over time we have realized that you can actually minimize the number of your difficult customers. This can be done by :

• Active Small Talk.
• Advertising Corporate Social Responsibility Activities Of The Company.

Small Talk.

• An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure. If your staff learns the art of Small Talk, you shall never experience any difficult customer. Reyes Barbecue is still in the learning stage. We are currently polishing the Small Talk Training module for our store teams.
• Active Small Talk is about establishing a personal relationship with the customers so all avenues of communication can be opened.
• Active Small Talk is the friendly gesture of saying anything relevant to the customers to make them feel they are not only welcome but are also warmly regarded as friends. The following are examples:

1. Suggestive sell. Example: “Are you in a hurry? Our quickest dish is our best seller Boneless Chicken Barbecue. If you are not in a hurry, you can order our grilled tuna which is delicious but needs 30 minutes to prepare, grill and serve.”
2. “Ang daming taong nanood ng Katy Perry concert, Sir, diyan din ba kayo galling? Maganda ba yung concert?”
3. “Taga FEU po kayo (customer wearing FEU jacket), sino po ang nanalo sa basketball kanina, NU o FEU?”   … “Congratulations, Sir!”
4. “Did you enjoy the Boneless Chicken Barbecue you ate the last time you visited us, Sir ?”
5. Talk about the weather. “Malakas po ba ang ulan?
6. Talk about the food. “We have Sinigang sa Miso on pilot here, Sir. Would you like to try this instead of your usual soup ?”
7. Talk about where he ate the yesterday. “Wala po kayo dito for lunch yesterday, Sir. Saan po kayo kumain ?”
8. “Hi, Sir ! Bakit ngayon lang po kayo nakabalik …?”
9. “Bukod po dito sa anong branch po ng Reyes Barbecue kayo madalas?”
10. “Ang ganda po ng damit ninyo.”
11. “Ang cute naman po ng baby ninyo.”
12. “Sir ako na po ang kukuha ng litrato ninyo para kumpleto kayo sa picture.”

• Through Active Small Talk sincerely made, we win the trust and goodwill of the customer such that when they encounter our rare but possible service or product lapses, they will treat these with understanding.
• One case that happened a year ago concerned a new customer who walked in ordered a breakfast meal. Unfortunately, the store was packed the previous day and had not yet bought the necessary groceries to replenish their stocks, which included the eggs. The customer had to wait, was of course annoyed, and lodged a complaint. In such cases, we advise our stores that instead of making the customer wait for an hour while the crew rushes to buy the eggs, confront the brutal fact of a service lapse, tell the customer the truth, own up to the lapse, and suggest to the customer to order the best seller Boneless Chicken Barbecue instead.
• Bear in mind that not engaging in Active Small Talk is like encountering a classmate in a party and never even bothering to approach, say hello and talk to him about something the whole night. Service crew members are required to engage in some small talk, no matter how briefly.
• If your crew member engages a customer in Active Small Talk, this customer will not be difficult, and will simply whisper in his ear, saying gently … “My friend, there’s a fly in my soup, please just replace it quickly.” … With no one noticing, thus deftly preserving the crew member’s and the brand’s dignity.
• A wise practice is to expect all customers to be potential difficult customers. With this in mind, one can see why Active Small Talk must be done constantly, aggressively.
• If your store receives a customer complaint posted through social media, this is a clear indication that your store team has not not been actively doing small talk with their customers.

Advertise Corporate Social Responsibility Activities Of The Company.

• Knowing that your company gives back to society makes customers more forgiving and supportive.
• Put eco-friendly notices in your packaging.
• Feature in your in-store televsion any CSR projects being undertaken by the company.
• Do you know that for every Boneless Chicken Barbecue you order from Reyes Barbecue you are actually helping the poor ?  The bones we get from your Boneless Chicken Barbecue are made into lugaw for our school feeding program with Makabata Foundation, outreach feeding programs with Golden Acres, Mandaluyong Medical Missions, and food donations to Kaisahang Buhay Foundation

Aggravating Circumstances – How Regular Customers May Become Difficult Customers – Mismanagement Signals

Always remember that our customers’ understanding and patience can only stretch so far. Even our regular customers expect and deserve our consistency, and their regard for us can change if we do not pay attention to important details. Let us not take details for granted. Signs of store mismanagement are communicated to customers immediately by examples such as these :

• Some letters of the neon signage are busted.
• Crew are visibly chit-chatting with each other – an annoying distraction from the customer’s perspective.

The crew are paid for their time so when they are on duty, full attention must be given to the customers whether they are needed or not. Horse playing and gossiping scares customers. They are telltale signs of the probability that the food wasn’t handled professionally.

