As a business owner, you probably have at least one major systematic breakdown. Chances are that you can solve it without capital or adding a new team member.

A few years ago our then 8-year-old said during an at-home meal, “Did you make this or did you buy it?” We said that we cooked it. He continues, “I’m impressed.” I realized then that he didn’t believe that we could cook to rival a restaurant meal. I was raised by a “don’t cook things from a box” mom, so I saw our homemade meals to restaurant meals ratio as a flaw in our family system.
This blog series is about solving a problem (business or personal) incrementally with the resources you have on-hand by keeping it simple and looking deeper.

Resource Assessment
The first thing I did was assess the resources we had on-hand before we began: 

• Talent. We had one amateur chef, one young yet energetic apprentice chef, one passionate kitchen manager, and one surprisingly helpful teenager.
• Skills. We had two generalist kitchenites with 20+ years experience and two novice kitchen users.
• Money. We wanted to decrease our monthly food outgo.
• Food. We had a full food pantry and a partially full freezer.
• Time. We had four able people with plenty of time in the day to contribute to kitchen duties.
• Tools. We had a well-stocked and well-tooled kitchen.

Role Definition
Since I use the StrengthsFinder 2.0 tool night and day to troubleshoot my business issues, there was no question that I’d use it to solve this home issue. The authors’ define strength as “the ability to consistently provide near perfect performance.” Talent is defined as “a natural way of thinking, feeling or behaving,” while investment means, “time spent practicing, developing your skills and building your knowledge base.” Strength is achieved by multiplying your talent by your investment.

I developed a talent-aware job mapping. I ensured each team member agreed with their job description and had enough passion for it to carry us through low spots. These conversations did include whining, but it was minimal. The titles helped.

• Chef. A deadline and task-oriented, multi-tasking and adaptable cook with skilled taste-buds, and knife and pan skills. Would rather make a concoction with spontaneity and skill than from a cookbook and a plan. The focus is delivering an on-time, hot, delicious meal on the table. The Chef does not clean or manage the kitchen. The Chef does, however, shop for food. [Hired—Dad]
• Kitchen Manager: An organized planner who revels in keeping things well-stocked, in order, clean, and nice of the eyes. The Kitchen Manager’s focus is to make sure the kitchen is ready to cook in, including meal planning, shopping lists, tool replacement, and pantry inventory. [Hired—me]
• Head Assistant: Supportive and eager-to-please assistant to the Manager and Chef; Chief dishwasher and Busboy. The focus of the Head Assistant is to be the eyes and ears for the Kitchen Manager. This person ensures our rules are followed, the table is ready, and the kitchen is ready. Willingness to learn. Must manage others with kindness. [Hired—our teenager]
• Chef Apprentice: Positive and hard working successor to the Chef; Busboy; Dishwasher; Avid foodie. Willingness to learn. Must listen well. [Hired—our youngest]

Part II: Invest in your strengths by building on your knowledge, practices, and skills

Knowledge
The next step in the process was to identify the gaps in knowledge and close them.

• The menu. What would we all eat together? Eating in a place where each person orders separately is completely different than all agreeing on a meal. So, I reassessed our commonalities. What recipes work? We had to make sure the recipes would work in 30 minutes or less on work days or rely on the crockpot. Weekends could take a bit longer.
• Logistics. How many sit-down meals did we want per week? We settled on about 3-5 meals a week. What time do we want to eat? Homemade meals don’t go off well by throwing curves at the timeline. We ended up with a 6:30p mealtime when no activities got in the way.
• Cooking. What did we want our kids to learn? Were there new styles of cooking we wanted to learn?  I wanted the kids to learn more about keeping the kitchen cook-ready; how to independently navigate the kitchen and set a table. The Chef wanted them to learn how to be a true-blue sous chef—chopping, cleaning, shredding, and prepping. We decided that we wanted to learn more about vegetarian cooking and introduce more vegetables to our kids. We wanted our kids to respond to new kinds of food with eager eyes.

Practices
I thought we were just being silly by not cooking very much. I quickly saw how many curves dinnertime throws at busy families. As the years drifted by we had forgotten about some that we once did and there were some we never did well. Each time we ate out, we analyzed it and added another practice to our list. Here are a few practices we changed:

• Change our kneejerk response to “I’m too tired to cook.” If we were too tired to cook, we got used to eating something quick like a sandwich. Our dinner standards had to be flexible to get through this phase.
• Be hungry at dinnertime. We needed to remember to stop eating 1-2 hours before our planned meal. Chefs don’t like it when their eaters are full when they sit down to eat.
• Plan and shop every week. We needed to hash out a meal plan before the week got away from us. Each time we didn’t do this, we ended up with a kitchen that lacked something. When the kitchen lacked a plan or an ingredient, we called for take-out.
• Come to the table. We’d gotten slack in the “I’ll be there in just a minute” routine. Each time this happened, our Chef got one day closer to quitting the job altogether. Chefs spend a lot of effort making sure all the courses are hot at the same time. We learned to come to the table when the “dinner bell chimed”.
• Thaw it out. It doesn’t matter if you had chicken on the menu and in the freezer, if it’s not thawed it throws a wrench in it.

