In the End, You Create Your Own Luck

Of course, the reality is that there aren’t three more events "just like that." That’s why we decided to go for the restaurant in the first place. We ran the concession trailer for five years before we bought the café. We searched high and low for profitable events. County fairs, art festivals, craft fairs, "taste of" events, all over northwest Oregon. We changed, we shifted, we adjusted, we added and subtracted menu items. And still, the BIG events eluded us.

We grossed over $20,000 at our one big event this year. Our next highest-grossing event, ever, was our own local five-day county fair, where we endured long hours, dust, late nights, flies and cowboys to top $4000. Once. In subsequent years, sales were eroded by things like terrible weather (triple-digit temperatures and/or rain), presence or absence of decent entertainment, location within the fair of said entertainment and our proximity thereto, the addition/subtraction of other vendors, and declining attendance at the fair itself. All things completely outside our control. And those same frustrating conditions applied to every event we did. One year you would have them eating out of your hand; the next, you felt as if you were trying to peddle the vilest poison.

It didn’t take long for us to realize that a $3000 event was a good one, and an event that grossed us over $10000 for a weekend—besides our beloved Scandinavian Festival—was an impossible dream. That, and the frustrations of all the uncontrollables, are what sent me in the direction of a stationary, consistent, open-every-day restaurant under a solid roof of my very own.

So, we’re not going to cash in our hand on the restaurant yet. There’s no going back to the concession thing, since it was the concession thing that pushed me into the café in the first place. I’m bound and determined to solve this damn labor puzzle; I need a decent, dependable staff so I can detach myself enough to become full-time captain of the ship, rather than the jack of all trades (master of none…) I have some ideas up my sleeve. And I’ll just have to indulge in some creative problem-solving. I can do that. Just let me get a couple extra hours of sleep under my belt…

As Luck Would Have It...

Jeez, I made that sound awfully dramatic, didn’t I? Did the place burn to the ground? Were we closed down by the OLCC (Liquor Commission)? Did every major piece of equipment pick that day to roll over and play dead?

No, nothing as earth-shattering as all that. I just discovered that at the end of this month, I will be losing most of my staff. Again. Out of nine girls on the payroll, I will, for all intents and purposes, be losing six. One is going back to college as of the end of the month (which I knew when I hired her), one is expecting a baby in October and only wants to work through the end of this month. These two departures, while a bummer, were not unforeseen, and I had anticipated hiring one or two more girls to beef up the staff at the end of the month.

However, when I walked into the kitchen Monday morning, I was greeted with a huge pile of "schedule requests" from everyone else. One girl—completely out of the blue—dropped the bomb that she will be having surgery (don’t ask) next week and plans to be out for a month. One of my "cooks in training"—again, without any forewarning—decided to sign up for an "intensive" course at some career college and informed me that as of the beginning of next month she will only be available to work weekends. One of my high school students, who will also be going back to school next month, requested off the day of our community festival, which basically takes place right outside our doors and causes us to be crazy busy. And my other "cook in training" has been telling me for months that she was going back to school in the fall, so I know her availability is going to be drastically reduced.

I was about to write that I cannot get a break when it comes to staffing this restaurant. That’s not completely true; I have two dependable, trustworthy employees who have been with me since I bought the place. One of them has been at the cafe since the doors opened in 2005. And without the other, my good and faithful "D", I know I would have perished long ago. Unfortunately, it takes about 260 labor hours a week (not including administrative time) to run the place. And I’ve found that I can’t expect anyone to work actual full-time hours…even "D" starts to burn out if I schedule her for more than her normal 35-38 hours a week. And we need four people on shift during any given rush period. So, obviously, my two decent employees and I cannot do the job by ourselves. We do have one other girl who is not planning to leave or go to school or have a baby. And she has been begging me for more hours. But she is, of course, the most useless piece of dead wood on the staff and I have been planning on cutting her loose at the first available opportunity. Sigh!

We’ve been hobbling through the summer with these nine girls on the payroll. It’s actually worked out well, because everyone has asked for so much time off that they are getting all the hours they seem to want. And there were enough bodies to staff the place while I was gone for five days doing our Scandinavian thing. I suppose I should be grateful…and I am.

