Joey I concur. When we opened a Ryan's (and I was involved in opening over 25) the company directive was to hire around 175 knowing that the staff would quickly dwindle to first 125 then 100 then to around 75 which was your ending crew.
However, this is totally different. As for me when I only have one tech and you spend months getting them trained so that one day you may get off the truck "some" and focus on building sales even more. You tend to be more leanient and "soft" I guess, however I think through this I realize that you must have policies in place just like when we worked for the Big Corporations, and I think from now on I will enforce them very strickly. I am considering hiring 2 "part time" techs this time and taking the best of the 2 after 30 day trial. Another issue that becomes a problem is like as a manager you became close to your staff because you spent as much time with them as you did your family. Well in this business you spend even more time one on one time with a tech and no matter how you slice it you will get close. I never hung out with my tech, never had a beer with him, never friended him on facebook, but I was closer to him than I probably should have been. I never had a problem showing "tough love" when friends or family worked for me in the resty business I was usually harder on them by far so that others couldn't claim that I was showing favoritism.
This is a different set-up for sure. I'm sure I will learn all the ends and outs of hiring and retaining the best techs at
SFS next week. I know I didn't pay the best but I do not believe in rewarding poor performance. I start at $10. per hour after 30 days give $1.00 increase would have given another $1. if performance had maintained after 6 months and so on. However, when the issues started showing up the increases stopped and he was made well aware that there was more money to be made when the performance justified it. On smaller jobs of less than 2 hours (like a small restaurant) I always paid for a minimum of 2 hours if that's all we did that night. I even went so far as to share with him my asperations of paying a base plus percentage of job, plus percentage of up sales when he was on his own truck. He knew the 2nd truck was coming and the time was near but he continued to screw up. So now my
Vortex will set idle in the driveway while I am away for a week at
SFS. I was going to let him do jobs while I was gone after trying him out this week. Who knows maybe he didn't want to go solo. I do believe there are "helpers" or grunt people and there are those that want to grow and really make something of it. It's just a matter of learning to being able to put them in their respective place quickly. The best cook I ever had in the restaurant business was a 50 year old recovering alcoholic that drove me crazy for over a year, but later became my most dependable, consistant cook ever, and later became a very steady consistant asst. mgr. for years.
I scheduled them alot of days when I didn't even need them (like when I had 3-4 small jobs) just to keep his hours up there.
Without a doubt my biggest weakness as an 0/0 is the same weakness when I supervised 10 Ryans or 30 mil a year, and that is that I am a very hands on type individual and it took 2-3 years of "coaching" from my
superior at Ryans to get me to let go of the reins. The biggest issue with letting go here is that I only have the one truck and I was not comfortable letting it out of my sight. I know that train of thought will change when I get a back up rig.
Oh, and Steve you may feel free to use me as your guinnea pig next week since Marty won't be there!
Gotta love this place! You guys are funny! 
