Jeff Anon was 17 and
working as a cook at his
family’s restaurant when an order of eggs was returned
because the customer felt they
were undercooked. After the
customer had sent them back
three more times, Anon’s frustration boiled over.
“After the fourth time, I sent
a whole egg out there with a
book of matches and I said to
cook it yourself,” Anon says.
“My father scolded the crap
out of me. He said, ‘Those people come every day, and they
tell 10 of their friends, and
that’s what builds business.’”
Anon wants his employees
at Berryhill Baja Grill to avoid
making the same mistake, and
he emphasizes the importance of every customer. The
founder, president and CEO
of the Mexican restaurant
chain has grown the business
to 16 locations with 2007 gross
sales totaling $22 million with
about 250 employees.
Smart Business spoke with
Anon about how to teach your
employees the value of their
jobs and of every penny the
business makes.
Q. How do you get employees to follow your lead?
You have to have a vision. It’s
my job to let that vision be
known to all my employees
and hopefully get them motivated and let them see it. One
person can’t grow the business.
You’ve got to have a passion.
If you don’t have the passion,
no matter how good an actor
you are, you can’t give that to
your employees. Be passionate
about your business. Live, eat
and breathe it. I let my
employees know what my
dream is. If I hit mine, they are
going to hit there’s also.
We have 16 locations. Every
time I visit a location or have
management meetings, we
always start off with, ‘Tell me
what’s going right.’ We set
goals every year. There are
weekly goals and monthly
goals. They know what the
goals are, and they know if
we meet those goals, there is
going to be a reward for
everybody.
We’re not sitting there saying, ‘All right, you have
to clock in at 9, and if
you clock in 10 minutes
late, you’re in trouble.’
It’s more of a laid-back
atmosphere. We get
involved with their families. We support their
Little League teams. We
go to their weddings.
It’s a big, extended
family that we have.
Q. How do you get
employees to value their
jobs?
Simplify things. Most
employees don’t have a
concept of what a profit and loss statement is
— especially if they are
younger. If you ring up a $2
item, they don’t have a concept of how that $2 is being
spent to pay bills. It doesn’t
equate to them.
One of the things I do is
when I get a new employee, I’ll
get two rolls of pennies, 100
pennies. I’ll lay them down on
the floor. I’ll say, ‘Look, if you
ring up a dollar, 100 pennies,
how many do you think we
end up with after we pay
everything?’ You get answers
from 60 to 40 pennies.
I just start taking pennies
away. This amount of pennies
pays for labor, this amount
pays for food, insurance,
here’s your rent, here’s some
advertising. At the end of the
day, if you end up with 10 pennies, you’re doing great. It
shocks people.
It gives people an idea, when
the money comes in, of how
it’s being spent. Hopefully,
they appreciate that this is a
pennies business. They have
to look out for food costs, portion controls, labor and things
like that.
