Good Morning Friends! Here are my 5 Things to Consider this week!
Culture – Doing more with less. If there’s silver lining in any of this recent craziness, it’s learning the hard fact that we’ll have to do more with less. Now and for the foreseeable future we’ll have to deal with less budget, less resource and less people than we were previously used to. One of Amazon’s 14 Leadership Principals is Frugality. The Principal goes, “We try not to spend money on things that don’t matter to our customers. Frugality breeds resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention. There are no extra points for headcount, budget size, or fixed expense.” We certainly won’t forget the luxuries of the pre-Covid era and I certainly hope to return to the time when we have Piesan outings, cultural team building and location parties again, but for now, because we just had such a sever shock to the system, it’s basics basics basics. Until we’re stabilized, we must focus on the most important thing in our world and it’s as easy…and as hard, as perfect shifts day in and day out. People that have had traumatic injuries take a while to regain the skills they once had, like walking or standing. Sometimes the injuries are so bad they never get everything back. I have no doubt that we’ll get back to our previous glory, but it’s going to take time. It’s going to take one small step at a time, but soon we’ll walk and with enough hard work, patience and commitment, one day we’ll be able to run again. I want us all to look forward to the time when we’re back on our feet, but more importantly I want the impact of doing more with less to never be forgotten. People tend not to remember when time were the easiest. They tend to remember the comradery of going through a hardship. I, for one, will never forget this one.
Leadership – It’s tough to be tough on people. In the era where we’ve been forced to turn our front line, with everything they already do, into the mask and “6ft” police, it’s more important than ever to learn the finesse of being tough on people. Not only are you, as leaders, tasked with making sure our Piesans aren’t using confrontation as customer service, we’re also having to take on the job of being tough on customers ourselves. Being tough by acting rude, short and apathetic is easy. It doesn’t take into account so many things that we need to be aware of; how people will react, the negative environment it may create, and a lack of leadership and empathy just to name a few. When we ourselves are mentally tough, we know that people’s first reactions are usually emotional, not necessary logical. We know how to disarm people and we know that we’ll attract more bees with honey than with gasoline. Being tough on people starts with us understanding what our own personal motivations are as customer service professionals. Over the years, we’ve learned the skills needed to work every night with intoxicated people. It’s not something that comes natural to most of us, it’s a skill we develop over time. It’s something we learn. And just like dealing with the drunks (I use that term as lovingly as possible, btw) we’ll learn how to be tough on people. Toughness combined with empathy, finesse and a genuine desire to help is the recipe for getting someone to do what you’d like. It’s that easy and it’s that hard.
History – That one time we fed the Black Keys. Back in 2017 the Black Keys were on fire. They were headlining Bunbury and we not only had two food trucks there, we also had Truck #1 (our original truck and the smallest one we had at the time) there to handle band catering requests. It was by far our most ambitious festival presence yet. Late Saturday afternoon, we got an order in from the stage manager. It was a huge order for not only the Black Keys, but their entire crew! Being originally from Akron, like a lot of us that work here, it’s was an enormous point of pride for us to feed these guys our pizza. I remember taking a picture of the order and posting it on Facebook. I thought it was so fucking cool. It still pops up every once and a while on our feed and I get to remember that feeling.
Motivation – “Life is rough, so you gotta be tough” – Johnny Cash
The 5th Thing (something I’m reading, watching or inspired by) – One of my favorite singer/songwriters is Father John Misty. He recently came out with an album of four cover songs that are just awesome; two Leonard Cohen songs, one Yousef (Cat Stephens) song and a Link Wray song. It made me start diving into Leonard Cohen and what a prolific songwriter he was. If you know one song of his, it’s probably Hallelujah. If you haven’t heard it or haven’t heard the original version of it, which is probably the case, I encourage you to check it out. Some songs make time stand still. Leonard Cohen has several of those songs.
Baby Update – Having Will has made me do something I never did enough…call my parents. Well, facetime really. About every morning when I’m giving William his breakfast of Mountain Dew (Code Red, naturally) and Hot Fries, I’ll video call “grandma and grandpa” and we’ll have a nice little video chat. They get to see the boy, he gets to see them, I get to see them all interact. It’s incredibly rewarding. I’ve said it before, but being late to the kid game and having parents scratching at 70, I want to make sure they have as much time with him as possible. I just wished they lived close so they could be baby sitters too.
Thanks for reading! Like or hate any part of this? Let me know! I really value your feedback.
Have a great week!
5 Things to Consider Archive 