Are You Always Looking for an Opportunity?

Posted on May 3rd, 2023

Opportunity is defined as A good chance for progress or advancement. Merriam-Webster

The word is positive in nature, and I subscribe to looking for opportunities vs. the antithesis of this which is misfortune or bad luck. Are you looking for opportunities within your organization daily or are you hiding from them?

2023 is shaping up to be the year of opportunities. Mostly coming from those leaders or bosses that are asking you to find:

Your job is to assess your opportunities to see what your most strategic area might be to focus on for your ‘best’ opportunity. Visually this is how it might look. The biggest box in the area would be the place to start. A few ideas on how to discover your best opportunity follow in this blog post.

Opportunity-Map

Daily we help teams look at their operations with a fresh pair of eyes and recommend new programs, processes, or approaches to their operations. You can do the same thing! Take a walk outside of your own department or area. Look at how your staff, visitors, guests, or customers interact with the building and your services. What do you see as an ‘opportunity’?

We have all kinds of tools that help us find savings and revenue opportunities. One tool is the Ruck-Shockey Associates, Inc. 75 Causes of Food Cost. For those of you reading this article, click here to receive our top 10 ideas from our top 75! This will get you started in your search for savings opportunities. Likewise, we have the same document for those in the environmental services (EVS) work. So also, please click on that link and let us know which one you’d like to receive!

Staffing opportunities are the thing we are hearing about the most today. How to find and hire the best out there is the question most are asking. But, first have you looked at your staffing needs, hours of service, or positions to see if they all still fit what your operation is doing today? Then how do you find the right staff to fit the right position? Some of our clients have changed their advertising approach, moving away from those generic position postings that just say the title and ‘apply here’ to more of a fun and inviting call to action for applicants. What is your opportunity to send a new message that says come to our place we have a great thing going?!

We all want our departments and staff to shine on the service opportunity bucket. At each encounter is everyone making the most of their 10 or 30 seconds of interactions? Recently, one of our team had the opportunity to call several facility administrative offices. On the majority, the main phone number that we called and the person answering, could not direct us to the right person or number. And a lot of these facilities had the annoying self-answering recordings with 10 prompts to get to an extension. This is the first impression of your organization or department. How would you take this opportunity to create a better experience for your guests?

Go on a guest experience adventure in your own operations. What is your staff lacking to delight each visitor or guest? Also, we all know a great competitor in our area, go shopping or explore their operations, how was that experience compared to yours?

As we are all reading and seeing, technology is integrating more and more with hospitality. What are your opportunities to bring technology into your operation? Do you have the technology in place but have not fully implemented its capabilities? Many organizations just launch the basics and leave some of the more refined tools untouched. Is this your opportunity? And what are you doing to elevate services as you shift from some of the personal touches to technology solutions? Remember the more you use technology to interact with your guests the more the ‘humans’ that are still in your operation must make every encounter positive. That warm smile only a human can give vs. your AI, robots, Chatbot, electronic scanner, self-checkouts, etc. is still valued!

We hope this inspires you to find new opportunities and improves the operation for your staff, your guests, and others that interact with you. Share your most inspired opportunity with others and spread your innovations to capitalize on them!