But I just can’t seem to find the solution to my labor puzzle. If I have more than eight staff members, everyone gets so few hours that it’s hardly worth having them at all. It’s difficult to train employees who work less than fifteen hours a week. You teach them something, and by the time they have the opportunity to perform the task again, they’ve forgotten how. My two high school girls were hired in January. During the school year, I held them to less than fifteen hours a week on purpose. So I ended up with two girls who were never completely or properly trained. But I kept them on staff hoping they would pick up more hours and more training, and hence be more useful, during the summer. Then they both ended up taking so much vacation time that they are STILL marginally trained and mostly unhelpful.

And I can’t beg, steal or borrow an experienced cook. Check that…after the traumas I’ve lived through with the experienced cooks I’ve had, I don’t even WANT an experienced cook. I’ll take a knowledgeable apprentice any day of the week. Unfortunately, those seem to be in short supply as well.

I had some mutinous thoughts this past weekend. Stacking the constant barrage of setbacks and headaches that have come with ownership of our very own restaurant against the relative ease and smoothness with which we cranked out a café month’s worth of sales in four days from our cramped but comfy little trailer… The eighteen-month escape clause in our café purchase contract started looking mighty attractive. "If we could just find three more events just like this," I thought, "I’d ditch the restaurant in a heartbeat."

to be continued...later.

Feeling Lucky

Our event went well. The weather was perfect. Considering the non-summer we’ve had this year, the gods could have inflicted any number of meteorological disasters upon us. We’ve hardly gone a week without rain (which is unusual in summer here…usually by mid-September we are begging for it); so we could very well have had to battle that. It did cloud up Sunday afternoon, but the wet stuff politely stalled about a hundred miles north. 

Worse, it could have decided to finally break out into actual summer, complete with unrelenting sun, no breeze and temperatures in the triple digits. Picture an 8 x 20 ft. trailer packed with four or five adult bodies, two large refrigeration units, a convection oven running 95% of the time, and the western sun beating on the back of the building for six hours a day. We’ve "Scandi-ed" through those conditions in the past. There are more pleasant activities…like having a root canal or walking over burning coals in bare feet.

 Anyway, we couldn’t have had better weather if they had taken our order for it. So the faithful citizens of the central Willamette Valley showed up in force. And they were hungry. So we fed them. To the tune of over $22,000.00 in sales in four days.

I personally had to drag my butt away from the last hour of the festival, de-Scandi myself and make the two-hour drive home Sunday night, so that I could be ready to open the restaurant on Monday morning. It didn’t seem difficult when I made the schedule. And, truthfully, I wasn’t as wasted as I once might have been. As I was dressing Saturday morning, one of my sisters walked in the room and said, "You look like I feel!" And my reply was, "I look like this every morning. I’m no more tired today than I am any other day since we bought the restaurant."

On the drive home, I’d tuned in to a country station.  I heard some guy waxing rhapsodic about how lucky he was in his everyday, normal, boring-ass life. But the lyrics got to me, and I had to nod my head in agreement. How lucky I am to have the life I have! Sunday night, I walked in my front door, laden with my Scandinavian paraphernalia to be lovingly set away for another year. I wasn’t exhausted. I was kind of stoked, actually. We’d had a great event. Daily reports from the restaurant indicated business had turned around over the weekend and pulled a bad week out of the crapper. The housepainters had come while I was away, so I was anticipating some major new curb appeal for the humble abode (which unfortunately I was going to have to wait until morning to enjoy.) Lucky. Yeah…I felt lucky. 

For the first time in a really long time.

And then I went to work on Monday morning. And within two hours, I wasn’t feeling too lucky anymore.  
I’ve got to go get ready for work now, so I’ll have to finish this later…

Old Dog, Old Tricks

Ago. For the longest time, my whole life, everything vital or important, was “ago.” Twenty years ago…

Twenty years ago today, I was a little more than two months from embarking upon the most successful enterprise of my life. The one that would take fully two more years to develop into the experience of a lifetime.

I was thirty-one years old. I thought I was mature. I thought I was experienced. I thought I knew so much.

Funny how, now, I look at thirty-one-year-olds and think of them as “kids.” Young. Callow. Green.

I would have been pissed, back in 1986, to find out that someone thought that of me.

