New Job Redux:

What was the deal-breaker with Travinia?

Woah, your life moves fast.

Congratulations, I guess.  Best of luck with the new place.

Well, essentially Travinia failed to mention one key thing when they hired me. That they calculate their BOH labor in a very non-traditional manner.

Normal BOH labor break down is as follows:

Hourly wages/Food & NA Bev sales = BOH Labor Cost

Note that it says "Hourly wages" meaning that salaried management aren't included in the equation due to the fact that they are managers and not labor.

Travinia calculates it as:
(Hourly Wages + Salaried Managers)/Food & NA Bev sales = BOH Labor Cost

Now, that may not seem to different to most, but when you have a team of higher-ups that are asking for 11% total BOH labor, it gets tricky. See, lets say it's slow, like February is prone to be. Average sales per week are topping out at about 35K/week in food and non-alc bev. That means if you want to keep your labor at 11% you can only spend $3850.00 on labor per week.

Now that sounds like a big chunk of change, but when you add 3 salaried BOH managers into the mix that make a combined $2384.00/week that only leaves you with $1466 to spend on hourly employees. Figure an average of $10.00/hr for said employee pay and you only get 146.6 man-hours to use. That means that at an average of 30 hours a week for hourly employees, you can only have roughly 5 employees on the schedule. That's not enough to run a PM line, let alone a whole restaurant.

So, due to poor accounting skills and failure to adhere to GAAP, I was working roughly 13-14 hours a day 5-6 days a week just to keep labor down. I figured out that I was getting paid something like $15.60/hr for the hours I worked (adjusted for OT) Simply put. It wasn't worth it.

My new job is running 3 restaurants. I'll still be in the kitchen, but not as a glorified line-cook and will be taking on new restaurants for the group as they emerge.

P.S. my newest restaurant which opens in May involves a smoker the size of most people's kitchen refrigerators.

Edited by tallen702 - 09 February 2011 at 10:44pm

Yeah, much like any other job in the world, who you work for is a very big part of how much you enjoy your job. The thing that gets me is that this company is on the verge of making it big (which is why I originally went with them) but without drastically changing some of their work practices, they're going to wind up being a case-study in some business school text book ten years from now.

Anyway, I'm back to doing what I do best, which is being creative and making people happy with their dining experience.

I doubt they were any more Italian than you.  Which is probably more Italian than most Americans, but still.

Last time I was in an Italian restaurant the waiter asked me if I was Jewish and then spent five minutes talking about his Sicilian Jewishness.  I really just wanted to order an appetizer, to be honest.

Gatyr wrote: Italian food is seriously lacking in Texas. The best I've found is Olive Garden :/ Here's hoping for a good future at your new job, Tallen.

pfff. the steakhouses make up for it. Cattleman's near El Paso is great from what i've heard, but I never had a chance to get there when I went down

These guys were about as far from Italian as you can get. The corporate chef is from Belize.

Tallen: I want some beef jerky that comes out of that smoker.

agentwhale007 wrote: I cannot really tell the difference, visually or auditory, amongst Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian. I know that's terrible, but it's a thing.

All white people look the same to me.

KBK

I meant to ask earlier, how is your commute now, tallen?