Experimenting with opening my restaurant only 5 days a week.

It's Fall of 2022. We've been reopen for about 15 months now. For the reopen, we transitioned from 7 days a week, 362 Days a year to being closed on Mondays. And it's been glorious! We've really enjoyed being closed for 1 day per week and for the better part of the first year, I felt like it really was a pace I could sustain. I had been able to attain an illusion of work life balance and have taken that 1 day each week to pursue my hobbies. And for a while it worked. I had a full staff in the kitchen, plus a guy and I was working 5 days. One day off having the restaurant closed, and 1 day off work but the restaurant still open. I was taking advantage of the perks of business ownership; other people work and make money while i'm not there. That idea of the self sustaining restaurant is great in theory but not quite in practice. 50% of the time, on the day I took off but was still open, I'd get work calls or something would break or there would be some incident, or somebody wouldn't show up. And 50% of the time it would be fine, but 100% of those days, I'd be checking my phone just in case, always feeling on call. Away but not "off". No matter where I was, my mind was at work until about 8pm.

But things have changed a bit in the last few months. We've lost a bit of kitchen staff due to one chef retiring and another being let go for an inability to show up to work on time. We've had to have half our kitchen staff working 6 days a week for the better part of a year, and I've been working 6 days a week in the kitchen for the last 3 months. I've got a Chef or 2 ready to retire at the beginning of the New Year and hiring has been spotty and unreliable. Hiring Wok chefs isn't something that's really possible. I'd say 1% of the workforce really knows how to do it, and that 1% eludes me, so we hire based on work ethic and the ability to be trained, which takes weeks and months. As we run the 6 day work week, we're short handed 3 days and full strength 3 days. As we head into the busy season, I know that running short is possible, profitable but extremely exhausting. With just the sheer amount of time it takes to train, at this point in the year, we wouldn't be able to train somebody in time for them to be able to be proficient enough to get us through the busy season. My paperwork has been piling up since I've transitioned to the kitchen full time, and with pending retirements, I figured it we closed another day, and only worked 5 days, we could run at full strength every day and I'd have another day to catch up on paper work and work on business development.

As the business owner, its important to understand the distinction between working "On" the business versus working "In" the business, and lately I really haven't had much time to do the former. My particular situation is different than most. All the secrets, recipes, and techniques being applied here are in the heads of old Chinese men, who don't speak English. The only way to proceed into the future is to slowly extract that information, learn it and understand it innately enough so that I can teach it to somebody else, which I've done, which I'm doing, and which I'm still in the process of completing. But it takes time.

About 2 months ago the question popped into my brain. "Should we move to a 5 day work week?" - I brought it up to my uncles in the kitchen. The old generation. We discussed it for about 30 minutes and ultimately their concerns were that we'd never get 5 days of prep done in 4 days (we don't prep on Sunday because Sunday is dinner service only) and that I'd lose tens of thousands of dollars a month, or a few hundred thousand dollars of gross revenue per year. From a fear standpoint, I understood it. I had their fears and their insecurities projected on me, and i listened. We tabled the topic and continued to work 6 days a week grinding it out. The beginning of fall always hits a slow down after the busy summer season ends, and some days it felt as if I was working these short handed days just to break even for the day, maybe some days we even lost money! It dawned on me, that I was grinding out these days just to cover my variable costs - Food cost, Labor, Utilities, Linens, etc. If I close for a day, those expenses are 0. I kept pouring over the books trying to figure out how much we'd lose. Could we cover all our bills? All our fixed expenses just working 22 days a month?

I had closed for 3 extra days, the first week of September. We had a busy, hot summer in the kitchen and I needed to spend a few days with the business closed to do some much needed plumbing repairs (I had to have my grease trap pumped and then pay a specialized plumber $3,000 to fix 2 stand pipes that had fallen). We closed those 3 extra days, fixed a bunch of stuff, and then reopend to business as usual. At the end of the month, we still kind of made money.

So with that particular case study of closing for a few days and still making money, in conjunction of being tired and short handed and really understanding my variable costs vs how much net profit I was losing by closing one extra day a week, the undying questions of "Could I still be profitable? Could I still be just as profitable, or could I somehow be more profitable by closing one more day each week?" needed to be answered. I pondered this at work, I pondered in my sleep, I asked the internet, I asked my friends, I talked with my family, I found another local restaurant that was doing 5 days and talked to the GM there. All signs kind of pointed towards.... "It's worth a shot". So... going against the the grain of the traditional Chinese immigrant work-a-holic mentality and advice, I did it. About 3 weeks ago, I started closing on Tuesdays.

While doing my research, I came across somebody on the internet say something that really struck a cord with me. They pretty much opened my mind to the idea that I'm the boss and I can do whatever I want. I was tired of working 6 days. I was tired of feeling like all I did was work. I was tired of feeling like my 1 day off was so precious that I had to run myself ragged indulging in surfing and golfing and fishing and riding motorcycles. Running as far away from work as possible, and it was tiring. I was tired of not getting my laundry done, and tired of being behind on my bills and paper work. And at the end of it all... I was just tired of being tired. So I had this simple realization that the only person making me work 6 days a week was me. And that simple realization empowered me to take back my life, take control of my time and really sit down and understand that I could create the life I wanted for myself and my staff.

It's been 3 Tuesdays now that we've been closed and so far so good. I've taken time off to be me, time to clean my room and my house and I've actually gone into work to catch up or get ahead every Tuesday. It's nice to go in because I want to and it's reinvigorated me and challenged me to see work as less of a chore and grind now and more as this wonderful project I'm building. I've seen a change in mood in the staff as well. Everyone seems more well rested. We've reorganized the weekly prep schedule to accommodate the short week and it's really streamlined our weekly and daily work flows. I've talked to many of my peers and they've praised the importance of added rest and me prioritizing my mental health and those of my employees, and I've talked with my customers who understand and continue to support us by adjusting their schedules to meet up on days other than Mondays and Tuesdays. I do want to say that this Wednesday was the best Wednesday we've had in months, so that's encouraging!

On a day by day or week by week basis, it will be hard to say if this is the best decision to make for my business or not. I don't think we'll truly know until we run it for a whole year. But for now, the added rest, the added time to be a human / son / boyfriend / friend , and the space i have to now be creative and grow the business by working ON the business and not just being stuck IN the business has already been worth it. Will I gross less money this year? Probably. Will I net less money this year? I dunno... maybe... maybe not? Did I just gain another 52 days off a year? Absolutely! Will I look back at this year and this decision and regret taking a chance on myself to dictate how I choose to live my life? definitely not. Because both business and life aren't linear. It's not always just steady progress. In both business and life, we take risks, we take chances, we ask questions and we experiment. Do we always get it right? No. And I'm OK with that. But we always learn. And as long as we're learning, we're growing. And as long as I'm happy, I'm living. I'm lucky enough to be in a position where I've got the demand and the support of my customer base to try something like this. Wether or not it works out in the long term financially remains to be seen. But for right now... we're gonna put another check mark in the "Happy Life" column and just hope everything else just falls into place.

I'll keep you posted -

Much Love and Many thanks!

-LawN