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We have about 450 employees. We have 17 retail locations and our wholesale business delivers to about 350 wholesale customers a year. Stefan, so you started with $100, okay? Your total should be $858. 00, we give or take a dollar in difference. (Latch) One of the most difficult things of running a multi-unlit food establishment Is finding people to run the stores. (Trust) The city stores are all about speed of service and moving the line. You can have 1,000, 2,000 customers a day. These people have to be moved very quickly and effectively, as well as they need to be serviced properly.
Latch) Suburban stores are totally different. You really have to have an owner/ operator mentality. You have to be mature and you have to be able to run the business like it’s your own business. What we always try and convey or sell to people who might join our company is, “If you want to be a franchisee but don’t have the capital, if you want to own your own business, we’re goanna put you in business. You don’t have to give us any money to do that. And if you can get over a certain level of sales or profits, we’ll start splitting the bottom line with you In some sort of bonus program. ”
My name is Nick Cochran, I’m a general manager and I work in Waylaid location, which is in Waylaid, Massachusetts. I’m 23, and ah– which is pretty young. I started off when I was even younger actually, 15 and a half. I started off working for Burgess’s Bagels, making bagels and I started out there as a sandwich person and moved up to cashier and kept learning, wanted to be a baker, wanted to be a I think being younger, as a manager, in Finagle a Bagel truly helps me because it gives me the stamina and power to work long days. The title is “Store manager/ Partner” of your specific location.
And the only difficult thing sometimes is trying to empower people who are much older than me. We have a– we call it an Incentive Compensation Bonus Plan, ICC Plan. The base-salary for general managers generally starts off in a company with $35,000. And as you go through time you would get certain raises, and we actually have a salary cap in the company where no general manager can make over $42,000 in a particular year for a base-salary. What will however change as you time accrues with the company is your percentage in that Incentive Compensation Plan. Thank you very much.
It’s goanna be number 72 at the end, okay? Male #5) I strive more for my managers to bonus than for me to bonus. It’s important that they bonus because it shows individual– Goals and individual stores doing well. Let’s say your monthly salary was $4,000, you could get 30% of that which would be $1200 in a bonus if you were to meet your expectations. As time grows on with the company, your bonus could be at 80% of your $4,000. (Tony Premier) I fight for my managers to bonus, because if they bonus it Just means that, you know, they’re goanna look at that check and they’re goanna say, “Damn, I did well this month.
And whatever I did this month, I have to repeat next month and I Just eave to do a little bit better and I’ll get a bigger check. ” And so, you know, I feed off of them, you know? I mean I feed off their happiness. I feed off of their Job well done. When I do bonus, you know, it’s a win-win. I mean it’s a win-win for everybody, it’s a win-win for Finagle, it’s a win-win for me, it’s a win-win for my stores because in the end we’re all trying to accomplish something which is to grow this company and we all want to grow as individuals as well. Cochran) I think it’s a good way, in essence, because you’re not paying the people who sit around and do nothing. But rather, you’re paying the people that who have A. ) been with the company for a while, and B. ) go out and work hard to get in that– them extra customers and take time to make sure that the actual profits are coming through in order so they get a share of the business. (Trust) Nick Cochran is a manager, came to us as an assistant manager, he picked up on the passion and the direction of the company very quickly.
And he is one of our most successful managers and his ability to understand the level of customer service that’s required in a community like Waylaid, or any suburban community or affluent immunity is phenomenal. And he has done wonders for our business there. He is adored by the town. He gets invited out to dinner by the customers. (Paulo Premier) I’m from Portugal, a little country in Northern Europe. I came to the language, an intensive course of English for six months. I liked it and I’ve been here since. (Trust) Paulo is a businessman.
He really understands how to run a business and his greatest talent is taking a store that is struggling for whatever reason, and turning it around, making it very, very efficient. His sandwich makers know what to do. His cashiers know how to handle people. People know where to be. He could walk into a store and in three months he can take a store that isn’t making the kind of money it should make, or moving the people that it should be moving through and he can turn it around by Just getting people to tow the line, if you will. Tony Premier) It’s all about motivation, it’s all about how you treat people. This is a people-business and you know our people and the people we serve every day. We’re not goanna abandon people because they run into issues, either personal or professional. I mean, we like to give people second chances and we like to work with people. You know, we want people to feel like they’re welcome here and want to work for us. We don’t want to force anybody to stay here, we want them to stay on their own. But we want to make an open-door policy and we want to have people be successful. Cause their success is again, is our success. You know, the better they do, the better we do. I think luckily and maybe with a little experience, I’ve always been able to have a good eye to be enabled to hire good people. I sit down with someone, I talk to them for maybe 20 minutes-half hour, “Where have you worked before? How long you worked there? How do you feel about working with people? ” You know, “What kind of experience do you have? ” And that sort of thing. My philosophy is, you know, you’re pretty much goanna tell me how much you’re worth.
