Chapter 18 — Exercises

How to use these. Items marked with a dagger (†) have full worked solutions in the answers appendix. Everything else is yours to defend. Where an exercise asks for a number, show the arithmetic; where it asks for a document, write the document — a paragraph describing a standards page is not a standards page.

Unless told otherwise, use Bellwether's frozen figures: 68 seats, 36,140 covers a year (475 dinner covers a week plus 220 brunch), a \$46.00 dinner check of which \$12.88 is beverage, Year 1 sales of \$1,550,000, beverage at 28% (\$434,000) of which wine is \$164,920, a 22% pour cost, a 60.0% prime cost target, and a \$500,000 (32.3%) labor plan.

A. Recall and definitions

1. State the four properties that separate a service standard from a wish, and give an example of a common restaurant instruction that has none of them.

2. † Define, in one sentence each: service standards, shadowing, cross-training, training matrix, pre-shift line-up.

3. What is the difference between a food-handler card and a certified food protection manager credential? Who at Bellwether needs which?

4. Name the nine major food allergens recognized in United States labeling law. Which one was added most recently, and under what statute?

5. List the six steps of Bellwether's allergen protocol in order. Which step exists specifically to catch a point-of-sale failure?

6. What are the four phases of Bellwether's training pipeline, in order? Give the one-sentence reason each phase must precede the next.

7. What are the two documents described in §18.6, and what job does each one do that the other cannot?

8. Why is the offer of dessert Bellwether's standard rather than the sale?

B. Applied reasoning

9. † A restaurant's standards document contains the line "Servers should be knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the wine list." Rewrite it as three standards that satisfy all four properties from §18.1, and state how each would be tested.

10. Your training program puts new servers on the floor on day two because "that's how you really learn it." Using the sequencing argument in §18.2, identify the three specific costs of this choice, and say which one is the most expensive.

11. A trainee scores 88% on the food-menu test against a 90% gate, and the schedule for the soft open is already published. Argue for waiving the retest. Then argue against it. State which you would do and what precedent you are setting either way.

12. Bellwether's cross-training matrix shows expo at depth 1 and hearth at depth 2, with the sous chef as the only certified person on both. Explain why depth 2 on hearth is more fragile than it appears, and name the single cheapest certification that would improve the situation most.

13. A manager tells you their pre-shift is "just the eighty-sixes and section assignments, five minutes, we're too busy for more." Using the break-even logic from §18.8, explain what is wrong with the reasoning — and note what is right about it.

14. † Your by-the-glass wine report shows that two of eight wines account for 71% of pours. Name the most likely cause, name two less likely causes you would rule out first, and state the specific training intervention.

15. A server holds a table's entrées for six minutes past the standard because the guests are in the middle of a difficult conversation, and tells nobody. A guest complains about the wait. Was this good service? Answer using the rule from §18.4 and explain what makes the answer turn on something other than the six minutes.

16. Explain why "menu knowledge decays" is a menu-engineering problem as well as a training problem, using Chapter 12's quadrants.

17. A consultant offers to write your training manual for \$6,500. Using §18.6, list three things you would require in the deliverable and two things that would make you decline.

C. Cost this

18. † Compute the fully loaded cost of training one line cook at Bellwether, given: 60 training hours at a \$20.00 base rate with a 12% payroll burden; 14 hours of sous-chef instruction allocated at a \$30.80 loaded rate; 16 shadow hours carrying a \$2.24 loaded trainer differential; 2 hours of chef certification time at \$33.60 loaded; \$55.00 of materials; \$210.00 of product consumed in practice cooks and yield tests; and a \$15.00 food-handler card fee.

19. Recompute exercise 18 with the payroll burden at 18% rather than 12%, holding everything else constant. By how many dollars and what percentage does the total move? What does that tell you about which line in a training budget is most sensitive to assumptions?

20. Bellwether budgets a \$2.00 an hour training differential for trainers, loaded to \$2.24. Across 27 separations a year with an average of 12 shadow hours each, what does the differential cost annually? Now argue whether it is worth it, in a paragraph a skeptical partner would accept.

21. † A 120-seat restaurant serves 62,000 covers a year and turns over 48 people annually: 14 servers at 48 hours each, 4 bartenders at 55, 6 hosts at 24, 10 runners at 20, 9 cooks at 55, and 5 dishwashers at 12. Compute total annual replacement training hours and the blended hours per hire.

22. Using Bellwether's ongoing-training table in §18.8, recompute the annual ongoing cost if the line-up runs 18 minutes instead of 12 and 13 people attend instead of 11. What is the new per-cover break-even at a 22% pour cost across 36,140 covers?

23. Your restaurant runs 10 services a week. You want every one of 22 staff to receive 90 minutes of menu-change training four times a year, at a blended loaded rate of \$19.50. Cost it. Then express it as a percentage of \$1,550,000 of sales and decide whether you would fund it.

D. Price this / engineer this

24. † Bellwether sells 429 entrées a week; the Hearth Chicken is 22.4% of them at a \$20.48 contribution margin. A training push moves it to 26% of entrées. (a) Compute the naive annual gain. (b) Now compute the honest gain, assuming the displaced items average \$11.20 of contribution margin. (c) Explain in two sentences why you would quote the honest number to your staff rather than the naive one.