Yet, la plus ca change, la plus c’est la meme.

I am fifty-one years old. And embarking upon what I hope to be the most successful enterprise of my life. So far.

The bags under my eyes, the shooting pains in my feet, the aching joints in my fingers, have me wondering whether I yet possess the physical stamina to get me through the fourteen-hour days, the ninety-degree heat…the demands that a thirty-year-old body could meet with alacrity, but a fifty-year-old body struggles to conquer.

Are the blessings that I seek from this new venture really too much for this more-than-half-used life-force to hope to attain?

I cannot believe that. I won’t.

But when I drag myself into bed after too many consecutive hours of putting out fires and walking tightropes over boiling oil, I wonder, at least briefly:

Is it worth it?

There can only be one answer.

It HAS Been a Year

That was a rough couple of weeks. Beginning with the meteoric rise and fall of Hawaiian Shirt Cook, then slogging through the last few days of Cook-in-Training #1’s three-week vacation, the last gasp of June and early days of July nearly did me in. The piece de resistance was when one of my fresh-out-of-high-school summer hires decided she no longer needed the job (apparently, the Credit Union at last came through with the full-time position for which she had been angling) and no-showed last Sunday. Necessitating a cancellation of my personal plans for my longed-for half day off, and nearly causing me to lock the doors of the restaurant in utter frustration.


Still, enough of my brain remains intact to understand that the best place to leave the crap is behind. I was determined to start this week off on a fresh, more positive note. After all, the one-year anniversary of our acquisition of this life-force-sucking black hole…um, I mean, this Lifelong Dream  …came and went during this particularly trying time. It was unfortunate, because I was in no mood to look back over the past year and analyze how far we had come. When I did visit the issue, it seemed that we had gotten nowhere at all, except a year older, fifteen pounds fatter, and well on the way to an ulcer.

Of course that is not true, and a couple of days of gliding over less tempestuous waters have put things back in the proper perspective. My two Cooks-in-Training are rising to the challenge and providing me with some opportunities to disentangle myself from the kitchen and start acting like an owner. I’m feeling almost human, having got a few nights of decent sleep, despite the withering heat of the last couple of days. I’m enjoying an actual Day Off today; the weather is pleasant, and I’m going to take my butt (and my husband’s butt) over the hill for a little shopping and dinner out this afternoon.

Now that my glasses are more rose-colored and less toxic tar-tinted, I have given myself permission to climb a ladder and look back over the past year. What I see is not what I would have expected to see after a year at the helm of my own enterprise. It just goes to show that I really didn’t have the slightest idea what I was getting into when I jumped into it, body and soul, one year ago. I’m absolutely convinced—if I had known, I wouldn’t have jumped.

But it also shows me that I have amazing resilience, for an old goat. That I still have the ability to roll with the punches, think on my feet, change direction when necessary, and make no changes that aren’t called for. I’m learning (grudgingly) the realities of the twenty-first-century American labor force, and trying to utilize them to my best advantage. There are so many intangibles…adjustments I’ve made in my heart and my mind that prove to me, at least, that I’ve grown to meet the challenge. Even though it has threatened to kick my butt, at times…

But the real proof is in the numbers, which looked absolutely dismal at the outset. Last July, I was handed the keys to a restaurant that was, basically, tanking…though I didn’t know it at the time. When I look back at the numbers, now, I understand that the previous regime had been chasing customers away in droves for months by the time I took over. The inmates were running the prison, there was no leadership, no direction, and no actual cook. And between the previous owner’s penchant for spreading too much information far and wide, and the soon-to-be-jobless manager’s disgruntled smearing of incoming ownership, we had some ponderous obstacles to overcome.

Last summer, we were fortunate if we showed less than a 25% drop in sales from the previous year. It was usually more like thirty-five to forty percent. We labored, we learned, we hired new help, we tweaked…but we didn’t get much of anywhere for many months. 

