6 Steps to Writing a Schedule to Control Labor Cost

6 Steps to Writing a Schedule to Control Labor Cost - If you’re looking for a way to control labor cost in your restaurant, a great place to look is your restaurant’s labor schedule. Labor is a huge expense in a restaurant, and a lot of dollars can be wasted in the scheduling process. To help, use these six steps to write a schedule.

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Welcome to my YouTube Channel. I am David Scott Peters, a restaurant coach and speaker who teaches restaurant operators how to cut costs and increase profits with my trademark Restaurant Prosperity Formula. Known as THE expert in the restaurant industry, I apply my no-BS style to teach and motivate restaurant owners to take control of their businesses and finally realize their full potential. Thousands of restaurants have used my formula to transform their businesses. To learn more about me and my coaching program, visit http://www.davidscottpeters.com.

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Step 1: You must start with a budget. I say the two most important systems any restaurant should have our budgets and recipe cost and cards. Why? Because they're proactive management tools. With a budget you're going to find that you have a different labor cost by month, higher and lower. In the middle of your high season where people are coming in, you might run an 18% hourly labor cost. But in the offseason when your sales virtually disappear, and your salaried managers are chewing up all your money and you're at minimum staffing levels, one server, one cook and a manager, your labor costs are through the roof.

Step 2: You must use software. Scheduling software will do all the things I want you to do. Software is critical. Go subscribe and implement scheduling software today because it's going to allow you to track the information easily, create templates and schedule the way you need to communicate with your employees. But more importantly, with that information and the budgeting tools I'm going to talk about, you can then go into the week on budget and control budget on a daily basis. It's critical. Software is a must.

Step 3: Document the critical information. You need to document each team member's critical information, their availability, how many shifts they wish to work, any schedule requests for times that they went off from vacation to a single day to shift. Rate employees based on their skill sets on a scale of your choosing, one to five, one to ten, don't care what it is. You want to do this so you know who your best people are and those that need development.

Step 4: Use templates. Scheduling software allows you to go one step above. The old way to do it was creating what I call the staffing guide: three cooks in the AM, seven in the PM, whatever day. Whether you have a $40,000 week, a $50,000 week, or a $150,000 week, you know how many each position, what time they come in and what time you're sending them home, creating your ideal schedule, if you will.

Step 5: Communicate. You need to share with your managers how many dollars, but more importantly, how many hours they have to schedule next week to be on budget. To really manage your labor cost, you can’t schedule like you’ve always done it, copying one schedule to the next week. If your sales are projected to be slightly lower and you’re 14 hours over budget, you only know that if you are using your budget to schedule.

Step 6: Make the schedule. With all these things in place, schedule your busiest days first. When you're using the templates and you're dragging and dropping employees, you're dragging in your best people on your busiest days, going backwards from there. Be sure to avoid “clopens,” or people who close and then open the next day. Make sure you're only using the number of hours that were budgeted.

By following these six steps, I can guarantee you will go into the week on budget versus scheduling and praying you're busy and only cutting when you're bleeding. In following these six steps, you're putting yourself in a position to give up scheduling without giving up your checkbook.

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