Tea in the Library (17 page)

In the kitchen, things were worse. Our café manager and chef, Jo, continued to turn out exquisite dishes, the likes of which had not been seen in a simple “light meals” café, and, trust me, won't be seen again. The cost of producing our menu far outstripped what we were charging. It gradually dawned that the dishes we were offering, while wildly popular with our customers, were far too labour-inten-sive to produce, and our suppliers were far too numerous and our stock too complicated to properly control.

Take the duck wraps, for example. This was a top-selling item, with the critical ingredient being Chinese roasted duck. One serious draw-back of the dish was the intense labour required to roll the ingredients in individual rice wraps, which was very time-con-suming. We must have hand-rolled thousands of those duck wraps. Additionally, while everything else in our kitchen was delivered, the Chinese roasted duck had to be
fetched.
So every day during a quiet moment Jo or one of her helpers would set off to China Town a few blocks away to fetch the duck. It became common to hear that Jo or Chloe or Kate was off on “the duck run”, rather than in the kitchen or café. As if this wasn't inefficient enough, one day I was bemused 
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no, gobsmacked
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to learn that the duck had, that day, been delivered in a taxi, since no-one had had time to go on the duck run. And you, the lucky customer, could purchase a plate of delicious duck wraps for a mere $6.95!

At this stage, we had about fifteen or twenty different café suppliers. Wisdom has it that three to five is an optimum number. The invoice handling, sorting out of seven-day accounts, monitoring returns and food items not received or accepted
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all this was mul-tiplied unacceptably. We had lovely jams, unusual breads, gluten-free cakes, ham off the bone, smoked salmon flown in daily from inter-state
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it was ridiculous. No wonder our café was popular!

In the planning stages of the café, I had long discussions with Jo about how to price menu items. We worked out (I thought) a system of allocating a cost to each menu dish. This was done by including the cost of the ingredients, plus a time component for producing it, plus of course a margin, which had to take into account possible spoilage and wastage. Jo worked carefully through this with me with great concentration, and then proceeded to price her menu using the tool of total guess-work. As the weeks progressed, we gradually increased our prices (we called the low early prices “opening specials”) but guesswork
—
and what Jo thought the market could bear
—
seemed to remain our touchstone.

I worked at reducing the number of café suppliers, insisting that Jo find catering suppliers who could cover the majority of our needs, especially non-fresh items. I insisted that any cakes we bought in should come from one supplier only, not three or four different ones. We still had separate suppliers for tea/coffee, cold drinks, bread, fresh meat and cakes, as well as a general supplier, but it was an improvement on the early chaos. Smoked salmon went off the menu. Jo began to get disgruntled. She was “an artist” who enjoyed creating, but had no concept whatsoever of running a commercial kitchen, and certainly not profitably.

In addition to the supplier debacle, staffing issues were also a disaster. At this early stage, we were ambitiously opening for breakfast, and well as manning the coffee cart at street level. Chloe, bless her, was a stalwart back up in the kitchen. Her experience in hospitality came to the fore most spectacularly when disaster loomed. She had a technique she called “customer recovery”. When there had been a delay or other poor service issue, and customers had complained, Chloe leapt into action. News of the complaint would reach the kitchen, Chloe would roll up her sleeves, head on out with her best smile plastered on, and proceed. Customers were showered with apologies. Everything was our fault. We were distraught that this had happened. Free bottles of wine were produced. Free meals dispensed. Boots were licked and forelocks tugged. Nameless staff members consigned to the fires of everlasting perdition. Customers invariably relaxed with smiles after this treatment, the day was saved, the reports passed on about Tea In The Library were favourable, if not glowing, and Chloe had earned her wages tenfold.

My second daughter, Sophie, came on board at the café during uni holidays
—
her hospitality experience had been in the sweatshop of a McDonald's restaurant, nothing to be sneezed at. She worked very hard, got on wonderfully well with Chloe and the other waitresses, and would report to me over the dinner table at home about the goings-on in the kitchen. Her frustration with Jo knew no bounds. Many were the arm-waving and emotional discussions around my dinner table with my kids, about the day-to-day minutiae of running Tea In The Library
—
Sophie from the café side, Evan from the books side.

During this time, and extending right throughout the time we were open, we often had need
—
urgent and un-planned-for need 
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of a chef. If you have only one chef, you are obviously sunk if he or she doesn't turn up for work. The show can't go on. After facing this crisis unprepared for the first time, I came up with an agency for casual chefs, and we relied on them more or less heavily throughout the life of the shop. If need arose, Kate would call the agency, and a chef would be miraculously produced at short notice. Whew! Sometimes we would continue to hire the stand-in for several weeks or even months, depending upon the relative desperation of our needs. There was one young man who became quite smitten with our Kate. When she asked him to stay on to fill a need, he, in a word, asked that she fulfill his. The Casting Couch of the hospitality world. Kate rebuffed him, and reported this incident at the weekly staff meeting. We looked at her with varying reactions. He was a good chef, and we were desperate. Hmmmmm

Jo insisted that we needed a chef on duty for most of this time, and to cover the roster we need “two and a half” chefs. There was no reason why the wait staff couldn't plate up many dishes in the absence of a chef, with proper preparation. My better judgment was stirring uneasily, but the blind were leading the blind at this stage, and we hired a second chef, Daniel. He was a personable young man, who listed a long string of professional jobs on his resume (none of which we checked), and who could in fact cook wonderful scones 
—
and other things. His biggest attraction was that he had worked in professional kitchens. Unlike anyone else on staff.

