Disclaimer: The title of this post is the start of my soap opera for old people called "As the Burger Turns" Anyway, to make this clear right from the start, everything in this post is created from my own recollections, which may be faulty because I am old, or because I choose to lie about it, take your pick. At any rate, everything I post here belongs to me, the good the bad and the ugly, and is a product of my highly developed imagination. If I use a situation that you know about and it was actually different, then shaddup! , just read it and don't ruin a good story with a correction about some trivial things called facts. It's a story, stories are based on what people think and everybody knows that people lie.
Today in History
- 1898 US Marines land in Cuba during Spanish-American War.
- 1916 Great Arab Revolt begins against ruling Ottoman Turks.
- 1963 US Equal Pay Act signed into law by President John F. Kennedy.
- 1977 Apple Computer ships its first Apple II computers.
- 2003 The Spirit Rover is launched, beginning NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission.
So anyway back to the story.
I had just been promoted to my first actual management position and was assigned to be the 2nd assistant manager at 5401 East 38th St at 38th and Irvington in Indianapolis IN. It was one of the original style stores with 8 stools at the counter about 15 tables more or less, and 50 or more parking lot spaces with curb service and no drive-thru as those had not been in wide use as of yet. We did about 60% of our business on the curb so we had to have people who could move quickly and who were interested in making money. That store was a great learning environment for me as it had plenty to work on, plenty of things to do, wholly different styles of leadership presented in Mr. West, and Mr. Duncan and a well-established crew. To get anything accomplished there you had to have the buy-in of the GM because that crew was his and they were not doing anything because Mr. New Guy, the WFNG said so. Mr. Duncan had already earned the respect of the crew and they loved him because he was the kind of guy who would go to bat for you when you were being unduly criticized and he didn't care one whit what color or sex you were.
I always tell the story that one of the ways I have mentally evaluated people was to say in my mind "Could I work for this person" if the circumstances dictated it? I saw Mr. Duncan stick up for Mr. West and for members of the crew against undue criticism leveled against both from the superior management in the company a few times. I never knew why but the senior managers did not care for Mr. West not even a little bit and he wasn't there for very long after I was transferred. I always thought Mr. Duncan was a stand-up guy because of it. I reported to him in a fashion because of his tenure and his position in the hierarchy. I usually had to get his ok to change anything in the store because, for the most part, Mr. West made him responsible for me, especially on the night shift that I normally worked. I think Mr. West did that because I bothered him with my big mouth. He was a sort of taciturn no-nonsense kind of guy and didn't like small talk or telling jokes or anything like that. I think my nature of being gregarious and talking a lot got under his skin so Mr. Duncan had to sit on me as a result.
I used to ask Mr. West a lot of questions on purpose because I knew it made him nuts to have to answer a lot of questions, one right after another. I found out that was the easiest way to make him go home and leave me alone, was to make him crazy. He wasn't going to send me home, that would have meant he was running my shift, and we both knew that wasn't happening. I used to watch him leave and would be laughing, and I remember Harry-O coming up to me and saying something like "Drove him crazy again huh?", It was a hoot. So anyhow I saw Mr. Duncan stick up for me and the rest of the crew, even with the District Manager and he gained a lot of respect from the crew and me as a result. I could have worked for Bill in any position, no sweat. We remained good friends until well after I moved to Florida and lost touch with him. He was a great guy.
I learned a lot about managing different types of people and situations by being at that restaurant for about 6 months or so, and after a time I was transferred to a restaurant located on Pendleton Pike in Lawrence Indiana. I worked for a lady named Nancy Johnson there initially and it was a good assignment for me. The staff at night was about 1/3 retirees, 1/3 teenagers, and 1/3 South Koreans. I learned how to manage people who were older than me who hand a tendency to be paternalistic and would want to pat me on my head and tell me it would be ok. I probably heard more stories about how I reminded them of their children and grandchildren there than I ever heard anywhere else. I also learned how to manage people who didn't speak my language. The Koreans were the hardest working group of folks I had ever seen, there was no quit in any of them. They ate this stuff called kimchi` though that was the foulest smelling food I had ever smelled. That restaurant size-wise was the same size as Franklin Road so running that dining room was fairly easy. Especially since my Franklin Road dining room training was conducted by Donna Jennings. She was the absolute best salesperson I ever witnessed in my time at Steak `n Shake. She also made the most money for a server that I ever witnessed, that is until I met Jackie.
