The Kitchen, Part 2

I ran food trays for a couple of weeks. Glorified delivery guy.

But I'd run businesses before. And the longer I pushed that cart, the clearer it got. The kitchen was a business. Worse ingredients. Better attendance problems.

So when the head cook job opened, I trained for it. And after Easter, I took over the kitchen.

Here's what running a jail kitchen taught me about running a company.

Every day worked came off my sentence. That's the whole economy.

Which made the kitchen the most valuable real estate in the building. In the free world, people fight over the corner office. In jail, they fight over the tray line. Same instinct, different zip code.

The training was thirty days with the current cook. Watch first. Ask questions. Do it under supervision. Then it's yours.

The old me would've been impatient with that. Give me the keys, I'll figure it out. That impatience is a big part of how I ended up in that building.

And here's the part nobody expects. Day one as head cook was honestly pretty easy. Thirty days of preparation meant no surprises.

Good preparation doesn't make the hard day easy. It makes the hard day familiar.

Proverbs 27:23. "Be thou diligent to know the state of thy flocks, and look well to thy herds."

Most owners onboard people in thirty minutes. Here's the login, good luck. Then they're shocked when the ball drops in week two. Nobody showed them where the ball was.

Running a jail kitchen is running a business with every disadvantage you can think of.

Your employees are paid in time, not money. Some can't be fired, only rotated out. Your customers get one menu and zero choice. And your quality inspector is whoever yells loudest at the tray line.

The crew was mostly solid. Good men who showed up and wanted to go home as bad as I did.

And a few were lazy as hell. It's jail. People not washing their hands. People stealing food. People picking through the return trays like they'd never been fed.

You can't fire them. You can't bonus them. Every tool a normal manager reaches for is gone.

So you do what any operator does with a workforce you can't choose. You build the system to survive them.

Checklists. Written steps, not the ones in your head.

Temps. The few numbers that tell you something's wrong before somebody gets sick.

Portions counted. Same output, every time.

Eyes on the line. Somebody whose job is to notice.

The system doesn't depend on people being good. It works when they're not.

Most business systems only work when everybody's having a great day. That's not a system. That's a hope with a logo on it.

The question I ask every owner now: what happens to this process on your worst employee's worst day? If it falls apart, you don't have a people problem. You have a design problem.

The fundamentals were the same as every business I've run. Inventory matters. Waste matters. Schedules matter.

And the person who shows up consistent beats the person who shows up talented. Every single time. You can build a system around steady. You can't build anything around a mood.

Luke 16:10. "He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much."

Marcus Aurelius said it shorter: "No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such."

The thing I'm proudest of isn't a story. It's a math.

Every day I worked was a day off my sentence. I worked every day I could. While other men chose walk-offs over beard nets, I was buying my freedom one tray at a time.

Three hundred and some odd days is a mountain from the bottom. A day at a time, it's just work.

Zechariah 4:10. "For who hath despised the day of small things?"

I had. For years. The kitchen was nothing but small days. The small days got me out.

The kitchen didn't just shorten my sentence. It rebuilt something the fall had taken.

The ability to run something. To be trusted with it. To take a broken operation and make it work with whatever you've got.

Shame said I didn't deserve to run anything ever again. Guilt said: you made a mess, so go make something work. Start small. Start here.

I walked into that kitchen an inmate. I walked out of it a manager. And when I got home, I wasn't starting from zero.

I was starting from the kitchen.

Pick one process in your business or your life. Ask the kitchen question.

Does this still work on the worst day?

If not, don't blame the people. Fix the design. Write the steps down, pick the one number to check, and name the person who notices.

Episode 15 is live now. The Kitchen, Part 2. Wednesday is Episode 16, The Parents' House.

One step, one day. Grace over guilt.