Racking My Brain

What a major PITA. For the LDS Seminar tomorrow I have to bring several things. Two of them are my 30 day goals for people, profits, and sales and a copy of my 30 day personal and professional calender. Those two are easy. I keep that stuff in Outlook, as well as my daytimers, so it’s a matter of adding a couple of minor items and printing. I also have to do a write-up covering the four key areas of recruiting on how I will recruit a quality management candidate during the next quarter. This one is a bit more difficult as my views on this differ than company policy over the last few years.

We have had our major focus on recruiting outside of the company. In particular we look for people with at least four year degrees or a good bit of experience in the business world. It doesn’t necessarily have to be in the restaurant industry, just some sort of experience. It is a very difficult job, occasionally with long hours, ALL holidays, most weekends, and occasionally strange hours. Just because the shift ends at a certain time, as manager I still don’t get to leave. In general I average 50 hours a week. A short day is eight or ten hours. The longest day I have ever had with them lasted about 36 hours. That was about 18 years ago, so it is not something that happens all the time, but it does happen. My former trainee that worked a triple Sunday is proof of that. It is a job of preparation, and constantly putting out fires.

In the 20 years that I have been there, I believe that the best qualified people for my job are the hourly associates that work for me. Currently they only allow 20% of the stores to be hourly to management types, and we need to increase that number. That’s why I’m just a manager though, and not CEO I suppose.