ready or not: part 1, from the floor to the founding: transitioning from food service to a start-up
Introduction
Last semester, I made the (somewhat regrettable) decision to enroll in a standardized career readiness course at my university. In this class, I was told – as I had heard many times before – that experience working in the service industry would provide considerable preparation for “real” jobs a few years down the line. I took my first service job the summer after my sophomore year of high school, freshly of legal working age but otherwise entirely unprepared for those months I would spend behind the counter selling donuts at a local Dunkin’. Subsequently, I have worked six other jobs, including the one from which I am writing this currently. My time working in various positions in the food & beverage industry developed and bettered me in a number of ways, but I am not sure that I would include professional preparedness amongst them.
**Disclaimer: I speak from personal experience, much of which is potentially company-specific and may or may not reflect the experience of others – especially as it pertains to the job I am currently doing at a tiny, highly fluid start-up.Things That Did Not Translate
Some of these are admittedly more intuitive than others, but I am of the belief that all are worth including, as they fundamentally underlie many of the behavioral shifts that are necessary in the transition from one type of job to another.
Feedback Loops: It is commonplace in both realms to answer to a manager, whether it be an intermediary authority (shift manager, mid-level supervisor), a “higher-up” authority (boss, manager, owner, CEO, etc.), or both. However, it is often overlooked how exactly this “answering to” functions. In the service industry, even the best of employees – I will now take the liberty to place myself in this category for the purposes of this article – do not like their managers to see everything. Luckily for us, it would be an impossibility for them to obtain this omniscience regardless. This is because we spend the vast majority of our time working directly with customers. Customers, like online reviewers, mostly speak up when something is very wrong or exceptionally good. So if you hover in just the top 75% — and occasionally enter that upper 10-25% — it’s often indistinguishable from being an all-star. In start-up work, though, your output is directly reviewed, leaving significantly less leeway for “on-par” work.
Operational Awareness: I have often heard proprioception (awareness of your body in space, reductively) be referred to as the “sixth sense” of sorts. Well, whether you are behind a register, a host stand, a bar, a counter, or any other form of guest/worker divider – you will need to develop a seventh. That is, a proprioception in reference to others, or, what I have here called “operational awareness.” At any moment, you need to be able to account for where every person is, what they are doing, and where they will go next. At my desk, I can work for hours at a time with little to no information as to what my coworker or supervisor is working on, with remarkably insignificant influence as to my order of operations.
Procedural Guidelines (or lack thereof): What are you supposed to do when a guest wants a food order modified, a specific area, or space to seat a large party? Obviously, this depends on the company. It does not, however, depend on the person (at least not in a well-functioning company). There are policies and procedures to follow, values to prioritize, and clear directions as well as consequences for deviation. Working for GenZen, I don’t have any of these things. In some ways, this is freeing, in arguably more ways, this creates a pressure to be constantly discerning what the unspoken or even unconscious rules may be.
Task-Allocation: When a customer approaches you, they are asking you for something (whether that be explicitly or implicitly). In the absence of a customer and the absence of a manager, nobody is necessarily asking you to do anything. Of course, it would be very courteous of you to restock something, or lighten the load of a coworker, but oftentimes, if you have 10 minutes to yourself, you have 10 minutes to yourself. In other words, you are largely occupied by the needs of others, who make it known when they will require things from you. In my work with GenZen, it is not so transparent who the customer is at any given moment, much less what they would want or how exactly they would want it done – providing for much more room for both (mis)interpretation and creativity.
The Overlap Worth Noting
No matter where you are or what you are doing, something will go wrong. There will come a time (usually about a couple weeks in), where you are expected to clean up the mess – sometimes literally. This requires the ability to think quickly on your feet, assess a situation and what it may require. More importantly, though, it requires you to be accountable for the action you decide to, or not to, take. Of all the service industry takeaways, this blend of urgency and personal responsibility may be the most enduringly useful — in work and in life. I believe this is the type of thing people mean when they say that the skills you gain there will be to your benefit in a professional career.Conclusion:
Though I spent the majority of this article detailing the ways in which my roles in service decidedly differ from my role at GenZen, none of this was to in any way devalue the work myself and others have done in jobs like that. Quite the opposite, in fact. They taught me quick-thinking skills, discipline, grit, and much more. That said, the environment and the dynamics at play within those jobs is entirely unreplicable. To tell young people otherwise is a mistake. The oft-called “soft skills,” one learns from them are skills that you can pick up doing a great deal of things: being a conscientious student, a summer camper, a sibling, a volunteer, a teacher, the list goes on. The value add of these activities is similar. The transferable value of a starter job doesn’t come from it simply being ‘a job’ — wherein you are paid to perform a task. It comes from the larger effort of showing up, caring, and navigating the world thoughtfully, something you can learn in countless other ways, not just ones that involve filling out a W-2.About the author:
If you were wondering who wrote our blog today, her name is Alexandra! She has been working as a summer intern since June. She has one more month left in Ireland and is excited to enter her junior year studying Philosophy, Psychology, and Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A fun fact about her is that she loves Diet Coke & iced coffee, especially when consumed on audiobook-supported long walks. Click on our Instagram posts below to see more of her work!
