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Excel’s Tavern

​Excel’s Tavern, a now very successful restaurant, originally began as an investment opportunity for CPS INC., an investment firm that specializes in restaurants. They took the chance to develop Excel’s Tavern into an upscale, customer oriented, friendly restaurant. Mark Jacobs was chosen to be the first general manager on January 1st 1999. Jacobs main focus was to gain media and attract new guests. However, he never focused on employee behaviour or keeping existing customers. This was the company’s downfall. Jacobs also gave no direction over purchasing items in the restaurant or staffing decisions, he left that up to his assistant general manager and executive chef. As Jacobs was rarely on the floor to observe front-line operations, he relied on his AGM and executive chef to observe the day-to-day operations and never asked for feedback. He believed on the “hands-off philosophy” and let people complete the tasks however they pleased. His style of management brought many problems to the restaurant that resulted in a declining income. The restaurant was about to go under. In order to fix all of these problems, CPS decided to hire a new general manager and give her six months to show progress. Sharon Tomay, who was born into the restaurant industry and later pursued a corporate management career, became Excel’s Tavern’s new general manager on July 1st 2001. Tomay wanted “to improve the operation through change to the organizational structure and reduce costs through an increase in employee motivation”. It is evident that Tomay successfully achieved her goal because within a couple of years the restaurant had exceptional sales and had greatly expanded, and not only through the restaurant industry, but they even ended up opening their own cooking school. Excels Tavern began selling out up to four nights a week. The overall customer satisfaction was at an all time high and the employee turnover rate was at an all time low. Tomay had a...