I am not famous for being predictable or routine. There have been days where life flung me here and there and I went with it. When we began having children my wife told me they needed a routine for their healthy development. I complied when I could but due to an ever-changing work schedule, surprise visits by her huge family, urgent things popping up out of the ether, and life in general the routine life seemed beyond my grasp. Often I wondered if I would accomplish anything worth doing if my time was always spent trying to moderate chaos.
After all, anything worth doing requires a consistent investment in time and effort. I felt that way, but rarely could apply it in life. Until the motel.
Here, it is all about routine, and the discipline to stick to it. The consequences of not adhering to the routine do crop up. There is nothing along the lines of "It might or it might not." Consequences do happen. The grass gets longer, or dies, the paint peels and wears, the rooms disintegrate, neglecting the laundry will cause problems, delays or otherwise.
The simple truth is that some things need to happen at certain times to maximize efficiency. Let me give you a glimpse of my day, and an illustration of the effectiveness of the routine.
Following is essentially a flowchart:
8:45 AM - begin stripping rooms (removal of laundry and trash from rooms)
**some guest are not checked out at this time
- strip building 1
- put building 1 laundry in the wash
- strip building 2
- strip building 3
10:30 AM - housekeepers arrive
- coordinate with them on how many rooms are check outs, how many rooms are stays, and their expected hours for the day.
10:45 to 3:00 PM - concentrate on finishing laundry / field phone calls / regulate check-ins and coordinate maids
3:00 to 6:00 PM - wrap up laundry and complete office work
6:00 to 10:00 PM - regulate check-ins / field phone calls / schoolwork --
- summer
- watering lawns / clean up lot / mingle and care for the guests
There are, of course, dozens of things to do in-between. There are a myriad of maintenance woes, preventative and repairs, small things within the rooms that need attention, odor elimination, filling the bird feeders, shampooing carpets, tracking the switch-outs of linen and bedding, blowing the parking lot clean of debris, etc. All these jobs take a back seat to the most important elements of running a small business - customer service, product, quality/experience (in the case of the motel business), return business, and a competitive edge.
These things do not happen spontaneously. They require effort and learning, specificity, prioritization, and specialized knowledge. While nearly any situation can be related, they can be completely different from each other as well. Therefore each motel can be said to be its own creature, its own entity. It requires specific ways to run it effectively, and that can be found in the routine, which if performed correctly greatly reduces the time involved in daily prep.
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