186: {Sassy Solo} Why Everyone Needs to Work in the Service Industry at Some Point in their Career

One thing that I feel strongly about is this: Every Single Person should be required to work in the service industry and wait tables at some point in their careers. For me, that was in my late teens and early twenties and gosh I learned so much. In today's episode, I'm breaking down my 4 major takeaways and skills that I learned that I was able to use in my corporate roles and now in entrepreneurship. 

Transcript

Caroline Pennington (00:01.688)
Today I'm popping off about why I feel very strongly about this. And I think that every single person should work in the service industry. If y'all don't know, back in the day when I was a teenager in my early 20s, I worked in the service industry. I worked at many different restaurants. I worked in several different capacities. I worked as a hostess. I worked as a waitress. I worked as a bartender. And

You learn so many life skills that translated into my corporate jobs and then now my role as an entrepreneur. And I'm gonna go through those because I think they're so important and I learned them at a young age and I'm very grateful for that too. So, number one, you learn how to show up to work on time. Because if you don't make your shift, then you don't make any money. Because if you know, you know you get a small couple dollars as a waiter for the salary, and then other than that, everything else is tips.

So if you don't show up to go to work, you ain't making any money. Number two, you learn time management. I worked at a very high-end Italian restaurant and I knew that I had to time everything perfectly so that the flow of the dinner for my customers would go the way it needed to. They needed to get their appetizer first, then their entree, then their dessert. By the way, they're drinking fine wines during the meal. That needed to go smoothly too. I needed to know my wines.

I needed to be able to make recommendations to them. And so that was all really important. Some good life skills that I learned when I was putting in the orders and whatnot. Because when you're putting in the orders and you're managing a section of, you know, five or six tables and everybody's on different timing wise, you learn really great time management skills. I also worked at a restaurant that I forget which one it was, one of the chains.

It had you had a lot of sauces that people would have. And so I would always be running back and forth trying to get people's honey mustard or ketchup. And you learn really good time management stuff too, and ways to be proactive with customers with communications too. So go ahead and ask them on the front end, and that saved me so much running back and forth. you learn about money when you work in the service industry. You learn about how to manage it, how to make it, how to

Caroline Pennington (02:19.084)
Deliver great service so that you do get that 20% on the checkout. so that you do go home and maximize your earnings. I remember too when I was waiting tables back in the day, I would always make double, if not triple, the amount of money if I worked on holidays. And what that taught me is that you can work really hard on holidays and you are gonna have a good day. It's gonna make up for things. So maybe I had a bill that month or something special I wanted to do and need to make some extra change.

I would pick up holiday shifts. so that's one thing I learned too when I was waiting tables back in the days. You learn great customer service skills, you learn great time management skills, you learn how to show up and hustle and work. Let's just start there. Okay. And then you learn how to deal with difficult people because sometimes I would have customers who were very difficult to deal with, especially when I was working at that Italian restaurant, because it was very high-end. And so there were people that would come dine would be.

Sometimes very affluent and wealthy. And whether or not that means you can be rude or not is neither here nor there. But sometimes people were rude. And so I learned how to deal with really difficult people in that moment too. And that was a really good life skill and a good takeaway moment too. So, anyways, I just want to go off and rant about this one topic. And I appreciate you listening. Thank you so much for being here. Don't forget to subscribe and share.