It is with a great deal of pride and excitement that I can finally announce the release of my first book: Tips2: Tips For Improving Your Tips. I have been teasing this big announcement for months and am glad to finally be making it, even though for regular readers it may be akin to Mitt Romney announcing that he is running for President. We all know that he hasn’t been in Iowa and New Hampshire for the last two years because he loves the weather. Today, I am making it official and wanted to take a moment to discuss the book and why I truly think it is something that should be on your bookshelf.
When I was a young server in the nineties I used to pay very close attention to some of my more experienced co-workers. I noticed that when I was in the weeds other servers were handling far more tables, helping me out, and looking completely stress free. I wanted to see what they were doing that I wasn’t. They had a secret and I wanted to know what it was. I would ask them, but no one could really put their finger on anything they were doing differently than what all the other servers did. Over the years, I watched my best co-workers like a hawk. Learning how they phrased things, how they dealt with the dinner rush, and why it was that their guests seemed to enjoy them so much.
As it became more apparent to me that serving was something that I wanted to be able to support myself with, I began to seek out books to help me. I read books about sales, but found that few of the techniques were easily applied to serving. I read books about customer service, but they seemed to all be written for managers. I read the seven habits, found out how to win friends and influence people, discovered the thinking without the growing rich part. All of these books were great, but very little of it could be directly applied to making me a better server.
Over my years of serving I have been through the training programs of a dozen restaurants. Each time I finished training, I made a sincere effort to try to follow their system. It led to disappointing tips straight out of training until I started integrating the techniques that I knew had worked for me in the past. Each of these training systems had the same two flaws. The first was that they were written by someone who had not been in front of a table in years. They were filled with rambling scripts that came across as an infomercial rather than a service oriented interaction. The second problem was that they were written to be easily understood by the least intelligent person the restaurant could hire. They often bordered on patronizing as they explained only the very basics.
Fast forward to two and a half years ago when I found myself relaxing on my couch after training a new server on a lunch shift. The server delivered their “pitch” as the training manual had taught them to. Not one thing about that pitch would have made me want to purchase what they were selling. After following me for the shift, this server seemed excited to learn to do it my way. It reminded me of how I must have looked trying to watch the great servers at the restaurant I started at. They had asked me how I made it look so easy and I didn’t have a better response than the servers I had asked years before. I decided to come up with an answer.
Over the next six months I began outlining and writing a book. I would go into work each day and try to test very specific techniques. I would tweak and fine tune the tricks I used to find out exactly what worked and why. Then I would write about them when I returned home. Once the book was finished it went through numerous rounds of edits and rewrites. With each time I reviewed it, I put the techniques back into the forefront of my mind and started trying to polish them. The finished product that I am announcing today looks very little like the first draft. The first draft was good, but the end result is a book that I think will make a significant impact on server’s income.
I know this book will help any server that implements the lessons in it to improve their service and increase their tips. That is not hyperbole, exaggeration, or bragging. I know this is the case because it has improved my tips. I knew everything in the book because I wrote the book. Even on the seventh round of edits and rewrites I was finding things that I was slipping on and by reintroducing them found my tips improving. It is not all revolutionary and new information. Many of you will know most of the information in it. Seeing it explained in a different manner and choosing to apply it will place it in the forefront of you mind and help you increase your income. Those that have been serving long enough to know most of the information will respect more than anyone how one good technique or trick can improve your tips. I would not put my name on this book if I was not convinced that you could improve your income by more than the price of the book in the first week.
It is not my intention for this post to turn into a sales pitch. Instead, I would like to sincerely invite you to check out the website for the book at www.tips2book.com. There are a number of sample chapters available for you to read and reviews from other bloggers who received advance copies of the book. Take your time to consider whether you feel the book will improve your income. I have every confidence it will and hope you will consider buying a copy today.
Tips2: Tips For Improving Your Tips is the new book from the author of The Hospitality Formula Network. It contains the 52 essential skills of the exceptional server. This book teaches the philosophy to turn average service into an exceptional guest experience that will rapidly increase your tips. This book shows how you can provide better customer service and dramatically improve your tips. Enter the coupon code “squared” to receive 20% off your copy today.
Critiquing The Server
Next week we review the biopic of an amateur server critic entitled, "Why did you shove that fork in my eye?"
As you are reading this, I am most likely sitting in a courthouse awaiting a trial. Not my trial or anything of that nature. I was summoned for jury duty. If this is the last post for a while, you will know I was sequestered for the crime of the century. In anticipation of my potential selection, I have spent some time thinking about my recent guest post and a comment it included. The idea of critiquing a server was brought up in the post and confirmed by some comments posted afterwards.
