Sequencing: How the Order of Tasks Can Make or Break Your Business

Episode 044

Ben Walters: [00:00:00] Welcome to the SuperPumped Business Podcast. Today we are going to talk about how the order of tasks that you do things in your business can affect whether the outcome is fantastic or a failure. We're gonna talk about three specific examples of this.

Ben Walters: The first one is how you make a proper latte. How you do it in terms of the set of sequences. The way you sequence the task is gonna determine how successful that latte is. The first thing you're gonna wanna do when someone orders a latte is you're gonna wanna grind your beans. You want those to be fresh. You don't wanna grind the beans a week out or two weeks out or even a month out. It's not gonna be very flavorful. So grind the beans.

Ben Walters: The second thing you're gonna wanna do is you're gonna wanna pick the flavoring. Usually that involves sugar. So in my case, since we don't have an espresso machine, we're gonna make a fantastic iced coffee. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put in a little bit of vanilla. Then once you've got those beans ground and you pull your shot, you're gonna put that shot of espresso, which [00:01:00] we're gonna use iced coffee today, into the cup. And depending on the customer's taste, it might be a little stronger, a little weaker. I'm not a big coffee guy, I'm gonna go a little bit weaker on that.

Ben Walters: Then your next choice is milk. Are you gonna do soy, almond, if someone has a dairy, lactose intolerant, that kind of thing. Today I'm gonna do a little bit of 1% milk, so I'm gonna put a little bit of that in there. And then once I do that, I'm gonna take my cup. 'cause I'm making an iced latte.

Ben Walters: Then I'm gonna put some ice in it. I'm gonna pour my mixture in my syrup and my coffee or my shots as well as my milk. Then I'm gonna shake that bad boy up. You can tell I'm a pro. I didn't even spill, not a drop, right? So pretty good. Then you've gotta break the seal, which sometimes a little bit more difficult.

Ben Walters: Since it's coming up on the holidays, I'm gonna make this really pretty. So I'm gonna take a little bit of Hershey's syrup here. I'm gonna make the glass really pretty. I'm gonna take that, then I'm gonna pour, wow, look how frothy that is. That is delicious, [00:02:00] right? I have got a fantastic iced coffee for my breakfast.

Ben Walters: But I'm not done. I'm gonna put a little whipped cream in here, make that look pretty. And then, because it's the holidays, I'm gonna take a little bit of green sprinkles and a few red sprinkles. And Wow. Does that look fantastic or what?

Ben Walters: That's how you make a latte. Okay, but let's say you wanna change the order. So if you are gonna change the order of your latte, let's say right off the bat, I'm just gonna grab some of this, which is my sprinkles, a little bit of red. I'm gonna throw that in there. It takes a little bit of, chocolate drizzle, people like that, right?

Ben Walters: Put a little bit of chocolate drizzle in. I'm gonna put some, let's go with, oh, let's go with whipped cream. They wanted that. I remember they said, get us some whipped cream. Okay. And then I need a little bit of milk here. Oh, and ice. So I'm gonna take a little bit of ice. Throw that in and maybe, there's my shot. I'm gonna throw that in. [00:03:00] Okay. That's looking good. And then being a pro, I'm gonna put it in here. We'll shake it all up and voila. Here is my iced coffee, sir, you enjoy your day.

Ben Walters: Now, if you're the customer, would you rather have an iced coffee that looks fantastic with a little drizzle on the side of the cup or this? Both lattes have the exact same ingredients. The only difference between a latte that is fantastic and a latte that stinks is how you sequence the tasks that go in to making a latte.

Ben Walters: When people say, oh, we just trained them up. I trained them how to pull a shot. I trained them how to put their syrup in the cup. I trained them on all these things. But you don't sequence those things correctly, you can come out with a bad outcome. All of a sudden you've trained this barista, you've gone through this whole hiring process, spent all this money, you've trained them up on the individual tasks, but you haven't trained them up on the sequence of how to [00:04:00] do them correctly, and all of a sudden your customers saying, your lattes are terrible. They taste like garbage. I used to love your lattes, but now they're crap. You're like, oh man, I guess I hired the wrong guy. Russell really doesn't know how to make a latte after all.

