Exceeding Expectations

When I started working at Ryan’s Deli, I was a very young base employee who was looking to learn as much as I could so that I could be promoted into leadership. I was quickly promoted but in my time as a standard deli worker I noticed major flaws in how the deli was running greatly effecting efficiency. I was surrounded by people much older than me with many more years’ experience working at the deli, so to see a “kid” promoted to manager was pretty ground breaking to them. Since I was young and lacked the years of experience they had, they expected me to fail miserably so that one of them could take over. I knew this but it did not affect me because I knew my work ethic over theirs was the reason I deserved the position. I started to implement the changes I saw necessary, for example we were a small deli so we didn’t have a laser pricing system so we had to ring up each item by inserting the price, which were located all around the deli. I saw that each employee was spending far too much time on each customer when they could be doing other productive tasks, so I created a categorized and alphabetical list of items and their prices that were posted at convenient locations for employees. This cut down on time being spent on each single customer substantially leaving them with excess time. To utilize this excess time the employees had, I created a list of jobs that would either help create products quicker and more efficiently or that would keep the deli clean. They would be held accountable for these jobs so if they were caught standing around and their jobs were not done they would incur a penalty of some type. This system worked so efficiently that we never ran out of our homemade products and I was able to cut down on shift sizes, increasing revenue. After that, I realized customers were calling asking what was on our menu and what our hours were constantly. This cost us a great amount of time so what I did was create a website that included everything customers would like to know. I not only exceeded the unfairly low expectations set by others, I surpassed expectations that would be set for anyone in my position.

The website I created for the deli can be seen here.