Chapter 37 — Self-Check Quiz

Twenty-six questions. Answer key in the collapsed block at the bottom — write your answers before you open it. All figures are constructed and illustrative.

Multiple choice

1. The chapter's central claim is that the multi-unit skill is:

  • A. hiring better managers than your competitors
  • B. writing down what "good" looks like precisely enough that it happens in a building you are not in
  • C. buying enough volume to negotiate better food costs
  • D. building a commissary before you open the second location

2. In a single unit, the owner performs four jobs continuously. Which one stays with the owner as the group grows past four units?

  • A. correcting deviation
  • B. detecting deviation
  • C. setting the standard
  • D. teaching the standard

3. The write-it-down test's first question is "would two competent people, both trying to do it right, do this differently?" If the answer is no, you should:

  • A. write a procedure
  • B. write a specification
  • C. write a standard with a threshold
  • D. not write it down at all

4. The second question of the write-it-down test — "can you tell from the finished result whether it was done correctly?" — produces a procedure when the answer is no. This is the same logic that underlies:

  • A. menu engineering
  • B. HACCP
  • C. the tip credit
  • D. RevPASH

5. A restaurant group's four units score 92, 91, 93, and 44 on the quarterly audit. The most useful description of this group is:

  • A. a group averaging 80, which is mediocre
  • B. three good restaurants and a fire
  • C. a group with a scoring problem, since the range is too wide to be real
  • D. a group performing acceptably, since three of four are above 90

6. The most common design error in restaurant audit scoring is:

  • A. using too few items
  • B. auditing during service instead of in the morning
  • C. giving every item equal weight, which rewards the cheapest items
  • D. allowing unit managers to self-audit

7. An audit item reads: "Walk-in reorganized every Tuesday and Friday." The problem with this item is that it measures:

  • A. a result rather than a method
  • B. a method rather than a result
  • C. something a guest would never notice
  • D. something that varies too much by season

8. Span of control, as this chapter defines it, is best described as:

  • A. five units, adjusted for distance
  • B. a headcount set by the complexity of the concept
  • C. a time budget divided by the variance in the units
  • D. the number of managers who report directly to one supervisor

9. A district manager has 45 usable hours, 10 of them fixed, and a stable unit consumes 7 hours a week. How many stable units can they carry?

  • A. 4
  • B. 5
  • C. 6
  • D. 7

10. The single most common failure of a newly promoted district manager is:

  • A. visiting units too frequently
  • B. relying too heavily on the reporting package
  • C. continuing to run shifts, producing one good service and zero instructions
  • D. setting exception thresholds too tightly

11. In the multi-unit valley (Figure 37.4), group operating margin reaches its low point at:

  • A. two units
  • B. three units
  • C. six units
  • D. ten units

12. Central production of a given item is least likely to pay when:

  • A. the item carries a great deal of labor in a small package
  • B. the item's texture degrades in transit
  • C. the units are within a twenty-minute drive of the commissary
  • D. the group buys the item's raw material as a whole primal

13. A group leases a commissary at \$145,880 of annual fixed cost and saves \$15,564 per unit served per year. The break-even is closest to:

  • A. 4 units
  • B. 6 units
  • C. 9–10 units
  • D. 15 units

14. The most reliable single move to reduce a commissary's break-even scale is to:

  • A. buy a larger van
  • B. rent an hourly shared kitchen instead of leasing a space
  • C. add more items to the production list
  • D. move the production lead to hourly pay

15. A restaurant group reports total sales growth of +40.8% and comparable sales of +1.1%. This combination tells you:

  • A. the business is performing strongly and expanding
  • B. the comp base has been defined incorrectly
  • C. the growth is coming from new units, and the existing business is roughly flat
  • D. the group has taken too small a price increase

16. A comp of +4.0% built on +6.0% price and −2.5% traffic is worse than a comp of +4.0% built on +3.2% traffic and +0.5% price because:

  • A. price increases are harder to implement than traffic growth
  • B. price is a lever with limited remaining pulls, and departed guests do not return on request
  • C. traffic-led growth always carries a lower food cost
  • D. mix is negative in the first case

17. Two units count inventory on different days of the week. The most immediate consequence is:

  • A. one unit will have a higher food cost than the other
  • B. the variance you observe between them is accounting, not operations
  • C. the group's consolidated COGS will be overstated
  • D. the period close will take longer

18. An exception threshold that trips on every unit every week is evidence that:

  • A. the group is in serious operational trouble
  • B. the threshold is wrong before the units are
  • C. the metric is not being measured accurately
  • D. the units need more frequent visits

Short answer

19. State both questions of the write-it-down test, and name what each terminal branch produces.

20. Chapter 34 asked "who audits the owners?" Name two of the four concrete mechanisms this chapter offers, and say what each one specifically protects against.

21. A unit's dashboard shows: food cost 30.2% (inside threshold), labor 36.2% (threshold 32.5%), overtime 31 hours (threshold 12), trailing turnover 104% (threshold 65%), and ticket times at the 90th percentile of 24.6 minutes (threshold 19). State the single underlying problem in one sentence, and explain the loop that makes it self-reinforcing.

22. Explain why a written standard is a worse instrument than a good operator's attention, and name the one advantage that makes the trade worth making anyway.

23. Give three metrics from Figure 37.6 and, for each, the specific way a manager under pressure could produce a good number without producing the underlying result. For one of the three, name what you would watch instead.

24. Culture does not travel by manual. Name the mechanism that does transfer culture most reliably, and explain the counterintuitive staffing implication for the second unit and the first.

25. A group's operations manual contains a section stating that sanitizer buckets are changed every two hours. The logs show four hours. Explain, in two sentences, why this is worse than having no written standard at all.

26. The Bellwether business plan turns out to contain roughly two-thirds of an operations manual without anyone intending to write one. Explain the structural reason this happened, and name the two sections it did not produce and why the financial work never forced them.