Ben Walters: No, Russell can still make a great latte, but Russell has to be trained how to sequence that. The other piece of this is if Russell starts making lattes, based on all the things you told Russell to do, and they're terrible, russell's gonna feel bad about himself, and Russell's gonna stop coming to work because nobody wants to go to work and feel like they're doing a terrible job, right? So pretty soon you're gonna be there for the morning shift and Russell's not gonna show up and you're gonna think, oh, no turnover. Russell just turned over that position and I'm back to square one. All because you didn't sequence.

Ben Walters: Now let me give you a couple more examples. Family of four goes into a full-service restaurant, right? And there's four of 'em. Let's say one of the kids orders chicken fingers and fries. Somebody else in the family orders a salad. [00:05:00] Somebody orders a burger and then maybe somebody orders a salmon. That order goes back into the kitchen, boom. The ticket's hanging there, and line cook grabs it and says, okay, a salad, some chicken, fingers, and fries. First thing they do is they decide I'm gonna knock that salad out. They start working on the salad. They get that salad made and it's really nice, pretty salad. They put it right next to the heat area, but not quite, not under the heat lamp. They're not an idiot. They put that there and then they get the fryer out, right? And they throw those chicken fingers and the fries in the fryer and those take two or three minutes. So they get those going and then pull those out and put 'em up there, throw 'em out. Bam. Done. Then, oh, I gotta do a cheeseburger. Okay, so throw the cheeseburger on the grill, get that started. Go get the garnishments, the sliced tomatoes and the lettuce and the pickles, all that stuff that goes on it to make it really good and pull the cheese outta the fridge. Got that. Go on. And then, oh yeah, they had a salmon. And so the last thing they do after doing the salad and the chicken fingers and the burger is they do that [00:06:00] salmon, right?

Ben Walters: Do you know how long salmon takes to cook? It usually takes around 15, sometimes 20 minutes. So they put that on. But guess what, we're already about 12 minutes into the order. 'Cause remember they made the salad and they made the cheeseburger and they made the, or at least the cheeseburger's still on the grill, but they made the chicken fingers. So all that's now waiting for this salmon. So all of a sudden they've spent 10 or 12 minutes on that, and then they've gotta wait another 15 to 20 minutes on the salmon, right?

Ben Walters: So by the time all four items comes together waiting for the salmon, it's gonna be 30, 35 minutes. Now that family, maybe they wanna wait 35 minutes, but a lot of times, even in a full-serve restaurant, people don't wanna wait that long. People wanna wait about 15, 20 minutes tops for their order. So already they're hangry. Your customer service score is gonna be low.

Ben Walters: But then here's another thing. That salad that sat adjacent to the heat lamp. It's looking a little funky now. It's looking a little wilty and not quite as fresh and as crisp as it should. And do you know what those chicken [00:07:00] fingers and fries that sat there for that long? They're not tasting all that fresh. The burger's okay. It's a little bit cold.

Ben Walters: So all of a sudden, because you didn't sequence these things right, you have food that doesn't taste great and a long wait. Now, what kind of a review do you think those customers are gonna give you? What kind of comeback rate are those customers gonna give you? They say, we'd like to see the manager, and then they tell the manager, man, we had to wait 35 minutes for this stuff. And on top of that, the food was cold, the salad was wilty. This wasn't very good. What does the manager do? He's like, I'm so sorry, I'm gonna comp you your meal. Right? That's what managers do in restaurants. So they comp 'em the meal.

Ben Walters: And then what does that manager do? He's hotter than a match. He goes back, come on, cook. What is wrong with you? It took 35 minutes to get this simple family of four's meal out there, and the guy's like, I did everything you told me. I cooked the salmon correctly. I made the salad correctly. It looked good. Everything was fine. Do you know what the hiccup was? It was in the sequencing. If the salmon goes on the grill right off the bat, and then [00:08:00] the burger, the salad begins to be made and kept in a cold area. And then finally, in those last three minutes, when everything else is coming together, you just pop those chicken figures and those fries into the fryer. It all comes out in 15 to 20 minutes, it's piping hot, tastes delicious, that family is giving you five stars on Yelp, right? Manager's happy.

