Right people for the right job

When I hired the staff to run Tonic, I’d read a tonne of business books and spoken to countless people – the hardest part to get right is staff. Finding good staff and retaining them. It’s also crucial that you fill teh gaps in your own knowledge and experience.

I didn’t think it would be a problem to retain staff, given that I would am a fair boss and I plan to share the profits with the staff. However finding the right staff was going to be a bigger issue. I tend to work on the premise that if I like someone and think they are trustworthy, I’ll take them at their word about what they can deliver to the business. This was a mistake in hindsight. All my staff were excellent as people, and worked hard. The problem was that there were serious gaps in the skills I’d bought on.

My manager, whom I was expecting to play a key role in the operational management and building the framework for the business, was used to working in larger chain operations. Therefore, while he was a good manager, he was used to following the a rule book and when it came to creating all our processes and systemising them to make them efficient, he found himself outside his depth. Similarly working in an entrepreneurial environment requires everyone to pitch in and run with new ideas, but trying to find a food offering to go with our product was proving quite difficult. He could not think outside the box, and since we had tried a couple of suppliers in the sandwich market, and found that their products were either too expensive (the organic ones) or not up to the high standard and creativity we would expect, we had to consider making food ourselves. Not only would that help us to keep costs down but also create the product range we felt could work in this environment. As manager, Emanuele was tasked with this for many months, but he just was not getting there. He tried creating things in-store but he just could not grasp the natural, healthy angle we were aiming for. In the end, Jonathan and Paola actually drove the food element. They started by doing some good research on-line and in shops that did the type of food we wanted, and then then started creating healthy and unusual salads and wraps. This really should have been driven by Emanuele, or he should have coordinated it with J&P, however a rift was already starting to emerge between them. Paola and Jonno had a lot of get up and go. Paola in particular (being a fellow capricorn) had the ‘just get on with it’ attitude (I think Jonno got dragged along, but he seemed to be up for it as well). Jonno by contrast was completely in his element when he was being creative on the food front, and came up with some great items. Emanuele, rather than embracing this, took their initiative as a sign that they were not happy in him being the boss and he became quite agitated about it. I can understand his annoyance, however he was asked to deliver a good food offering for months and had failed, so I was just glad that someone was stepping up.

Another thing he failed in was creating a proper, streamlined operational process to manage/cut costs and reduce waste. I even went as far as suggesting that he take individual areas of the operation and see how they can be streamlined and then create a formalised process. When I took him on as manager, these are some of the key things that I thought he would do. When Mandy came to look at our operation, she loved it, however one of the first things she noticed was that we were wasting a lot of money by having inefficient processes. Even, for example, the way we made our smoothies using heavily frozen fruit which, according to her research, used up a lot more ‘mixer’ juice such as apple or orange to properly blend the fruit. She said that we could shave about 30% off the production cost by just letting the fruit thaw a bit, or storing it at just under freezing rather than -20 degrees!!

In short, it’s important to ensure that you employ the right skills. I liked Emanuele and because he had been manager in numerous food places, I accepted that he would be good in this entrepreneurial environment. In the end however, no matter how much I liked him as a person, on a business level it was becoming apparent that he was not the type of manager we needed. He clashed heavily with Martina, who ended up leaving a few months earlier, and now he was clashing with Jonno and Paola, and the reason was that they disputed what he was saying. Don’t think that people should necessarily disagree with their managers because they tend to play different roles. However in this case the manager did not have a clear plan and I had to take this into account.