The business on one page
Lesson 1 of 6 · Hotels and restaurants
Lesson summary
Kestrel Quay House is an invented hotel with 22 rooms, a 60-cover restaurant and a cafe counter. Its owner is the agent manager. The Space holds the documents that were in binders, spreadsheets and chat groups. The till and the booking system stay the record of sales and bookings.
Open the Space. Six folders hold the house: Menu and recipes, Suppliers, People and rota, Guests and events, Numbers, Compliance.
Open the page Today. It is the daily sheet for the pre-shift briefing.
The agent Numbers writes the draft from the bookings export, the events list and the open issues. Its task, a row in the database Tasks, shows Needs review.
The front of house lead corrects one line on the page Today. Then she opens the task in the database Tasks and selects Accept.
The same person leads the briefing. An agent does not lead people.
Try it now
List the documents your team reads before service. Write the name of the person who signs the daily sheet.
English transcript · same language as the video
It is four o'clock on a Friday. Service starts at six. Where is the truth about tonight?
In most houses, it is in five places. The bookings are in the booking system. The allergy note is in a chat group. The sold-out dish is on a whiteboard. The wedding numbers are in an email. And the rest is in somebody's head.
You are not alone in this. One study of four hundred hospitality businesses in the UK and Ireland found four systems in regular use. Each manager lost about two hundred and eighty-six hours a year to moving between them. That is thirty-six working days.
This course follows one house. Kestrel Quay House is an invented hotel in a harbour town: twenty-two rooms, a sixty-cover restaurant called The Net Loft, and a cafe counter. Ines Marlow owns it and runs it. She is the agent manager.
Look at her Space. On the left there are six folders. Menu and recipes. Suppliers. People and rota. Guests and events. Numbers. Compliance. These are the binder, the spreadsheets and the chat groups, in one place. The till and the booking system stay where they are. They are still the record of sales and bookings. The Space holds the documents around them.
Now open the page named Today, in the folder Numbers. This is the daily sheet. Covers booked: fifty-four. One party of eight at seven thirty. The lamb is sold out. Table twelve has a nut allergy. Room nine has a broken shower.
Ines did not type this page. The agent Numbers wrote it at three o'clock, from the bookings export, the events list and the open issues. It is a draft. In the list Tasks, the task for this sheet shows Needs review. The task waits for a person: Priya, the reviewer.
Priya runs front of house. She reads the sheet. She knows something the agent cannot know: the party of eight moved to eight o'clock, by phone, ten minutes ago. She corrects the line on the page. Then she opens the task and selects Accept. Now it is the sheet for tonight, with her name on it.
Then Priya does the part that no agent does. She stands in front of the team and leads the briefing. She tells the kitchen about table twelve, face to face.
That is the pattern for the whole course. The agent prepares the paper. A named person checks it, signs it and leads the people.
Agents keep the documents in step. You keep the guests, the craft and the decisions.
In the next lesson, you move your own documents into a Space like this one.
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