We tell our people, “instead of gossiping among yourselves, why don’t you just entertain yourselves by doing Active Small Talk to lonely customers. Ask them for service and menu suggestions. Ask them to help our stores by telling their officemates to try us too.”

• Some crew members are not in proper uniform, not wearing standard identification.
• A customer from another table who arrived later got his meal first.
• Aircon is not cold enough.
• Surroundings are not clean, not spic and span, tables left uncleared.
• Poor customer traffic.
• Crew members do not project a smart, energetic image. Fumbles, slow movement, lack of confidence, hesitation, shyness, absence of eye contact.
• Crew member is holding a cellphone.
• Crew are not paying attention, not alert, not informed, not service-oriented.

When customers see these signs, even the most loyal ones may voice out nasty complaints, aggravated by these signs of poor attention to details, which communicate a low level of professional work ethics, which reduces the value of their over-alll dining experience in the store.

Check Social Media Weekly For Any Customer Review or Feedback

We in Reyes Barbecue are grateful for any and all customer feedback – positive and negative – because we believe that customer feedback is the best source for identifying the areas for improvement we need to focus on. The challenge for us is how to source this useful feedback.

The challenge stems from the fact that most Filipino customers are too polite – we consider it bad manners to complain or create a scene in public, and we do not feel comfortable giving negative feedback thinking it will offend (even if we end up complaining about our negative experience to all our friends).

There is also the element of fear, and lack of understanding of the role of feedback in business. We see this in some of our store crew who hide customer complaints from management thinking they will be penalized for them, when in actuality, they will be thanked for raising these to management attention, even if these complaints were actually due to their own lapses.

We try to address this crew attitude by inculcating in them the idea that job security actually comes from loving the company organization more than oneself. The idea that if one’s mistakes are shared with all for learning purposes, these mistakes allow the individual and the organization together to become stronger, not weaker.

However, over time we have noted that only five percent of negative and therefore useful customer feedback comes from our stores. Ninety-five percent of our useful customer feedback comes from social media (texts and emails from friends, postings on our Facebook page, reviews by bloggers), and reviews of our numerous roving company quality auditors.

The lesson here therefore is, regularly check social media, for you to know the real situation from the point of view of customers, and take all these blogged comments seriously. Have all your store teams read these blogs regularly and include these blogs in your future training modules on customer service.  

The Reyes Barbecue Culture With Respect To Handling Difficult Customers.

• We in Reyes Barbecue have decided that the best assurance of business longevity is consistent high quality. Therefore, rather than engage in promotions or other gimmicks that produce short term effects, we have embarked on a strategy of quality. The faster you run the more likely you will stumble. We want to attain success slowly but surely through the shaping of a strong culture of quality. Our time and efforts are now focused on putting in place the systems that will ensure this. We are aggressively preparing our people.
• An important point is that we have a very good Quality Head, who walks the talk.
• We focus on correcting the system rather than superficially concentrating on diffusing the anger of a difficult customer. We deem as unacceptable a statement from our crew to the tune of “Sir, hindi naman po nagalit yung nagreklamo noong nasa store siya.” We reiterate to our staff that a comment is important whether or not the customer shouted or created a scene in the store, or quietly left.
• We abide by the wise words of the successful and popular New York restaurateur Danny Meyer who said … “The road to success is paved with mistakes well handled.”Anybody in business makes mistakes. What is important is that you grow from these mistakes. Have an open mind and never assume the customer is unreasonable.
• Reyes Barbecue is proud to be now 12 years old and 45 branches strong. We were able to document and create solutions for all the complaints we received throughout the years, and implement them in all our branches. You may not see us as perfect now, but wait and see, as we are just building up our momentum. Our documented experiences will help the future generations of Reyes Barbecue management achieve our goal of busines longevity. We aim to be globally competitive in 3 to 5 years.

Training.

Reyes Barbecue is a medium-sized, emerging food service player with a clear market positioning. Like many of our fellow entrepreneurial companies, we have limitations on capital and employee skill. Because of this limitation on employee skill, the most difficult part of managing the company is to ensure that our huge investment in training delivers real results.

Customers today are more sophisticated and more demanding. Imagine the challenge we have – most of our employees have never had any exposure whatsoever to world class service, paying attention to details, reading and following a manual, adhering to processes and systems, taking proactive measures, acting in a professional manner, thinking and communicating thoughts clearly and all other professional practices needed in the conduct of business.

Hard handed enforcement, regular classroom training and having a detailed Operations Manual are simply not enough to ensure that training will deliver results.

We discovered over the years that the key to a sustained successful business is a strong and effective company culture.

We realized that we should build our own distinct Reyes Barbecue culture, and this culture will itself galvanize the organization and steer our people toward getting their acts together. Thus, for this year, our 12th year of operations, we are heavily investing on culture-building rather than on store expansion.

