People First
Throughout Juliet + Company operations, businesses rely on a system of staff empowerment called Open Book Management.
Open Book Management is:
A philosophy and management strategy of involving every employee in making a company more successful by sharing financial and operational information, sharing responsibility for its challenges and success, and giving active participants a stake in the outcome.
It involves five basic practices:
- Training employees to become business-literate so they can understand financial statements.
- Empowering them to use that information in creating and implementing controlling, revenue-generating, and quality and service improving initiatives.
- Trusting people with decision-making, projects, and problem-solving.
- Setting financial and operational goals collectively as a team – having and paying attention to a measurable annual plan.
- Sharing the rewards of the company’s success when the plan is fulfilled.
Through Open Book Strategy we empower our staff to learn and develop skills beyond their basic job functions, gaining a greater overall understanding of how a food service business, or other business, is run, managed, grown, and iterated toward sustainability and long term success. Based on our collective success, the entire team is incentivized through profit sharing.
Our programs are inspired in part by recent initiatives by acclaimed restaurateur Danny Meyer, with whom we shared the pages of Entrepreneur Magazine as well as Ari Weinzweig and Zingerman’s.
Although inspired by these course charting individuals, Juliet + Company remains singular throughout its restaurant operations in using these principles to simultaneously challenge, empower, and mentor their staff toward meaningful career growth while also to eliminating tipping and the alternative minimum wage from their hospitality experience; creating better guest experiences and guaranteeing their staff good, dependable wages, with plenty of room for incentives based on service and performance.
Juliet is proud to claim a well paid, well respected, well trained, and well tenured staff of goal and mission aligned individuals (unheard of in the restaurant industry) to go along with a profitable and award winning business based on community engagement, creative storytelling and cuisine, and exceptional service experiences.
These practices of personal empowerment lead directly to career oriented thinking within the restaurants, regular promotion, and true preparation for professional opportunities within the larger restaurant industry.
In creative pursuits, the Juliet + Company programs make it possible to practice and learn the crafts of writing, journalism, story production, and other artistic, as well as design oriented pursuits. Through the work in the restaurants, and in various independent publishing and performance projects, staff and participants are given the resources and responsibility to build sustainable, financial and personal, models to grow in their work.
Juliet + Company founders, Katrina Jazayeri and Joshua Lewin, have been regularly recognized, through traditional and less traditional outlets for the importance and effectiveness of these ideas.
Katrina Jazayeri: A Force for Bringing Economic Stability to the Restaurant Industry
We love eating at Juliet; unlike many restaurants, we'd love working there too.
If you are interested in hearing more about the employment or business practices employed by Juliet + Company, please be in touch.