You work for me for a few days, and if you like the Job and if I like your work, then we’ll go from there. But pretty much every person makes his own salary, you know, you tell me how much you’re goanna be worth over a period of maybe five, six days. Pretty much that’s all the time that I need to see if a person is goanna be worth the trouble or not. And so we go from there. My name is Washington Ramose, I’ve been working for the company for four years. My job really is I hire, I fire. Take care of ordering and my direct boss is Tony.
He’s mostly here to help out on the things that we need, like say, if I’m short people and I can’t find anybody I can call him, he’ll try to get people from other stores. Or if I messed up on an order of food or whatever I need and I can’t get out to get it, I can give him a call, he’ll get it for me. You know, once in a while he can give us a raise. Every one of these stores we have a sign, a “Help Wanted” sign. So people come in ND we always get them to fill out an application so we always have applications. Because in this business, you know, it’s in-and-out, a lot of times, you know, especially them, they stay longer.
We actually have a very good training program within the company. Like if I hire somebody, I don’t actually train them here. We have a couple trainers that will train them for a while, will teach them the whole routine, go through our book, what the company wants and what the company likes as far as the way the uniform looks and the way they treat the customers, and, you know, our rules. For every single full-time new hire they have a grace period, they have to wait six months in order to have health or dental benefits.
Finagle a Bagel offers a tuition reimbursement for managers or other employees but they have to submit the course description to our HER department, Heather Robertson, our director, she will look at and determine if that course is something that will benefit Finagle a Bagel. (female #4) In the last few months we’ve placed a few ads for people to Join the marketing department here and one of the requirements that we post in the ad itself is you just love bagels. And that’s really how I weed out the resumes. If they say anything about bagels, I put it in the “To be considered” pile.
If they do not mention a love of bagels, then it goes in the other pile. (Trust) We have a very diverse culture here. Boston has a lot of ethnic groups. We have people from Cape Verve, from Brazil, from Dominican Republic, from El Salvador, Chile, all the Latin nations. We have Americans, we have Europeans, men and women at all levels of the organization. The executive group is made up of an equal number of men and women which we’re very proud of. H’, my name’s Implied Rosa. I work in Finagle a Bagel for six years and I work in a cashier, and I’m from Dominican Republic.
I feel so happy for working here with everybody, my friends, the customers, I’m so happy. (Trust) English is not the first language of many of the people who work in the stores and some customers find it Frustrating to communicate. The ability to speak more than one language, in this company, is important because our workforce, and you know, most of the people that apply for work are either current immigrants or friends of people that Just came in. I mean, they all have a connection and they don’t speak English that well and they need an opportunity.
In my Job, as well as most of our managers, most of our managers speak both Portuguese and English and Spanish. It’s important for us to be able to communicate with them ’cause that way we can address their needs. We try very hard to encourage our employees to only speak English to the customer. Some people find that to be a little harsh, but every sandwich, every salad is built to order, so there’s a lot of communication between the customers and the cashiers, the customers and the sandwich makers, customers and the managers and the expectation is that everybody will communicate in English.
We are very proud of those individuals who have come to this country and have worked very hard to get them to get their green cards. We in turn, get a dedicated employee and somebody who we know that understands the passion and the desire that we have for the company to be successful. And once we get them on board, people don’t leave our company, they Just stay. They realize that it can be a career for them, they may come to us as a college student hinging to earn a little extra money in between classes, maybe to pay a bill or two, but they come on board, they get excited about what they’re doing and they stay.
And I think the size of our company has made a big difference in retaining people, it’s really unusual to have one-on-one interaction on a daily basis with the president of the company or any senior executive member of the company. We have tons of people that have been here-been with us for a long time. We have bakers that have been with us for 10-12 years. We have cashiers that have been with us for 8-10 years. So we have a great core of employees.
Our bakers, our managers, they know they can pick up the phone at any point in time and call anybody here and say, “Here’s my problem, how do I fix it? ” Or, “l need your help. ” Or, “Can you Just come by and bag bagels for an hour during lunch? ” The size of our company allows us to do that and the culture of our company encourages that. Everyone in our support center from the accounting department to the payroll department, spends time in the stores. (Tony Premier) This company means a lot to me because I’ve gone through some arsenal issues with my mom being sick and so forth and so on.
Both Laura and Alan, more Laura because I have more contact with her on a daily basis has been very, you know, very supportive. She’s helped me to get doctors for my mother. She’s helped me to–l mean, she has been the ideal owner that you’d want to work for. The ideal person that you want to work for. And I take great pride in that and I owe it to them– when you talk about bonuses, that’s a bonus that nobody can write you a check for and that’s a bonus that, you know, only a human being could offer.