The Mother Plucker’s Ramblings

Last night, we closed all of our Austin restaurants to celebrate the holidays with our employees at our annual Christmas party.  As one of the owners of Pluckers, I can’t tell you great it is to see hundreds of smiling faces being able to take the night off and enjoying themselves in an atmosphere away from work.  We even had many “Pluckers Alumni” coming back to hang out with us.  No matter how much personal success we may have in the future, Mark, Sean and I take no greater pride than in helping better the lives of the people in our company and watching them grow as people at Pluckers.

We have unfortunately grown to the point that we are no longer able to remember the name of every person in our company. However, it is a great feeling when employee after employee comes up to us at the party to thank us for allowing them to work at Pluckers.  Because this is the only real job any of us has ever had, its sometimes hard for us to understand just how many people do not enjoy the place they work at.  Hearing from our employees is always a special reminder of how much the things we do at Pluckers mean to them and how important it will always be for us to strive to create a better working culture for them.  Here is an email I received last night from one of our newer managers that helps better explain this.

 “Hello Gentlemen, I hope this day finds you with not too bad of a headache.  My wife and I thank you for the opportunity (and good excuse) to get out of the house and punt the children to the Grandparents.  It was a good time with a new flock of co-workers and I had the best time at a Christmas party, that I’ve not had in over 10 years. You all run a refreshing company and I sure am enjoying myself.”

While the title of this blog may seem a little egomaniacal or cocky, I really just wanted to share with you one of the secrets of our success.  For anyone that runs a business or manages people, I would like to think that this may inspire you or at the least give you a better understanding of just how easy it can be to become more successful at your job.  As Pluckers has evolved over the years, we have had the opportunity to meet many people in the restaurant industry and exchange ideas on everything from menu items to accounting practices to real estate.  I’d like to think that people enjoy the food at our restaurant, the plasma televisions, Trivia Night and all the other fun things we do that separate us from the common wing place.  However, the thing I think we are strongest at and what makes Pluckers great is our people.

Whether or not you have worked in the restaurant industry before, anyone who has every held a job knows how rare it is find a place that you enjoy working at.  To Mark, Sean and I, there is nothing we are more passionate about than our people.  We truly believe that almost all you have to do to be successful in almost any industry is to hire, coach and inspire the people that work for you to care about their jobs.  Once you show your people the love, it is almost inevitable that your business will become successful.  Its almost mind-boggling how few businesses today understand this simple concept.  When we talk with fellow restaurant executives at conferences, 90% of the topics they want to talk about are food costs or marketing or reducing labor costs.  90% of what we want to talk about is the pursuit to finding better people to work with us and learning better ways to take care of them.

The people that work for us work very hard and we are incredibly demanding of them.  We do not demand that are perfect all of the time…god knows we mess up way too many of your meals to say we are perfect.  However, we ask them to strive for perfection all the time.  It is this pursuit of perfection in taking care of our guests that we believe allows you to understand when we make mistakes because you know that we care about you.  To get your staff caring about your guests, you have to show them that you care about them.   To let you behind the curtain a little, here are some of the things  we are proud of that are different than most restaurants or businesses.

•          Over the past few years we have taken all of our general managers on an all-expense paid trip to Las Vegas.  And by the way, this isn’t the $5.99 all you can eat buffet way to go to Vegas.  We stay in the best hotels, eat at the best restaurants and take everyone VIP in the clubs.  This year we are headed to New Orleans and we have decided to expand that group to our office employees as well as many other people we work with in business life that help make us successful. 

•          We believe that holding people accountable for their actions is one of the most important lessons you can teach an employee.  We also believe that rewarding them accordingly when they do a great job must happen for them to continue to improve.  Most of our general managers have the ability to make over $100,000 a year with the bonuses we make available to them.  That is about 50% more than the typical restaurant GM makes.  People always ask us why we pay our people so much.  We tell them that we don’t pay them that much, they earn it.  We give them the tools to treat our business as if it were their own and want them to have the chance to nurture the entrepreneurial spirit inside of them. 

•          Every year during the Summer, we close the restaurants and have Pluckers Field Day.  Each of our stores compete against each other in events like the three-legged race, tug of war and the infamous Twinkie eating contest.  This idea was inspired by two of our General Managers who felt that every so often we need to bring out the child inside us.  As hard as they work, Munson Stodder and Todd Winiger spend countless hours each July planning the event for the employees not because they get paid to do it, but because they love the people they work with. 

•          Most of the restaurant industry is a churn and burn type of business.  Our goal is to develop every person that we hire to become anything they set their mind to with our company.  Where many restaurants typically hire people from the outside, a large portion of our staff is from employee referrals because they want their friends to experience Pluckers with them.  In addition, we are proud to say that almost every General Manager at our store started off as a cook, server or delivery driver in our company. 

•          The average Pluckers employee has about 100 hours of training before they are allowed to work on their own.  This includes attending employee orientations, studying for tests, reading manuals and on the job training.  Where many companies talk about cutting training costs to make more money, we believe the only way for an employee to feel good about their job performance is to make sure they have a full understand of our expectations and how to be successful with us. 

Really I could go on and on with this subject, but I think you get the point.  If you want to be successful in business, you’ve really got to spend time building relationships with the people you work with.  When other people ask us “How can you afford to do all of these things for your employees?”, we ask “How can we afford not to?”