PM & Ops Manager
Vagabond
Fast-Casual Restaurant
Vagabond is a fast-casual Lebanese-Mexican restaurant on a mission to create and share the perfectly balanced eating experience with all Europe. Their tasty cooking was rising up to the challenge but their chaotic operations were pulling the other way around. They needed a 180º change to save the business from taking a hard hit.
A brief overview of the work
Project Summary
From challenges and hypothesis to solutions and final outcomes, all squezzed into these few sections. Wanna dig deeper? Reach out and we'll talk details.
challenge
The starting point
Poor performance and aversion to change.
Despite the great improvements in product quality and kitchen affairs, Vagabond's operations and customer service were spiraling out of control. They were underperforming, constantly improvising, and increasingly burned out. That was making the business unpredictable and reactive and taking a toll on their success. To be fair, they were trying to put things back on track but all their initiatives were received with as little sympathy and efficiency as they were communicated. Resistance, frustration, and reversion to old bad habits was building up, hiding leadership problems under productivity issues that needed a quick fix.
approach
The turning point
Backing new processes with an empowering culture.
Sitting with the problem a little longer made it easy to see that pushing for tighter processes alone will not help. Laying the ground for these changes to happen -and stick- requiered everyone to be on board and inspired to follow through. First, I worked with the founders to get clarity on their vision and goals
results
The finish line
An empowered team and streamlined processes.
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Project highlights
Key milestones from this great project.
All projects required high-level management of plans, strategies, schedule, budget, risks, progress, metrics, people, documents, and more. In case you don't see them in the highlights, know they happened 😉.
n.accomplishments
Getting to the root of the problem so we could work on the right thing
Me and my partner did a first round of discovery sesions with the founders. Then a second round of conversations with the staff and key managers. And then a third round of observations by spending a few days watching them work without any intervention from our part. This allowed us to get a wide perspective of story, patterns, and dynamics and easy the way to unwrap the core issues.
Helping founders articulate a great vision and competitive strategy
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Aligning everyone under their new direction and company culture
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Brainstorming and planning all the optimizations as a team
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Implementing, testing, and improving ideas in a Lean way
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Documenting the process and leaving new leaders on charge
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Photo gallery
A visual take of the work and results.
Some images to prove I did work on this thing haha! You'll see photos, designs, documents, and some other media files. Enjoy!
Relevant stats
Nuggets of data to summarize the job.
These are some of the key details and skills required to pull this project off. There's also a few screw up. Call me to know more.
n.details
| duration | team size | docs generated | anual revenue |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 months | +20 people | 96 protocols | +600K EUR |
n.skills and tools
Process Optimization
Company Culture
Brand Strategy
Competitive Strategy
Vision & Ethos
Organizational Structure
Employee Handbook
Training Process
Restaurant Operations
SOPs
Lean Process
OKRs and KPIs
Project Planning
n.wins
One thing that worked great was the discovery session. Always get deeper into the synthoms until you discover the root issie.
n.lessons
Valuable lessons of things to improve
Explore more projects
Reach out
Trying to pull off a project?
I'd love hearing about it. Sharing visions, commenting business plans, ideating strategies... If you're working on an awesome idea and you want some help, feedback, or maybe a brainstorming session please be my guest. We will make gold out of the conversation. Promise :)