Our A.I.R. flowchart is posted to all stores. We conduct a weekly Case Study (Harvard style) Training to our 40 key company people. Husband and wife Frank and Inez prepare the weekly lesson plan, and facilitate the three hour training themselves.

We pressure the “wrong” people to resign and look for the “right” people to replace them. We have an available Crisis Manual, in written and audio formats.

After almost a year of undertaking this culture building initiative, we are gratified to see all the positive results – in sales, in employee morale, in employee pride. Watch out for Reyes Barbecue three years from now or even next year!!! You shall surely enjoy our food and service even more.

Feature In Appetite Magazine

A Review by Inez S. Reyes
2012 Grand Winner of Philippine Star’s
My Favorite Book Contest

My discovery of the sublime enjoyment of food came late in my life, upon marriage, in fact, to a man who was born to a culinary heritage. In his family gatherings, there would be endless discussions of the best way to prepare this dish and that dish, where to source the best type of this ingredient and that ingredient, debates on how their Lola would cook the old family recipes … At first I found it amusing. Later on, as I moved up the corporate ladder and was benefited with a representation allowance that allowed me to try all of the latest restaurants, I slowly discovered that indeed, food could be really, really marvelously cooked, and as such, could be an experience like no other …

It was then that I began to collect cookbooks. While I certainly did not have the talent for actually cooking a meal, I loved the culture and history behind cuisines and dishes, and I had actually dreamed of becoming a food writer.

Then, lo and behold, the joys of the cooking shows ! I first saw these in the United States, then to my great delight, they were now being aired in local cable television ! Cooking shows became so addictive, my favorite stress-reliever.

One day, I saw our two young sons watching a DVD of a television series called “Hell’s Kitchen,” starring a supposedly famous British chef, Gordon Ramsey. The kids were totally engaged in the plot – group of hopeful contestants competing for Chef Ramsey’s approval in a pressure-filled restaurant kitchen. The kids simply loved Chef Ramsey’s fiery temper, tantrum-like behavior, balanced with uplifting, sincere encouragement when a contestant would outstandingly deliver.

From then on, while I did not particularly enjoy the “Hell’s Kitchen” show, I did become a fan of Chef Ramsey. And if there was anything I admired in him, it was his constant passion for perfection.

Naturally, I started to seek out his cookbooks in stores, bought them, and encouraged our then eleven-year-old budding chef son to try cooking his recipes. One summer, we discovered just what a genius Chef Ramsey was. Every Friday, for that entire summer, we would invite my siblings to our home, and our son would cook a three-course meal for them, all coming from the recipes of Chef Ramsey’s cookbook entitled “Fast Food.” They were all simple recipes, but nevertheless, all special in their own way, and every single one of them – absolutely delicious.

Needless to say, we have a collection of all of Chef Ramsey’s cookbooks available in Manila. Not only are the recipes great, but because the books are written, in the masterful tone and honest eloquence of Chef Ramsey, one cannot help but read them over and over again.

So you cannot imagine my happiness when, a few months ago, I came across Chef Ramsey’s autobiography “Roasting In Hell’s Kitchen.” What a find ! What a find!

I could not put it down, I was totally absorbed. Written in the engaging and  straightforward Gordon Ramsay style, you actually feel that you are watching him tell his story. And what a story it was – the stuff made for films, really. From a practically poverty-stricken childhood with an abusive father; to that moment when he realized that indeed, he could do this – he could cook ; to the competitive, intense, sometimes cruel, but always  fired-up experiences he went through as he trained and worked (at  times for free), with the world’s greatest chefs ; to his eventual success with one restaurant after another ; to his breakthrough in the United States market ; to his still being dragged down to this day by a drug addict brother  whom, like his father, he could not seem to bring himself to shake away from his life.But what a success he had, and how valuable the lessons he shared about the road to becoming a consistent Michelin Star Chef. “No lies. No dirty chefs. No clock watchers. No Mummy’s boys. No fat chefs.” One appreciates even the business lessons – “Choose partners that share you attitude towards running a restaurant business. Put only your own trained chefs in your next restaurants. Check the market before you decide to take the lease.”

Today, my husband and I run a fast casual food chain, and our son is clearly Chef-CEO material, having reached a finalist position in a local kiddie reality cooking show. We sat down and talked about Chef Ramsey’s lessons about work and success. Whatever background you come from, success is there for your taking. But you must want it. And work hard for it.

If I could turn back the hands of time, it would have been great to be a chef working with Gordon Ramsay. But since that is not possible, I will content myself with being an expert on his cooking (at least theoretically), with thinking about the life lessons he shared, with planning and saving for a trip to visit all his restaurants around the world, and most of all, with being inspired by his life, which was really all about being passionate about perfection.

And by the way, he was simply great at the Master Chef series.

Feature in Business Mirror