Skills
I was raised eating seven dinners at home and watching my mom cook each one. I was under the false impression that it’s really just a simple duty. I didn’t put much thought to how many skills go into meal prep. And of course, there is always room for improvement. If we wanted to teach our kids how to do this well in their adult lives, we needed to get on it and start teaching. Here are a few skills we expanded:

• Cleaning. We needed to keep the kitchen in a cooking ready state (dishes done; counters tidy). We relied on our two young Dishwashers to make this happen for us. It took two courses—Dish Put Away 101 and Dishwasher Loading 101—to master this skill. Their ownership of this job freed up our time for cooking, shopping, and planning.
• Blended scheduling. I learned how to coordinate the meal plan with our activity schedule. I had to figure out some family calendar issues separate from our meal plan to refine this piece. When I didn’t get it synced, people were confused. It sounds like a no-brainer, but it took some time to smooth. I was surprised at how the family got attached to the combination weekly meal plan and schedule that I posted on the fridge.
• New recipes. Homemade meals can be tough to be creative about. It’s a lot of work just cook and clean. It adds that much more to find and figure out how to make a new something. I had to find and plan meals that the Chef had interest in preparing, would have time to prepare, and most of us would enjoy. This is by far the most challenging part of my job, and I’m far from mastering it.
• Recipe organizing. I know. I’m an organizer so my recipes must be perfectly in place, right? Nope. I had a few systems going and needed to gather them altogether, decide on one system, so the recipes could be at my fingertips.

Part III: A random sampling from our year of cooking more.

First things first: articulate your purpose. Why does the team want to pull together? In our case, our purpose had many prongs: “Spend less, spend more time together, teach our kids an essential life skill, and eat better.” We reinforced this time and again during the year, until it became part of our fabric.

Start small. Rather than planning three courses, seven days a week, we started small and easy. We were happy with a few meals at home in the beginning and grew our expectations as we could handle the shift in our daily practices. In the beginning, we did much more meal assembly than cooking. At the start, our meals didn’t rely on recipes and ingredients numbered less than 10.

Tie consequence to task. Our two Dishwashers know that if the dishes chore doesn’t get done before the Chef needs to cook; he may decide not to provide a nice meal that night. I’ve told them they’ll prepare their own dinner meal if that happens.

Refine regularly. Our culture embraces fluidity so staying in one mode for too long won’t work for most teams. One night the Manager arrived home late. The Chef couldn’t find some of the ingredients that the Manager had stashed (in a very organized yet hidden spot). Result: Pizza Hut. After that, we agreed that the Manager would pull out the ingredients from their hiding spots as well as the recipe in the morning, text him with missing ingredients, so the Chef could get the meal started regardless of the Manger’s schedule. Bottomline: there just really isn’t a stopping point for refinements in most modern teams, so be nimble.

Connect habit to motivator. When the kids began the whining: “Why can’t we go to a restaurant?”; we did the math with. “If we hadn’t bought this $75 meal, we could’ve bought that video game you want so bad.” Eventually if one of the parents mentioned having dinner at a restaurant, it was the kids that said, “I’d rather not spend the money on that.” Their response usually stopped us cold and reminded us of our purpose.

Turn into conflict not away from it. Any system that involves humans—which is nearly all of them—will have conflict. Learning to navigate your team through it is a skill worth the effort. For example, the Chef has lots of rules that include things like elbows, reaching, and napkins. The rest of us felt constrained by all those rules. This rub created lodes of conflict. After some painful meal times and heated discussions, we figured out we needed time to learn the rulebook—so we asked the Chef to be patient as we worked in the new rules.

Partner strengths. It’s important to look for weak spots and build support around them. One I noticed was the crazy, last minute effort our Chef gives to put three warm courses on the table. We put in place a rotating assistant to be in the kitchen with him to set tables, provide company, ensure eaters arrive, find the tools and fetch ingredients. This shift gave our Chef more enjoyment from the prep and eased us into the meal.

Results
The better part of a year, gads of refinements, and plenty of conflicts later, we have a working system with four peaceful and full souls. We are enjoying many meals that include lots of vegetables each week as a family. We have less money going out, more time together, and better food for us using what we have in our cupboard. We couldn’t be happier.