Cracked Cauldron Spillings

As we wait for word on the loan, we are polishing up the employee training manuals for our coffee and flour monkeys.

We're also putting our special recipes into a laminated format so we can use them in the bakery without getting them all covered in flour and sugar and butter and such.

And the third thing we're doing is running everything through a nutritional analysis so we can properly label them once we're open.

The Employee Training manual comes in several parts: the usual company propoganda about how great the Cracked Cauldron is and how elite they are to be chosen to work for us. This part is pretty true even if it is propoganda. The Cracked Cauldron is great and unique and wonderful and yummy. And if we invited them to work for us, they have something we think our customers will like. We think they are loyal, dedicated, industrious, intelligent, kind, and helpful - or we wouldn't have hired them. So the propoganda part is just a bit of ego-boost for them.

Then we get to Company Policy. This is the line they don't cross. Ever. This details what will get them fired for sure beyond any doubt. Job descriptions, what we expect their duties to entail. This also tells them what we can and cannot do for our customers. Yes, yes, that old saw about the customer always being right. However, in this litigious time, the customer isn't always right, and in food service there are some things we absolutely positively cannot do no matter how demanding the customer may be. This tells our employees what those are and how to inform the customer politely that we can't cross that line (accommodations we could offer, alternatives, and when to call Manager in). after all, if it reaches this point, most times the customer is just angry, and if we satisfy the anger, we don't have to consider performing illegal actions. We'll give the employees a lot of discretion in customer service, but we'll also provide back-up when it gets to this point. How to make things right when things go wrong. Emergency procedures (fire, getting burned, broken glass, customer having a heart attack...) And other necessary things employees need to know about how the Cracked Cauldron is run.

Last we get to the fun part - the How Tos. How to make the drinks. How to stock the cases. How to package up to go orders. How to take orders. How to clean things. How to care for the equipment. How to handle the sound system. How to open and close. All that wonderful fun stuff.

Because Coffee Monkeys and Flour Monkeys will be responsible for entirely different things, we'll have different books for them. Coffee Monkeys will be out front, meeting the customers and helping them, so their portion concerns that. Flour Monkeys are in back, baking up the yummies, and they get all the low-down on bakery procedures and precautions and recipes and pretties.