Those of you at MIT have been seeing more of me lately. Those at other locations may be wondering where I’ve gone. I have this ambition of making MIT, the truck from which we sold our first sandwich ever, our training center. Sara, our manager there, is an amazingly gifted trainer/ developer of people, and she loves seeing folks grow.

So I’ve been working to make MIT something of a model for the rest of the company. That’s a lot of pressure on Adam, Pedro, Yessy, Randall, Sara, and the other folks who work that truck. But I’m hoping it’s fun for them as well. We’ve been working on very nuts-and-bolts type things. Making sure there is a great check-list for open and close that is being used daily. I’m a huge fan of checklists after reading The Checklist Manifesto, a really cool book. We’re getting all sorts of things fixed. Talking about cleaning standards and how to live up to them. Putting up sandwich cards to help make construction more clear. Refining roles on board the truck, so everybody knows what they should and shouldn’t be doing. We’re training in detail on coffee, talking about where our beens come from, what is different, what they taste like. Killing the line. That’s right, we’re committed to getting the line below 4 long, even at peak, and wait times sub-5 minutes, even at peak.

It’s been really fun to reconnect with all of the customers I got to know when I was running MIT. We’re approaching our 4th anniversary as a company, but I spent almost 1/2 of that time running the MIT truck. So it feels like a homecoming for me. I’ll be at this for another few weeks. In the meantime, see you at the truck!