The thing that I learned that stuck with me the rest of my career at Steak `n Shake was how to control inventory. I don't mean how to count it or order it, I mean how to think about it logically. The restaurant ran fairly well and there wasn't any specific thing that stood out that was an obvious reason as to why our food cost was too high and all the usual methods like auditing the guest checks, double and triple-checking the inventories, working on waste and portion control and etc, didn't seem to make any difference. It turned out the one method that solved the problem for us was one of simple dialogue. I sat down with every single employee and asked them if they know or had any information that would explain a lot of food missing out of the restaurant.
One very shy almost totally nonverbal South Koren girl who worked there got my eye one day and called me over to the fountain where she was working and handed me a note one afternoon. The note said, "I need YOU to take me home tonight." I didn't know what to think at that point. I pointed to my wedding band on my hand and told her I was married and wasn't interested, and she shook her head almost violently and said "No, Mike, I need YOU to take me home tonight, not that." So I said OK, I'll take you home and she smiled, and went back to work. I worried about what she was trying to tell me and what she wanted the rest of the night. I really didn't know her all that well and didn't understand what she was trying to accomplish but I figured I was a grown-up and could handle myself. I remember calling my wife at the time, Terry Lou, and telling her what was going on and telling her I had no idea what it was about. She told me it probably wasn't what I was thinking because even somebody who didn't speak my language would go about hitting on me in a totally different way. I never thought about it like that, because I mean, I was almost in panic mode. So I stopped worrying so much and just waited on closing time.
So anyway, I take the girl home and home turned out to be a temporary arrangement she had made with another Koren woman who was our overnight Porter (think Janitor, clean up woman), who had worked at that store for about 5 years and was a fixture in that store. She was one of those people that everybody had a job for and she was in high demand to do all kinds of things because she did such a great job. It turns out every bit of that was a facade. The girl I took home, told me to wait here when she got out of the car, went inside the house and when she came back out she had her luggage with her, she put the luggage in the back of my car and closed the door and then opened my door at the driver's side and told me "Come, come", so I went with her, now totally curious to see what this crazy chick had me in the middle of. The owner of the house, the porter Kim, was at work and no one else was at home.
She went back into the house and came out of the side garage door, and hit the button that opened the garage opener. As the door opened I stood there with my mouth open and my chin on the pavement. I was looking into the backroom of a Steak `n Shake, there were cases of ketchup bottles and packets, to-go boxes, straws, #10 cans of Chili Beans, Baked Beans, rows of pineapples in the can and just about every menu product that the restaurant served. She looked at me and said, "You Like?", then walked over to three or four chest freezers and showed me cases of cheesecakes, apple pies, french fries, hams, and she had a separate huge chest freezer just crammed full of Steakburgers in the boxes still. I'm probably forgetting a lot of the stuff I saw, but trust me when I say it, it was a literal ton of stuff. The kicker was that someone while unloading from the trucks, had stamped just about every box with this custom date stamp the store had made which had the stores address on it, so It was a piece of cake to tie the product back to the store.
I remember calling the security officer we had that worked at the store part-time who helped us with outside curb security. He was also a Lawrence Police Officer and I told him the story that I had just seen, he laughed and said this is perfect because the girl that showed everything to me was a legal resident, and a legal resident of the house and was entitled to show me, it was all great evidence and would stick if we charged the porter, Kim. Anyway, she was arrested that night at the restaurant and took to jail and they rented a freezer truck and inventoried the product. Once we got a complete accounting of the total of the raw product, it was valued at well over $10,000, and she had stolen it over the past 2 or 3 years or so. It was no wonder we had a food cost problem, but after the arrest, our costs went way down. Go figure. Oh and the girl? It turned out that she wanted me to see it because she had to move out of the house that night because the porter was a thief and she didn't like the way it made Koreans look.