I have never been a lawyer, but I was on the mock trial team at North Kansas City High School. I love Law and Order. I have several friends who are lawyers and even know a couple judges. People tell me all the time that I should have been a lawyer. All of this makes me fully qualified to tell the lawyers what they could do better next time. Right?
Any lawyer reading this is raging at the last paragraph. I didn’t go to law school. I don’t know what evidence was excluded. I have seen lawyers in action and some have told me about things that annoy them, but it doesn’t exactly make me qualified to evaluate how they did their job. While I feel pretty confident that I know what the job entails, I am probably just informed enough to be annoying.
This is why I will not critique the lawyers in the case. Yet those same lawyers would feel comfortable providing tips for improvement to me. It is an odd double standard, which was confirmed in the comments to the aforementioned post. Otherwise polite and kind people with the best of intentions feel it is appropriate to tell a server how to do their job better. In some cases it is done to provide compliments with a good tip. In other cases it is to justify a poor tip.
Tipping seems to be the cause of it. I believe that since guests are entitled to judge service to determine their tips, they feel comfortable doing it vocally as well. It is a position of power that one would not have dealing with the DMV or a car salesman. You cannot monetarily punish the receptionist at the doctor’s office, so you tolerate far lesser service than you would in a restaurant. Even without the potential to take away their pay, the threshold for critiquing them in person or to their boss is much higher than for a server. A server, who would by all accounts be the friendliest person at the post office, will be punished monetarily, complained to, and complained about to management, far quicker than people doing poorly in most other jobs.
There are three very important and interesting factors in play that makes people feel more comfortable critiquing theie server than a surly bank teller. The first is that people have higher expectations of their server than they do of most people sitting behind a desk. The second is, in spite of these higher expectations, the server is still viewed in a subservient manner because you get to determine their worth by tipping. The third is that unlike all of those other people, who’s salaries you also pay, you are not aware of exactly how much you are paying for their services. These factors contradict each other in interesting ways.
Most of the other occupations I have listed to elicit emotions are people who hold power over you. The DMV worker or receptionist is providing you with something you need and cannot get elsewhere. This puts them in a position of power and forces you to tolerate such behavior. Likewise even the slightest bit of kindness from them will deserve rave reviews. The last mediocre server you had would be considered the best employee ever if they put the same sort of effort into shipping a package for you that they did serving your meal. The surliest person I work with would still be the friendliest person at the tax collector’s office. Yet I am certain as a server they receive far more complaints on top of having their wages reduced.
This is why I find it so puzzling that people feel comfortable critiquing their server. Having dined out a great deal or working at a pizza place in college, does not inherently qualify to know how the server could improve. There are a myriad of factors that can influence the service you receive. Just as my hours of watching Law and Order does not qualify me to fully understand a lawyer’s job, you may not be qualified to know how backed up the kitchen was or that your server’s cat died right before work. Even after being critiqued, the server cannot reply or explain for risk of being fired.
Too often this is used as a mild form of bullying. Some people do truly believe that they are saying these things to the server as constructive criticism. They do not view it as demeaning to the server. I have developed a litmus test for these people. If you do not respect the server enough to invite them to your job to critique you, then maybe your criticism is talking down to them. If it is truly a suggestion to an equal, their opinion of your job should be valued as well. They won’t keep part of you wage for poor performance, so you already have far less to lose.
The first response I am expecting to this post is that I am an exception. Some of you are even reading this thinking, “but you are a professional who is passionate about what you do, not some kid at the neighborhood bar and gill.” While this is true, and I do get far less criticism than I did when I a teenager starting out, it again points out the idea of subservience. When I was a baby-faced server without a spec of grey hair, I received these critiques often. While I have grown to love the industry more than I did back then, I cared just as much about my job and took criticism to heart much more. It’s been a couple years since I sat in my car after work crying because I didn’t feel like I did a good enough job that night. Never doubt how much your server cares or how much they are affected by criticism. I am a professional who is passionate about his job. I was fifteen years ago too. Now I have developed a demeanor that discourages criticism and a confidece that thickens the skin. Before that, I simply acted like I didn’t care about the criticism until I got to the car. It was easier that way.
I am not saying that it is rude to pass suggestions along to your server in every instance. Just take the time to fully analyze your motivations and preconceptions in advance. I have been at this for fifteen years and feel confident in my abilities to diagnose ways that servers can improve. I have trained well over a hundred servers. Even with all of that experience, I choose not to criticize. I can neither know the root of the problem, nor how it will affect the server.
Tips2: Tips For Improving Your Tips is the new book from the author of The Hospitality Formula Network. It contains the 52 essential skills of the exceptional server. This book teaches the philosophy to turn average service into an exceptional guest experience that will rapidly increase your tips. This book shows how you can provide better customer service and dramatically improve your tips. Enter the coupon code “squared” to receive 20% off your copy today.
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