Your new restaurant is nearly ready. You have the menu printed, the staff (mostly) hired, and the concept is shaping up beautifully. Among the million other things you have left to do is to write the employee manual. And then print it. And get your staff to read and sign off on it. You'll get to it tomorrow, you tell yourself, just need to get through the food order for next week's opening first...

Ah, tomorrow. That golden day when you're going to have time to to complete everything on your to do list; the day when all your staff is trained, you've collated your menus, archived your emails and alphabetized the walk-in.

But it's inevitable— Tomorrow always becomes today, usually much quicker than most of us would like. In the reastaurant world, most of that time is spent dealing with the now. The day is filled with immediate needs and challenges and items keep getting moved to the new day in the future when you can carve out a few extra hours for yourself.

We all have that golden to-do list, and I'll bet that "write/revise/update my training materials" is on there somewhere. But don't put it off too long— A study conducted in 2005 by Cornell University found that the top two reasons restaurants fail are these:

1. Lack of documented strategy; only informal or oral communication of mission and vision; lack of organizational culture fostering success characteristics.
2. Inability or unwillingness to establish and formalize operational standards; seat-of-the-pants management.

How well-defined is your mission, and how do you communicate it to your employees? Did you develop it beforehand and put it in place before you launched your concept, or was it developed on the fly? Do you regularly devote time to training and communicating with your staff?

Here's how restaurants using Waitrainer™ are doing it:

Our system, Waitrainer™, allows you to use employee manuals, job descriptions, policies, and more that are already written. With the policies and procedures out of the way, you can focus on fine-tuning your unique vision, and be certain it's being communicated to each of your employees. All our prewritten text comes from experts in the restaurant industry who combined their knowledge to help you be more successful in business.

All you'd need to get started is your restaurant name and your staff list. Let us know how your restaurant manages training in the comments below. If you'd like to learn more about what Waitrainer™ can do for your restaurant, click here.