Go Figure. I cannot say I blame her.
After that little escapade, I had somewhat made a name for myself as a guy who would look for every solution to the problem. Soon after that I got promoted to First Assistant Manager and they transferred me back to Franklin Road as one of John Fair's assistant managers. I felt proud and nervous and anxious at the same time. Yeah sure, we had improved results at 5401, got the sales up, and figured out the Food Cost issue at Pendleton Pike but what did I have to offer to Franklin Road? Jesus Christ. I remember driving to my first day back there and I had to pull over and throw up a couple of times I was so damn nervous. I left for work about an hour earlier than I ever had, I had gone to the barber the day before, I had on new shoes and socks and belt and had creases in my slacks and the arms of my short sleeve white shirts. I was sweating so bad that I was soaked through. I walked into the store and everybody was standing there that I knew and started clapping. John motioned me over to where he was sitting and motioned for me to sit. Then he just smiled at me and said "So what the hell are you so nervous for?." I remember I just busted out laughing and so did he. It was great, I got to come home.
It turned out to be just what I needed at the time.
Days after that just flew by at light speed. We were used at the time as a super-duper training powerhouse. We had trainees on both shifts, on almost every station doing all sorts of things. We had trainees that were going to be managers at every level in our Division, several administrative people, Senior Corporate Managers, Potential Franchisees, District Managers for other states, and even a Division Manager or two. I can't tell you home many times I trained a leader of some sort of another and they turned out to be my boss months or years later. It happened so much I never even thought about it much after it happened a time or two. I remember people asking me if it bothered me that I was always training my own bosses? I couldn't figure out why it should have and they would say well you didn't get promoted?. I was a realist and knew no one was going to promote a 21-year-old boy to a senior leadership position in this company or any other. I also had a theory back then that the only people who got taken seriously at a young age were tall people who were 6' 2" or better. I had seen so many ding dongs promoted to higher positions that the only thing I could see that they had on their side was that they were tall. It was the only thing I could figure it was. I never gave it that much thought because I always thought if it was meant to be it would come.
I never had the knack of dealing with the politics of a company very well. I just didn't know the proper techniques for what some people would call ass-kissing, but is just probably better-called ego-stroking. I didn't help my own case either a lot of times either. Like the time at a Christmas party, I was asked by this nice lady to get ger a drink and I did so. She engaged me in conversation and we laughed and joked and I had her rolling because I was being the class clown making her laugh. She really liked me. The only thing was I learned later that she was Mrs. Daniel Jarvis, the Vice President of Operations wife, the guy who was going to fire me years earlier for the X=Who cares incident. He was convinced I was hitting on his wife and was trying to get her to leave the party with me. I mean, she was pretty good looking and I did have this thing for the older woman at the time, but I mean, at the Corporate Christmas party? Hell, I was trying to be good. I told him later that I was just trying to be pleasant and was making the nice lady laugh. He wasn't really happy, but it blew over, and the weird thing was he tried to get me to come and work for him in two other ventures he had going years later. I don't know whatever happened to that guy either. I heard his wife divorced him though sometime later.
It turns out I had several things working against me that I never understood until many years later, the least of which was a knack for running my big pie hole when I should have kept it shut. In retrospect after what I saw happened to people I knew who were promoted in a few short years, I am probably lucky I skirted that catastrophe in the making. I remember the first time I ever met S. Sue Aramian, I thought, man I am glad I do not have to answer to her every day. I would have been fired so fast my ass would have flown out of there on a magic carpet. I remember when I was the General Manager in Carmel IN that I had a serious roof leak. It was leaking so bad it was filling a big trash can in the dining room every 10 minutes or so, and she walked in. After asking me a thing or two like had I called it in to my office or my boss and what did they say? I would say within 25 minutes I had 2 or 3 maintenance men, the maintenance boss Dave, My DM, the Division Manager, and a couple other people there just getting their butts reamed out sideways with a wire bristle brush, I stood off to the side and thought, "Well I did tell them it was leaking like crazy filling 30 gallons or larger trash can every few minutes. " I never told her that they told me I was making something out of nothing and told me they would be there this week to fix it. No one ever said a word to me about that incident either. The roof got fixed that day. Funny how that works.