As to the coffee cart, this was a disaster from day one. Out on York Street in the mornings, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of busy office workers rushing by on their way to work, and most of them are scouting for coffee. This seemed a fertile fishing ground for customers, but this bright idea hadn't been thought through. The first thing was that the coffee cart had to be manned (or girled) for several hours, by a staff member who was then unavailable in the café, which is a considerable expense when you are selling only cups of coffee. Secondly, people have to have a reason to stop at your cart 
—
we found that they have a loyalty to certain coffee spots. You need to have good coffee (we did), produced quickly (we weren't too bad), and to be handy and cheap. We undercut our neighbours (they got annoyed), and we were quite well located, but we built it and they didn't come.

I was of the opinion that what we needed was a barista with pizzazz
—
a personality up there dragging 'em in. We tried hiring for such a person, but they proved hard to find. What we ended up with was a timid little waitress sitting behind the cart reading a book, and looking up only when a customer came up to the cart. This was money down the drain, and it wasn't too long before the coffee cart was mothballed. It became a Remembrance Of Things Past.

“
R” stands for “Roster”.

As you will have gathered by now, Tea In The Library was generously equipped with staff. We had way too many staff in books and café, and they were costing the business far too much. The absence of a strong overall manager was also fatal. The various personalities began to grate on each other, and feuds broke out.

At this point, I tried something which may or may not have been a good idea. Certainly it was well-meant, even altruistic (when you consider what it cost me), but I did believe in it. I hired a coach for one-on-one sessions with Todd, Louise and Jo. Call me naive, but I wanted so much to make this work, and getting the people all on the same bus was essential. I wanted to do the best by my employees, and I believed that the right guidance would help. Emma was a personal and business coach, who I knew to be very professional and effective
—
she had several large companies as her clients. She also had experience in retail, having been a buyer for a large enterprise in London. She knew retail.

The coaching sessions went on for a few weeks. As befits the coaching relationship, I am of course not privy to what was discussed, although I do know that Todd's sessions included a lot of technical education about stock control. As to the outcome, the coaching may have helped, but ultimately it didn't solve the problems. Perhaps the clay wasn't there. Perhaps I had ineptly assembled a team that was never going to work.

One of the most intractable feuds was between Louise and Todd. This developed for a number of understandable psychological and personality reasons (to say nothing of my inept staff organizational plan), but inexplicably crystallized over the issue of the staff rosters. Louise was responsible for drawing up a roster for the book staff, and ensuring that Jo had a workable roster for café staff. This seemed to not only be a task of Herculean proportions, but also to take up a large chunk of the working day. Having completed the roster, it was then displayed on the staff notice board. For reasons that still escape me, there was general discontent and the view of the majority was that the roster “wouldn't work”. Todd became frustrated with the slowness and ineptitude, and muttered that he could draw up a workable roster in half an hour using a computer program he was familiar with. At one point
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I now forget the details, having probably blanked them from my mind in a self-preservation reflex 
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Todd took down Louise's roster from the notice board and replaced it with his “improvement”, thereby causing the maximum possible trouble. The trouble was characterized by Louise making long phone calls to me in the evenings and at weekends explaining how she was going to “assert her authority” and “tell Todd calmly but firmly” who was in charge of what.

Meetings were held, people were soothed, new directions were sought, many words were exchanged. Few books were sold. Unbelievably, the Great Roster Feud went on for weeks and weeks. How hard can it be?, I wondered. It was about now that I started saying that I didn't want to hear anyone mention “the ‘R' word”!

Of course, this was but a symptom of the greater malaise
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no-one had sufficient experience, or indeed the skill, to manage a small staff. They were learning on the job, and not very well
—
having no teacher other than trial and error. Lots of error. Chloe was the most experienced of all, and could possibly have pulled us out of the quagmire into which we had so swiftly slid, but she was a short-term traveling employee, and, moreover, a parallel feud erupted between Chloe and Jo, mainly because Chloe had decided (rightly) that Jo was not up to the job, and she (Chloe) could do better standing on her head. Angst-ridden conversations and hand-wringing sessions were conducted over cups of (excellent) coffee. Tearful offers of resignation on all sides were proffered, negotiated, withdrawn. Much time was wasted.

At this point
—
enter Dr. Joe. Dr. Joseph Braysich is a psycholo-gist who made his name on the US lecture circuit alongside such luminaries as Norman Vincent Peale, and is strong on issues such as body language and customer service. I had met Joe through an acquaintance and he became a strong supporter of the shop, including speaking at one of our Breakfast Club events. Over a discussion of my staff worries, Joe offered to spend some of his valuable time 
—
gratis
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in giving some staff training talks. I accepted gratefully, then fussed over “whether” it would be possible to get everyone together at a suitable time. With typical impatience
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if not incredulity
—
at such pandering, Joe told me to name a time and
tell
them to turn up. A novel approach.