Pizza Today - February 2021 - 35

you're going from a rural college town to
an upbeat urban location, the menu, flow,
and expectation will be much different.
Choose an area that matches your first
store's brand promise or be ready and able
to shift your brand perception.

4. Lead Up to the Open
To make the expansion a success means
your first week is organized chaos. Taking
proper preparations and planning ensures
you have an opening that flows well.
Over hire at your existing store, with a
plan to transfer some of that staff over to
the new store. Get as many reliable,
dependable, and aware people on your
team as fast as possible. Some of these
people will be good enough to help you
train your new workforce. What makes a
new opening more arduous is having all
100-percent green, brand new employees
representing your brand and culture to a
slew of new customers. New customers
are trying you out for the first time, and
you don't want to get judged on unproven
employees. Decrease this risk with trained

employees that transfer in for the opening.
Once you have this pre-trained
workforce, you should then hire onsite
for a minimum of three weeks. Don't do
more than five weeks before your new
opening. More than five weeks doesn't
work because people need a job; it's too
much time to wait. Starting to hire near
the opening day will be a mad dash of
untrained payroll, not helping your cause.
There's industry debate on how much to
overhire; I shoot for double. So if I need
20 people on staff, my goal is to hire
40 because the attrition rate for a new
restaurant is aggressive. In my experience,
the people I thought were absolute allstars that would one day turn into general
managers were the first to go. Meanwhile,
some applicants I was apprehensive of
went on to be with my company for over
a decade. It's hard to know. That's why
every applicant is a lottery ticket to be
taken seriously.

Here's my breakdown of a successful opening week during a

new expansion. This successful week

assumes you have all the Health Department certifications and approvals you'll
need to open.
Monday: Have your new staff start
training and get through all the legal
paperwork and basic orientation. This
day's purpose is to gain more awareness of
your brand and a big motivational buildup day. All new staff should leave that
day feeling energized and informed about
what they are taking on.
Tuesday: Back-of-house employees
should start to learn how to make the
menu items and cleaning tasks. The frontof-house servers should learn the food
along with service standards. Simultaneously, you'll be running around like a
chicken with your head cut off. You'll
be tending to final touches, last-minute
licensing, and all the other things that go
into a new opening.
Wednesday & Thursday: Reiterate
training. Make it redundant. Teach about
your computer POS system and all
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