you need admin docs including employee manuals and training guides

In my experience with owning two juice bars in Los Angeles I found that there were a few key documents I had to create that ended up making my life a lot easier.

You’ll want to create these documents because you don’t want to waste your time having the same conversations with people over and over again. Things like employee manuals, opening, closing and transition checklists, and employee training guides are vital to the success of your business.

The more you can automate certain processes, the more time you will have to deal with unexpected things that will always come up when owning a business. Managing your time in this way, even to create space for relaxation, is necessary on the road to owning a successful juice bar.

Opening, closing and transitions check lists

These are the routines your employees will go through all the time. When everything someone needs to do is written down as a list it makes it really easy to get that stuff done.

For opening think about everything that goes into getting the store up and running for the day. Does the drawer need to be counted? Maybe the patio furniture needs to be organized?

Transition checklists are for when there are shift changes. In order for these to go as smoothly as possible you want to have a very specific routine people can follow. Maybe the people leaving fill in the new shift with information like, “We’re working on this cleanse package and it’s half way done and here’s what we still need to finish.”

Closing checklists are important as well. Who is locking the doors? Is someone checking that all of the produce is properly refrigerated? Even if something seems like common sense to you, it should still be on the list.

Employee manual

Within this document you will put everything that a new employee should know about your business before their first day. Depending on how many employees you have, you are going to have turnover. The easier you make it to train people, the better.

This is where you put information like, when people get paid, the dress code, what happens if you don’t follow the dess code, and the menu. It’s important to include the menu so people can begin to familiarize themselves with it. It’s also important to have a standardized set of rules and treat everyone the same. All of these rules and procedures go in this document. 

Employee training guide

This is something I didn’t actually create until a few years into running my business and I wish I had done it sooner. This is a step by step guide for how one employee will train a new employee. I used a seven day training model where people were basically fully trained after their first seven days. I found that it was best to introduce people to more and more things each day and build on previous days.

Doing it this way also standardized the process so it was really obvious if either someone wasn’t trained properly or if someone simply was not capable of learning to do their job. It’s good to have accountability in this sense.

There are a host of other documents you will want to create and these are only a few examples. Things like inventory check lists and vendor price guides. I have a list of templates that you can download and work from here.

I also offer even more free document templates when you take my online course, as well as giving you a rock solid foundation for creating a successful juice bar.