Sticky Fingers, Bitter Lessons
The new year began with a rude awakening.
While most were ringing in January with optimism and champagne, we were dealing with theft — and the accompanying cocktail of disappointment, betrayal, panic and the very sapping task of reshuffling rosters and rehiring staff. The weeks that followed left us drained, and at times, quietly defeated — the exact opposite of what a new year is supposed to usher in.
We kept the doors open on grit alone. Thankfully, some robust systems were already in place, allowing us to strip down the menu, tighten workflows and still keep the beers flowing — even with a malnourished workforce behind the bar.
If there’s a takeaway worth sharing, it’s this: the best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour. In hindsight, the employees involved had prior patterns of breached trust. And perhaps this one’s on us — was it optimism, or naïveté, to believe people will change?
So we’ll leave you with a few questions:
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Where do you draw the line between giving second chances and protecting your business?
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Do you trust by default — or something people have to keep earning, repeatedly? Innocent till proven guilty, or guilty till proven guilty?
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When you’ve invested so much time and care into building teams, how do you know when those efforts are still serving the business — and when they’re quietly pulling you away from it?
No neat conclusions here. Just lessons earned the hard way.