Reference no: EM133345333

Question: Identify a managerial problem in need of a solution in this case:

You are the on-site owner of Happys, a profitable neighborhood restaurant. Your restaurant opens at 6 a.m., and closes at 10:00 p.m. seven days a week. Happys has an established clientele, a reputation for good service from the friendly and efficient staff, competitive prices, a reliable supply chain, and good food.

Your family has owned the business and its location for generations. Unlike most businesses, you do not need to worry about the landlord increasing your rent nor selling the building. Happy is a victim of its own success. You need to hire more staff for the front-end and back-end to meet customer demands while you maintain Happys' quality and reputation. Otherwise, you need to change Happys' operations. In the past, you had backlogs of candidates for future job openings. Now, you have a foreseeable major staff-shortage, and no backlog of candidates for staffing. If you do not find more staff within the next 90 days, you will need to change some aspects of the restaurant. Your busiest season starts at Day 91. The existing staff is a loyal and dedicated core of employees. Approximately 20% of them are planning on leaving in the next six months to pursue new ventures.

You celebrate their life-choices, although you know it means change. Higher than usual labor turnover is a certainty. Meanwhile, you would like to increase the staff while maintaining the same experience for customers and employees alike. You are willing to narrow your profit-margin to do that. You do not know whether you need to reduce your operations to maintain Happys' reputation, efficiency and employee-morale. Of course, you would prefer to expand services and increase profits if you can find the staff to do that. You know the restaurant business inside and out.

You got pulled into the restaurant business at an early age, and fell in love with it. You started as a dishwasher. Since then, you have done every job from the front-side to the backend. You have a knack and passion for the restaurant business. In fact, you like paperwork and book-keeping. Sometimes, you roll up your sleeves and bus tables or take customers' orders yourself or do kitchen prep. Located in a thriving and bustling mixed-use area, your location brings you nearby customers from family households, the high school, several apartment buildings, and smaller and larger commercial office buildings.

Over the years, the large commercial building has held coffee carts, although in the next 120 days a new popular franchise chain restaurant will be opening within that building. At street-level, that new franchise's employee-recruitments for the grand opening is advertised. Since the pandemic, other coffee shops and restaurants operated with severe reductions in their hours of operation and services. Some of them are going out of business and are advertising planned close-outs. That means cheap and available space for new restaurants and coffee.