25. Bellwether's by-the-glass average is \$13.00 at a 22% pour cost, and there are about 190 dinner tables a week. Design three different behavioral targets that each produce approximately \$1.00 per cover of additional beverage on dinner, and rank them by how trainable they are.

26. Wine is \$164,920 of Bellwether's \$434,000 beverage line. Assume a 60/40 split between by-the-glass and bottle sales, an average glass price of \$13.00, and an average bottle price of \$52.00. Estimate glasses and bottles sold per week. Then state what those two numbers imply about how often an individual server is asked a wine question in a shift, given 17 dinner server-shifts a week.

27. You are asked to cut \$10,000 from the training budget. Working from §18.8's ongoing table and §18.2's replacement table, propose the cut you would actually make, name what you are giving up, and estimate the cost of that trade in prime-cost points.

E. Build this schedule / build this program

28. † Build a fourteen-day server training calendar for Bellwether that delivers all 52 hours, using the module list in Figure 18.6. Constraints: the restaurant is dark Sunday and Monday; classroom sessions run in groups of three; shadow shifts must fall on Thursday, Friday, or Saturday; the certifying manager is available only before 4:00 p.m.

29. Build a certification-expiry tracker for a 29-person opening roster covering food-handler cards, alcohol-service certificates, and manager food-safety credentials. Specify the fields, who reviews it, how often, and what the trigger action is at 60 days out.

30. Design the first four monthly all-staff sessions for Bellwether's opening year — one hour each, twenty attendees. State the objective, the content, and how you would know it worked. At least two must be beverage.

31. Write a four-shift shadowing plan for a line cook joining Bellwether's hearth station, with a single objective per shift and a stated failure mode the trainer should allow to happen.

F. Read this and find the leak

32. † A restaurant's weekly labor report shows total labor at 36.2% against a 32.0% plan on \$28,500 of sales. The manager insists the schedule was written to the guide. Digging in, you find: 41 hours coded to "training" that week, three servers hired in the last month, one shadow shift where the trainer was also the closing manager, and a pre-shift that has not happened in six weeks. Identify what is actually going on, quantify what you can, and say what you would change first.

33. A month-one P&L for a newly opened restaurant shows labor at 44% of sales. The owner concludes the schedule is bloated and cuts two shifts a week. Using §18.2 and the Business Plan checkpoint, explain what they may have misdiagnosed and what the second-order cost of the cut will be.

34. Your certification cards show that of eleven servers, nine are certified on all twelve modules and two have been "3 of 4" on shadow shifts for eleven weeks. What does that pattern most likely mean, and what are the two possible root causes? How would you tell them apart?

G. Write the memo / policy / response

35. Write the one-page service-standards document for a restaurant of your own design — not Bellwether. Maximum fourteen steps. Every line must be observable, timed or counted, and owned. No adjectives.

36. † Write the refusal script your bartenders will use when declining further service, plus the three-sentence policy that tells the staff what backup they have. It must survive an angry regular.

37. A server tells a guest with a stated nut allergy that a dish "should be fine." Nothing happened. Write the same-day response: what you say to the server, what you change in the protocol or the training, and what you write down.

38. Write the paragraph you would put in front of a partner who wants to cut the pre-opening training budget from \$41,349.92 back to \$7,800 because the build-out ran over. Use numbers, not conviction.

H. Judgment and ethics

39. Your best server — the one who trains everyone — refuses to train anymore because shadow shifts cost them money. You have a \$2.00 differential in place. What is actually going on, and what are your three options? What does each cost?

40. A cook comes in with symptoms that your employee-health policy says require exclusion. They cannot afford the shift and they tell you so. Describe what you do, and then describe the system change that means you are not having this conversation again in three weeks. Be honest about what that system costs.

41. You cross-train a prep cook onto grill, and a month later you are scheduling them on grill most Fridays at their prep wage. They have not complained. Is anything wrong here? Answer in terms of both fairness and cost.

42. A manager overturns a bartender's refusal of service to a regular, quietly, to keep the peace. The guest leaves without incident. Explain, concretely, what this has cost — including the things that will not appear on any report.

I. Business Plan extension

43. † Update Bellwether's Training section for a scenario in which the opening roster is cut from 29 hourly staff to 24 (one fewer server, one fewer bartender, one runner, one line cook, one dish/porter). Recompute total pre-opening training hours and cost, restate the gap against Chapter 9's \$7,800, and write the two-sentence honest note about what the smaller roster does to Figure 18.7's depth row.

44. Bellwether's plan claims no credit for turnover improvement from good training. Build the case for claiming some: state the assumption you would make, compute what a five-separation reduction is worth using this chapter's blended \$1,209.36 per hire, and then write the sentence explaining why the plan does not currently claim it.

45. Write the Training section of Bellwether's business plan as it would actually appear in the document: no more than 600 words, including the program table, the certification schedule, the budget, and one honest paragraph about the funding gap. Assume the reader has ten minutes and a calculator.