This is the complete transcript of Restaurant Theft: 3 in 4 Employees Admit It — How I Steal From You, RTG Ep. 363. Chloe Rachel Howard and Jauna Werner are the co-authors of How I Steal From You: Theft Within the Hospitality Industry.
Episode summary
Chloe Rachel Howard’s family opened a restaurant in 1945 and ran it for almost 60 years. It closed entirely because of internal theft. She went on to corporate restaurants and then to selling point of sale alongside her father, and spent years watching operators lose money to a problem nobody would name out loud. Her co-author Jauna Werner is a business transformation and optimization specialist whose background runs from semiconductor manufacturing through healthcare into hospitality — and who got her first grounding in process discipline working quick service.
Together they wrote the book that has the uncomfortable conversation on the operator’s behalf. In this episode they lay out the scale — roughly $6 billion a year in the United States, three out of four hospitality employees admitting to theft, and 83% of thieves sitting among the most trusted people on the team — and then get specific: product pinchers, the chef at the Bellagio who strapped lobsters to his legs, ghost employees, rogue CPAs, the sweetheart comp, and the accidental theft that starts when one bartender treats Red Bull as a shift drink. They cover the IRS write-off for employee beverages that almost no operator uses, customer-side scams from the Wendy’s chili finger to organized drive-by ADA lawsuits, and close with the three lowest-cost defenses: awareness and signage, anonymous tip reporting, and becoming an unpredictable owner.
Jump to a section
- Meet Chloe Rachel Howard and Jauna Werner
- The Family Restaurant That Theft Closed
- Why a Book, and Why Now
- Why Process Is a Theft Control, Not Just a Quality One
- Three Out of Four, and the 83% Nobody Expects
- The Product Pincher and the Bellagio Lobsters
- The Sweetheart and the Accidental Thief
- The Employee Beverage Write-Off Almost Nobody Uses
- Ghost Employees, Rogue CPAs and the Wendy’s Finger
- Drive-By ADA Lawsuits
- Awareness, Signage and Anonymous Reporting
- Become an Unpredictable Owner
- Where to Find the Book and the Courses
Meet Chloe Rachel Howard and Jauna Werner (0:00)
Jeremy Julian: Welcome back to the Restaurant Technology Guys Podcast. I thank everyone out there for joining us. My family makes fun of me when they listen to me record these things — I know you guys have got lots of choices. So thank you for hanging out this week. Today we are joined by some special guests, and it’s kind of fun because I’ve known these two ladies through different means, but they’ve stepped out into a new realm and a place that I’m really excited to share with our listeners. Because what they’re trying to solve for is something that every restaurateur, at some point, if you stay in it long enough, has struggled with. So Chloe, why don’t you introduce yourself real quick, share who your business partner is, and then we’ll talk about the brand that you guys are building.
Chloe Rachel Howard: Thanks, Jeremy, and thanks for having us on today. My name is Chloe Rachel Howard. I’m the co-author of How I Steal From You: Theft Within the Hospitality Industry. And I am joined by my amazing, dynamic, brilliant partner, Jauna Werner, business transformation expert and co-author of the book.
Jeremy Julian: Awesome. Jauna, why don’t you introduce yourself? Talk a little bit about your background, and then we’ll make Chloe talk about herself a little bit, because I know how much she loves that as well.
Jauna Werner: Thanks, Jeremy. So as Chloe said, I do business transformation, but to me it’s really optimization. I’m an optimization geek. Processes, people, technology — how it can all get better, with a real focus on people first and having technology and processes that support people. My background is heavily in that, from industries as diverse as semiconductor through healthcare all the way into hospitality.
The Family Restaurant That Theft Closed (1:47)
Jeremy Julian: I love it. Chloe, why don’t you talk a little bit about your background? Because it’s certainly part and parcel to why you’re so passionate about solving this problem for people.
Chloe Rachel Howard: Sure. I grew up in the restaurant business. My family started a restaurant in 1945. We were in business for almost 60 years. And I really thought that that would be my career, but we went out of business due entirely to internal theft. And so I navigated into some corporate restaurant work for a period of time, and then went to work with my dad selling point of sale to bars and restaurants. Helped a lot of bars and restaurants in my career.
Chloe Rachel Howard: It’s just something I’m very passionate about. And so when it was time to leave corporate America and do that final amazing thing in my career, it’s like, what is it going to be? Hey, let’s really make an impact. And so Jauna and I had worked together at a previous company, and I felt like she had all of these gifts I didn’t have, and I had all these gifts that she didn’t have. And if we just joined forces, we could make some magic in a bottle. And that’s really what we’re doing now. We’re having a blast doing it, and we’re making a positive impact, and it feels good.