Ben Walters: But if you sequence wrong, guess what? You're getting a bad review, you got a manager riding that cook, all of a sudden that cook is like, I don't need this stuff. I did everything you asked me. All because in your training you didn't sequence correctly.

Ben Walters: I'll give you a final, super gross example from my cleaning business. So let's talk about how you properly clean a restroom. In our company, the first thing you would do is you would do all of your high dusting. So you would knock down, if there was a vent, maybe there's some dirt and debris in there. You would knock that down and anything up on like the dividers between the, let's say the women's stalls, you would knock all that dust down, get all that cleaned up, right? Then the second thing you're gonna do is you're gonna [00:09:00] start with a clean microfiber towel. You're gonna clean the mirrors. Okay? So you're gonna clean the mirrors really well. Then you're gonna go down, you're gonna clean the sink, make sure everything's shined up, looking good, the basin's good. Then the last thing you're gonna do is you're gonna clean those toilets, right? And once you clean the toilets, that rag, that microfiber towel is no more. It's kaput. It goes into the laundry bin, right? That's the sequence of how you do it. And then to top off the restroom, you sweep the floor, which gets up all that dust and debris knocked down. You mop the floor and then the last thing you do right by the side is you're exiting that restroom is you pull the trash. So that's how you do a restroom.

Ben Walters: Now, let's say you change the sequence of events. So the first thing you go in and do is decide I'm gonna mop the floor, right? So you mop the floor, and then you're working on a wet floor. So you're stomping around, you've been all over this building, you're stomping around on a wet floor, making it look like a mess. Then you're gonna high-dust let's say. So you knock down all that debris onto your wet floor. You've created mud [00:10:00] on the floor. And then maybe you take the broom and you smear it around a little bit. Try to get some of it up. But if you've ever had a broom on a dirty floor, wet, dirty floor, it makes a big old mess, right? So you've made a real mess of the floor. But here's the, final grossest kicker, and this is why sequencing matters in so many ways. You take your microfiber towel, you head into those toilets and you start shining those toilets. You clean them so good. They are beautiful. Remember, this is a public restroom, so they're probably pretty gross, right? And then you take that same towel because we're sequenced wrong, and you go over there and you spray the mirror down and you smear that toilet water all over the mirror. And then to finish it off, you smear that toilet water micro fiber towel all over the sinks and all over the handles and everything else. And then you grab the trash and you leave that restroom.

Ben Walters: Do you know how gross that restroom is? It is disgusting, right? I wouldn't wanna go in there. It makes my stomach turn just thinking about it. Now, you did [00:11:00] all the tasks we asked you to do. You did everything we trained you to do. Every task that we said goes into cleaning a restroom, you did it to perfection. The only thing that made this a fail was the sequence of how you did that. All of a sudden you are mad as an employee and you're like, I did everything you told me to do and now you're on my case. Now you're telling me my restroom looks terrible and it's unsanitary, it's gross. You know what I do? I'm like up your bucket, I'm outta here. And then your turnover problem persists.

Ben Walters: Sequencing matters, whether it is in a coffee shop, whether it is in your full-service restaurant, whether it is in a cleaning business, or whether it is in your business. If all your training involves is teaching the tasks, but not teaching them very specifically, the sequence to do those tasks, you are going to end up with really poor final results. If you want to get those [00:12:00] optimal outcomes, those lattes that taste great, those restrooms that sparkle, those families in your restaurant who say, wow, this service was fantastic, the food was great, it was out quick, I love this place. You have got to teach sequencing as part of your training and onboarding.

Ben Walters: This has been our SuperPumped Podcast about sequencing. I hope if you need some help just in your whole process of reducing turnover, boosting your training program, you will hit me up. I would love to talk to you. Let's dig in. Let's get this figured out and let's keep those profits in your pocket. Thanks for joining me.

Ben Walters: Enjoy your lattes and have a great day.

Ben Walters: Thanks for joining me today on the SuperPumped Business Podcast. If you enjoyed today's show, I have two quick next steps for you. First, subscribe or follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. And second, jump on over to superpumped.com to [00:13:00] find out all the incredible ways we can help you launch your SuperPumped Business.

Ben Walters: Keep well and I'll see you next time.