When everything is a crisis

Are you stuck in firefighting mode? Always running, to put out the next fire. Someone handed in their notice, your EHO inspection is due, the dishwasher is leaking, the rent is past due. There’s always something demanding your attention, something that needs to be dealt with right now. Or ideally yesterday.

What to do? How to be less reactive, how to spend less time running?

You need some slack in the system. Running a lean enterprise is good, necessary even, but not down-to-the bone lean. If everything is stretched thin; staff, equipment, you, as soon as something unexpected comes up, and it always does, something snaps. The balance it tricky. In our business we realised as we grew that if we didn’t have a better system for dealing with annual leave cover it was going to kill us. Even just five full time members of staff means that someone is potentially on annual leave nearly half of the time. We tried various solutions. The first one was that everyone worked a four-day week plus an additional 20 days per year to cover leave. I thought that was genius. Staff hated it. They very quickly got used to a four-day week and were resentful anytime they had to do more. We tried having a baker in reserve so to speak. We had one person more than we technically needed giving us the flexibility to cover leave and, when no one was off, to give us extra capacity for all those things we wanted to do but never had time for. In practise, during winter when we are quieter and no one wants to take leave, we were overstaffed, and the team frankly had a little bit too much time on their hands. The reality is that it’s rare beast who will power through the work and then look for something else to do, most just stretch the tasks to fill the time, or leave early. That system also left our wage bill too high. Our current set-up is that the kitchen team also do some front of house work, when one of them is off, the rest switch to solely kitchen work and a couple of the part-time front of house people will grab up the extra shifts. Baker-wise we keep Ol (my partner in crime) mostly off the rota, when a baker is on leave, he covers. It isn’t perfect (one baker had just handed in his notice and we go on holiday in 3 weeks) but it’s a good compromise. We’re not stretched to breaking point but we’re also not carrying an unaffordable amount of slack.

Talking of slack in the system, if you are stuck in firefighting mode, you may also need better systems. The more you have systems for things, the less reactive you will be. It can be a bit Catch 22, you don’t have systems because you haven’t had time to set them up, and you haven’t had the time because you don’t have systems. Take it one thing at a time. Develop a system and delegate anything you can. It might feel as though you’re the only person in the world with the necessary skills to do the rota or place an order with the Italian wholesaler but you’re really not.

And last, because it’s the thing no one wants to hear but the more you don’t want to hear it the truer it probably is. It’s you, you’re the problem, it’s you. Don’t feel bad, we all do it. Firefighter mode becomes so ingrained that we can’t stop. It’s wearing us down but we afraid to let go. ‘If I just keep an eye on everything all of the time, never stop running, never let go of absolute control I’ll be able to keep this rickety old shit-show on the road’ we think. Stop, put it down. Let go. When we opened our second location there was a lot going on. A brand-new place, brand new staff, other staff off sick, our busiest time of year, equipment failures. It felt like pure chaos for a while. And we carried on acting as though we were still in that chaos for quite a long time after the madness had passed. It was some kind of defence mechanism we had developed. I can’t tell you exactly when we stopped the running. But I can say that now as we move towards our busiest time once again, with a baker about to leave and two brand new kitchen staff, I feel fine, relaxed even. There’s no emergency, there are no fires. There are challenges to be dealt with. There will always be challenges to be dealt with. But there doesn’t have to be fires. We just have to allow ourselves to stop running.