Answer key **1. B.** The thesis of the chapter. A, C, and D are all real activities, but each is a consequence of having a written standard, not a substitute for one. **2. C — setting the standard.** Teaching moves into a training system, detection moves into reports and audits, and correction moves permanently to the unit manager. Deciding what good *is* remains an ownership function. **3. D — don't write it down.** If two competent people would converge on the same behavior anyway, the entry adds length without adding information, and length is what makes manuals unusable. **4. B — HACCP.** You cannot inspect safety into a finished product; where the outcome is invisible, you control the process. That is the whole logic of a food-safety plan (Chapter 25). **5. B.** Consistency is a statement about variance, not average. Nobody eats at the average, and the 44 is generating the reviews that define all four units. **6. C.** A flat checklist tells every manager that a clean mop sink and a functioning walk-in are worth the same, and they will rationally optimize toward the cheaper one. **7. B — a method rather than a result.** It will be performed on Tuesday and Friday regardless of whether the walk-in is actually organized. "Organized by cook date, oldest forward, nothing unlabeled" is the result and the better item. **8. C.** There is no research-backed magic number; the honest formulation is usable hours, less the fixed load of the job, divided by per-unit load — and per-unit load rises sharply for new or troubled units. **9. B — 5.** $(45 - 10) \div 7 = 35 \div 7 = 5$ stable units. **10. C.** The former best general manager who keeps taking the wheel is useful to one service and absent from four others, and teaches that unit's manager that seniority arrives when things get hard. **11. B — three units.** The support layer is required at three and not paid for until roughly five. In the figure, margin falls from 12.0% at one unit to 7.9% at three, then recovers. **12. B.** Quality degradation in transit is the condition that eliminates most candidates in a chef-driven concept. A, C, and D all make centralization *more* likely to pay. **13. C.** $\$145{,}880 \div \$15{,}564 = 9.4$ units. **14. B.** Renting by the hour converts a large fixed cost into a variable one and can cut the break-even roughly in half. It is almost always the right first move and almost nobody does it, because leasing feels more serious. **15. C.** Total sales measure your construction schedule; comparable sales measure your business. Both numbers can be true and they are telling you different things. **16. B.** A comp built entirely on price is a loan against next year's traffic — you can only raise prices a limited number of times, and the guests you drove away do not come back on request. **17. B.** The comparability problem: if the count date differs, the variance you are looking at is an artifact of when you counted, and you will investigate a difference that does not exist. **18. B.** Set the band so roughly one unit in five trips it in a normal week. Universal red produces alert fatigue, which teaches everyone to ignore the page — the exact opposite of the intent. **19.** (i) *Would two competent people, both trying to do it right, do this differently?* **No** → do not write it. **Yes** → (ii) *Can you tell from the finished result whether it was done correctly?* **Yes** → write a **specification** (describe the output, leave the method free). **No** → write a **procedure** (control the process, because the outcome cannot be inspected). **20.** Any two of: **segregate at the top** (the partner who signs checks is not the partner who reconciles — protects against undetected error or misappropriation at the level with the most authority); **a written delegation-of-authority table that includes the owners** (protects against approval limits existing for everyone except the people who set them); **reporting the owners' unit on the same form, same day, same definitions** (protects against the founding unit's numbers being non-comparable and therefore never actually examined); **an annual outside review** (the only genuinely independent look at bank reconciliations, owner-coded expenses, and inter-unit transfers). **21.** The kitchen is understaffed and losing people faster than it can hire. The loop: short staffing forces overtime and slows service; slow service makes the job worse; the job getting worse accelerates departures, which makes the staffing shorter. Food cost being fine is the tell that this is not a purchasing or portioning problem. Chapter 21 for the retention mechanism, Chapter 19 for the staffing guide that should have caught it. **22.** A written standard is less nuanced, slower to adapt, and blind to the thing a good operator would have noticed in half a second — it cannot read a room or taste a sauce. Its one advantage is decisive: **it works in a building you are not standing in.** **23.** Any three, with mechanisms: **ticket times** — fire tickets late so the clock starts later (watch table-to-entrée time from the reservation system, and guest complaints about waits); **comps and voids** — stop comping tables that should have been comped (watch review text and the ratio of manager table visits to comps); **cash over/short** — do not ring the sale at all (watch inventory variance and pour cost; a perfect drawer with a bad variance is itself a signal); **food cost %** — buy nothing in the last week of the period (watch the purchases-to-usage gap and the on-hand inventory value trend); **turnover** — reclassify separations or avoid terminating anyone (watch average tenure and open shifts covered by overtime); **audit score** — clean the night before (unannounced windows, service-hour visits, and the self-audit-versus-leadership-audit gap). **24.** **Moving experienced people** — transferring a general manager, a kitchen lead, and ideally a third or more of key hourly positions from the original unit into the new one. The counterintuitive implication: you send your *best* people to the *hard* building and hire new people into the original, because the original has systems, reputation, and trainers, and is the easy one to hire into. Most operators do the reverse because sending their best people away feels like weakening the thing that works. **25.** You have created a written record of your own non-compliance, in your own document, signed by your own people. In an inspection, a claim, or any dispute, the gap between your stated standard and your actual practice is the most damaging piece of paper in the building — and nobody else wrote it. **26.** Structural reason: **documentation is a by-product of measurement.** You cannot cost a recipe without standardizing it, set par levels without writing product specifications, build a staffing guide without defining positions, or write a food-safety plan without writing procedures — so thirty-six chapters of financial rigor produced most of a manual as a side effect. The two it did not produce are **service standards** and **facilities/preventive maintenance**, because no financial exercise anywhere in a business plan requires you to write down what a greeting is or when the hearth gets serviced. (The training path is the third near-miss: job descriptions exist, but nothing converts them into a certification of competence.)