February was our most dismal showing. Between the grand opening of a new dinner house up the road and the natural lag in business during the winter, our numbers tumbled 20% from the previous regimes "terrible" numbers of that same month a year earlier. I look back at that and wonder how I managed to get out of bed in the morning…

But we soldiered on…what else could we do? And, with the unbelievable staffing problems I faced daily, I had no time to scheme or invent or plan ways to improve business. It was everything I could do just to open the doors every day. Open them on time, close them when they’re supposed to be closed—not a minute earlier. Get the food out, makeit good, make it fast. Get to know the few familiar faces that hung with us throughout the long, cold, winter nights. Find out what they liked, what they didn’t. Smile and shake some hands. Doesn’t sound like much of a business plan. But it seems to have worked.

March brought the turn-around. The end of the skid…the about-face. A mere 8% drop in sales from last year. And then in April and May, we missed the previous year’s sales numbers by only a couple hundred dollars each month. Were we catching up, or were they falling to meet us? I choose to believe the former…

Come June, I noticed that the sales numbers from the last ten days of the previous regime’s tenure were…missing. I strongly suspect they were so bad, they were intentionally kept from me. The performances of Mr. Previous Owner and his pissed-off manager had begun eroding the numbers a few weeks before they were supposed to, I guess. But WE had a month last month. The best sales month in the history of the restaurant since September of ’05, at which time they were still riding the edge of the Grand-Opening Wave. And July can’t help but be an upper, because our numbers were SO bad last year, we can’t help but show some amazing improvement. I could hurt myself with all of the patting myself on the back I’m going to be doing.

I’m sorry this is such a long post. But I’m not sorry I wrote it, because, to tell the truth, I hadn’t actually sat down and looked at the numbers until today. I hadn’t allowed myself to absorb how BAD the numbers had been through February, and I’d been too afraid to acknowledge how GOOD they were looking now, especially last month. So this has been a day-brightening exercise.

Owning It

I did indeed have to terminate Mr. Hawaiian Shirt.

I arrived at work a half-hour before the start of his shift, half-thinking I might as well get an early start on the work he was not likely to show up to do.

For a hot minute, I thought I was going to dodge the bullet. I thought I had finally called something right, and that he really was going to blow me off.

But at 7:29 am, his car pulled up across the street. Sigh!

He walked up to the front door, spatula* in one hand, coffee cup in the other. (*All "real" cooks have their own personal utensils… He didn’t come with a set of fancy knives, but he did have his own perfectly-weighted, expensive grill tool…)

I pulled him aside to one of the outside tables. "We have to talk…"

Have I said how much I hate having to do this kind of thing? Hate, hate, HATE it! Did I mention that is why I had got about a half-hour of sleep the previous night?

I had purposely not rehearsed a whole scenario, because I figured it would be a waste to obsess about THAT (and I would have…) if he didn’t show up for his shift. And as it turns out, it was probably best that I hadn’t planned anything to say, because I was much more able to just…go with the flow.

It was all over in a very few minutes, and I was safely back in my kitchen feeling relieved, and yet like shit. He had been so apologetic…so willing to change. So, "Oh my gosh, I can be whatever you need me to be." Though I knew that he couldn’t—he’d demonstrated that clearly enough in the seven days he had worked for me.

In the end, the conversation was a peculiar flashback to one I’d had more than thirty years ago…the one and only time I had ever broken up with a boy (rather than being dumped.) It was the whole, "It’s not you, it’s me !" line of crap. I told him his skills were just too prodigious for our little operation (though I didn’t use that particular word—"prodigious"—since he probably wouldn’t have had the slightest idea what I was talking about.) I told him that rather than trying to change his way of doing things for us, he needed to find someplace that was bigger and busier and could really put his skills to good use.

I think he bought it. And, as a matter of fact, it was mostly the truth. I shook his hand, we parted ways; it is to be hoped, on a slightly positive note.

But I still felt like I’d been run over by a truck…

Wish Me Luck

I have decided to terminate Mr. Hawaiian Shirt, should he surprise the hell out of me and actually show up for his shift this morning.

I was up most of the night wrestling with this decision. Just after my alarm went off, having achieved perhaps forty-five minutes of real sleep, I suddenly had a vision of this disaffected drug addict bursting through the doors of the restaurant with an assault rifle and taking out my plate glass windows, my espresso machine, me, and my six-months-pregnant little counter girl.

Of course, I know this will not happen. It is merely the deranged workings of a sleep-deprived mind.

A little positive energy sent in my direction would not be taken amiss...