Well we’ve just done our second BBREAD workshop – BBREAD Recipes for Success, The philosophy of the Beechworth Bakery.

It was great people came up afterwards and said “This is what we need in Australia. We need an Australian success story that we can learn from.” It was wonderful. It’ s a bit like the Fish philosophy and the Seattle fish market story and a lot of people made the comparison.

Great feedback from the day although a few people said I was a bit intense and a bit loud for a whole day so I might have to tone it down a bit. But we’ve got people booking us and wanting to know more already.

 One interesting feedback we got was that we should organise a session for couples in business, so who knows where our Bbread program is going to go? Now its back to us to package it all up and get it out into the market place.

Watch out for BBREAD Philosophy!

Tom 

At the moment I’m very involved in a new series of special workshops. They're called “BBread a Recipe for Success” and it’s all the philosophy of the Beechworth Bakery (That's why we've called it BBread - Beechworth Bread). It’s about fun and life and work and being happy in your skin, teamwork and goals and doing that little bit extra  I’ve got a facilitator who I’m working with – Roger who does our sales training at the Bakery. My staff love doing training with this guy.  

Why am I doing workshops? Well people said to me, “We want more of Tom O’Toole, more take home value. You get up there and you present with your keynote talks but we don’t get a chance to write down notes and let it really sink in.” So this is a workshop where I go a little bit slower, and then we work through what I present.  

The first bit is on self – where you are, I talk about where I am and where I’ve come from. People look at their life, where they are at and what they are doing.  I do a section on leadership, because we’re all leaders in one way or another. And then I do a section on goals and goal setting.  Goals in many different areas of life – health and money and relationships. It’s about dreams and goals.   The important thing is that people are putting all this stuff down on paper.

It’s a program that goes for the whole day. We’re still fine tuning it. We’ve run one and it was a great success. We learnt a lot and now we’re just about to do another one with AIM (Australian Institute of Management) and quite a few people from big corporations are wanting to come along. Some of the people who were at the first session want to come again! Must be slow learners like me.  

The product isn’t really on the market yet but we’re already getting bookings. We’ll put a whole lot more on this website once everything is in place. But it’s pretty bloody close!  

Tom

We get a lot of feedback at our bakeries because we ask for it, and a lot of it is very positive – love the coffee love the smiles- love, love, love. But this week boy did we get a kick in the guts, we all need it sometimes to bring us back to earth and see how we can improve.  

This one is beauty and we have really stuffed up. This person has taken a lot of time to write a detailed message. Its really specific and I think they are very valid comments. He talks about the manager hiding behind the counter. Well I’ve done that I’ve hidden out in the bakehouse – I don’t want to face it!

But then just to show that we can also really achieve great things, we get this mystery shopper report. One hundred percent! I’ve been in business for more than 30 years and I’ve used mystery shoppers quite a bit, but never have we received 100% in all areas and now we’ve got two in the one week. But just think if we could do that 100% every day with all our staff how the money would roll in. But we sometimes fall down  and this is where those customer comments are so valuable. I’m very grateful.   

It would have been so easy to fix at the time. But now we can learn from this customer comment and try to change things because of it. A lot of our customer comments are terrific but they don’t help us that much. But this is simple and detailed it can really make us lift our game. I’ve forwarded on the email to all our other bakeris so they can learn from it too.  

Tom

To whom it may concern  

Mystery shopper 01
Mystery shopper 02
Mystery shopper 03
 

Last time I was complaining about how bad service was in Perth because it was so hard to find staff. Well there was one place we went to that was the exception. Hans Sander’s  Temptations bakehouse. http://www.temptations.com.au/

  I hadn’t called into his shop for a long time. Its in the famous boat shed in Cottesloe where they built the winning yacht that won the America's Cup. It used to be a pretty dungy little bakery. But I was in there last week and Wow! I was blown away. It was unbelievable. They are doing an awesome product, mindboggling.

The staff were great. They didn’t know who I was and that I knew Hans. But they got me to try some of their product and even gave me a free loaf of bread!   I was taking a photo and the bloke who owns the building started getting real stroppy – you can’t take photos. I thought what a cranky bugger, what an attitude. But to see Hans, how he had revitalised the whole business. Temptations Bakehouse in Cottesloe you should go and see it!

Just spent a week in Perth. Pretty incredible. As everyone knows it's booming over there. I’ve read two different reports that they need 50 to 70 thousand workers over there, they actually look like getting a lot of Balinese hospitality workers, they just cant get hospitality workers.

A lot of my mates the hospitality industry, some of them have got their hours reduced because they can’t get the staff. Some businesses have got signs up saying “Sorry for our irregular hours, we have staff shortages.   We got invited out to dinner by the owners of a food place, old friends and wonderful people but when we got to their place somebody said they said “Sorry we’re closed” “But we’re meeting the owner!” They said it’s been changed to another  bar in the same complex. Had a drink there with our friends but the kitchen was closed, they had no staff.  Boy what a night. We ended up at Chinese place and they ran out of food! Two hours later we ended up with a beautiful meal and by 10.00 that night we actually got to eat. It was incredible.  

Places were shut in the peak Christmas time because they had no staff. And some places that were open, the customer service was non existent, because no one was going to get sacked because workers are so hard to find. Everyone wants to go up north and earn the big dollars. 
But some places were doing really well, and that was it, it was the culture of the business, you could see they had a great culture – great service, great product. And other places where there was no culture it was a joke. I talked to some of the owners and they said we’re not game to say anything to them, they might leave!  

What’s the lesson? Get that culture, have the people, do that little bit extra. Don’t just have workers have friends. It has to be their business. They have to have that ownership. They are going to make sure that your door is open. They need good leadership and a great culture. 

Just before Christmas I’ve been out there talking to communities that are in real trouble. And here we are in our own town in North east Victoria with headlines in the paper the other day. "The North East is going to miss out on one hundred million dollars worth of tourism because of the bushfires".

Real trouble smoke everywhere people don’t want to come here. But I’m out there giving the positive message – The best is yet to come, and in every disaster lies an opportunity but it is scary But nothing is forever, this will change. There is an opportunity to get out and help your neighbours, get out and say thankyou, get out and give people a smile, a handshake, a pat on the shoulder, a kiss, a hug.

There’s a real opportunity to connect. I really do believe the best is yet to come. Just take it a day at a time. We just have today, we may as well be happy about it and enjoy it even with the smoke and the bloody drought hanging over us. We have our families and our friends. Tell them you love them. That is the most important thing.