Kitchen Rush

Captain's Log, 2016-02 Day 8. Towards the end of ops month four. (Ops started on 2015-10 Day 13.) Reports below refer to calendar months.

Monthly run rate is decelerating,  based on MTD figures. But I suppose that's okay if (COGS + OpEx) is decelerating more but we have no clear data on that. Also we haven't expanded kitchen operations into the most profitable shift of the day,  but we must within a week.

By EOM, we need to have suceeded in deploying
(i) execs on supply chain
(ii) line cooks to cover 240-410% more shifts/week than the present, while cutting pastry costs by 50% via insourcing,  and
(iii) the marketing funnel to grow mean daily net food sales by 270%, in order to grow mean daily net sales by 77%.

If we don't get close, we're pivoting away from 24-7 positioning for at least several weeks! All that matters here is the quality of people on the team,  and that is to be judged by its success or failure. 😁

Nerd vs Consumer

The body of consumer marketing is endlessly fascinating. Its head consists of myriad tribal languages (cultures; turns of phrase visual,  aural,  and more), its heart is set by mewling poms of a thousand varieties (each fundamentally the same),  its substrate is the graph of meat that turns food into carnival (billions of human bodies, governed by a specific information system sometimes referred to as consciousness). To me these things are easy,  and often gross. At work I see myself primarily as a manager of money. All balance sheets are the same. What I have to do, is merely plumb the morass of corporate and artisanal staff, customers, a market substrate,  and machinery... nudging us forward each day, along an undetermined vector, in an n-dimensional probability space. It is in this activity that one contemplates the control of variances, in the movements of particles through such space. Particles: a simplifying assumption.

And then I get to figure out how to translate how I think about the problem, to people who mostly just want good food,  or good coffee,  or a peaceful ambience, or friends, or family,  or a stable job.

Such is nerd life...

A Day of Data Diving

Silly achievement of the day: finding cheaper TP.

More useful: explaining to high-school-age staff...  the upper-limit of salary available to fresh university graduates,  and how to get there. (800,000 GBP bonuses at a boutique hedge fund, anyone? Nah, just settle for 250,000 MYR at a big consulting company.)

Less useful: reminding myself that the main inhibitor of my work in the management consulting industry is the degree to which my personality is anti-social. I care about client ("employer") success as much as I care about anyone else's - I don't care more, and I don't hide this fact from them. I also don't hang around very long if my advice is not adhered too, since I never really need more money.