One of the things I learned years later while I was sitting in the dining room talking to my boss at the time, was one of the reasons they never seriously considered me for any promotion above store level. He told me that I had too many friends and too many friends on the crew to manage effectively at the district level. He may have been right I don't know because I never really had that "killer" instinct that folks talk bout needing in order to be successful at big business. He said you have to have the total package, you have to have the dedication, you have to be willing to make big sacrifices, you have to think the part, to act the part, to pour your soul into the position. Then he told me something in confidence that he said If I ever told anyone that he would deny it was ever said. He told me one of the things that worked against me was the fact that I always drove a crappy looking car, which I got, then he said something that stunned me and I never forgave that company for. It was always in the back of my mind. Even after I divorced my wife at the time, I could never trust those people again.
He told me that they would never consider me because my wife "didn't look the part". My wife at the time was 4'9" tall weighed about 100 pounds soaking wet and through no fault of her own had a disease called alopecia (What is Alopecia?). What he meant without saying it was that she was too ugly because she was bald and she wasn't a professional working woman like they preferred. I had no idea that even happened. After that, I didn't want their promotion, I stopped thinking about it, stopped working towards it and only took the last one they offered me because it was a training job, it was something I could bury myself in and something I could do without taking it home too much. I got to see my kids a lot more because their mother and I had separated in 1993 and I was missing them anyway.
It turned out they only gave me the job to solve their own problem they had with the lady who was in the job they gave to me and to be able to keep an eye on me (because my ex-girlfriend had filed suit against them). It wasn't a real job as I found out later, and it was just another example of how I let my naive nature lead me away from what was really going on. I left there in 1997 and went to work a few months later for a good friend on mine who was a successful Steak `n Shake franchisee in Chattanooga TN. I seem to have a knack for letting people convince me I had a job I actually didn't have. It happened to me before I met John. I happened to me again in Orlando FL when George Figler gave me a company car and a nametag calling me the "Division Store Training Manager". I found out that one was a fake promotion when he got fired and some guy named Harry Palmer called me up and told me to turn in the car before they reported it stolen. I left Florida and went home after that crap.
It happened again, years later when I was "promoted" to the Division Training Manager in Indiana. There was one thing I did there that I was proud of, I rewrote the training program, professionalized it, and then created a database for the HR side of the business that compared and contrasted the hiring practices of my areas District Managers. It proved that there was no bias exhibited by either Male or Female DM's for or against Male or Female applicants and analyzed trends and salaries by the area that was used in just about every presentation gave by the HR department after that. I never complained but I also think they never understood I had figured it out and put up with it on my terms. The stupid thing was my ex-girlfriend had filed suit against them over some pretty shady termination practices and they thought I had something to do with it. Up until the day I left that company I never told them that we had been broken up for over one year before she ever brought her lawsuit.
It happened again, years later when I was "promoted" to the Division Training Manager in Indiana. There was one thing I did there that I was proud of, I rewrote the training program, professionalized it, and then created a database for the HR side of the business that compared and contrasted the hiring practices of my areas District Managers. It proved that there was no bias exhibited by either Male or Female DM's for or against Male or Female applicants and analyzed trends and salaries by the area that was used in just about every presentation gave by the HR department after that. I never complained but I also think they never understood I had figured it out and put up with it on my terms. The stupid thing was my ex-girlfriend had filed suit against them over some pretty shady termination practices and they thought I had something to do with it. Up until the day I left that company I never told them that we had been broken up for over one year before she ever brought her lawsuit.
I would have if they ever asked but they never did.
More later.
BigMike
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