Jeremy Julian: I love it. I know you and I have talked offline about some of the restaurants that you’ve helped. I got the privilege of listening to you speak most recently at the RSPA event, talking about how impactful theft had been even on your own personal journey. I love people that go and solve a problem or scratch an itch that they had in their own life, because out of some of that pain, hopefully it turns into something where you’re serving the community and helping them be in a better place.
Why a Book, and Why Now (3:31)
Jeremy Julian: So you guys wrote a book and have a media brand, How I Steal From You. I’ve got the book sitting here on my desk. I picked it up this weekend and spent a little bit of time with it — very, very approachable. But talk to me a little bit about the journey, Chloe. Why a book? Why not just start a podcast? Who reads anymore? We’re in 2026. Who wants to go pick up a book — as she’s sitting in a library with two hundred and fifty books behind her and I’ve got my four hundred books over here on my right. Tell me why it started with the book.
Chloe Rachel Howard: Sure. So back in the day when I was on the streets selling, I found that the main reason why bars and restaurants needed a point of sale system was because they needed control of their money. And most of them — pretty much all of them — at some point or another were encountering an issue with internal theft. But that topic is almost unapproachable.
Chloe Rachel Howard: As a consultant, if you start to talk about it, you almost become the enemy, because you’re insulting the restaurateur’s ability to hire and judge character. Oftentimes in mom and pop restaurants, their key employees are family members. And so to suggest that there’s a problem with theft is saying, hey, your sister’s a thief. It’s a very uncomfortable conversation.
Chloe Rachel Howard: So when I was on the street selling, I used to give away a book called How to Burn Down the House. It came out in 2004. And at the time when it was written, it was very powerful, because it was having that difficult conversation for me. It wasn’t like, hey, don’t shoot the messenger — this is what’s happening. And over the years — it’s been over 20 years since that book was written — nothing big has really tackled all of the complex issues facing these bar and restaurant owners today. There is no piece out there that’s really covering everything from not just internal theft, but customer theft, vendor theft, the risk of a data breach. All of those things are all-encompassing theft issues, and it’s a six billion dollar issue in the United States.
Chloe Rachel Howard: So it was kind of my tribute to the point of sale industry, to be able to equip them with a tool like this to have these difficult conversations, and to talk about the elephant in the room without them being the bad guy to the bar or restaurant owner. So it has that conversation for them, in a sense.
Jeremy Julian: You threw out some crazy statistics, and I know we’ll get to them throughout the rest of the show, of how prevalent it is. It kind of blew me away. But then when I think back about my own journey — I think we all have recency bias, and it’s like, no, no, no, that’s not that big of a deal. But at the end of the day, there are a lot more ways that people are stealing from you, and a lot of opportunities that it might not look like overt theft. Nobody’s taking hundred dollar bills out of the cash drawer. I mean, in some places they are. But most of the time it’s not about that. It’s all of these little things.
Why Process Is a Theft Control, Not Just a Quality One (7:16)
Jeremy Julian: Jauna, talk to me a little bit about the background of process automation and some of these things that you’ve done. Why restaurants? Why did restaurants strike you as such an opportunity to dig in?
Jauna Werner: Yeah. So, like a lot of people in the US, my first jobs were in restaurants. And one of the things that struck me when Chloe reached out to me about hospitality was — if you’re working for quick service, like I’m a proud Taco Bell alumni, they’re very specific on process. I mention it in the book. When you’re on the line, it’s this hand grabs lettuce, this hand grabs cheese. Very specific on process. So you could see I got my introduction to being a process geek in a quick service restaurant.
Jauna Werner: But if you go to the mom and pop restaurants, which I also worked at, they had very little process. The training was they partner you up with somebody else, and it was very much left to chance. And one of the things that you start looking at as business owners — process can take a lot of time and it’s tedious. Most people do not have fun writing a process.
Jeremy Julian: Nonetheless managing the process once you’ve written it down, right?
Jauna Werner: I’m a process geek and I don’t like it either, so I totally get it. But it’s this big business risk, especially for small to mid-sized businesses. Because first of all, it’s a risk to the service level. It’s a risk to food quality. But it’s also a risk to theft. Because if you don’t have written down what you’re doing — and what we found in our interviews and surveys is it’s actually a risk that you fire thieves and then you’re getting taken in for unemployment, because you didn’t have procedures around how to fire somebody for theft once you found it.
Jauna Werner: So we really tried to give in the book — if you notice, we do a lot of checklists at the end of each chapter. Process can be as simple as a checklist. One pager, here’s your checklist, here you go. It’s easy to do, easy to follow. Trying to give restaurateurs this idea of, you need process, but it doesn’t have to be onerous. It doesn’t have to be boring. It can be as simple as checklists that you’re doing for yourself and your employees. Really trying to scale down process to something actionable, so they can protect themselves — and it doesn’t have to be fifteen SOPs in a binder in the very back.
Jeremy Julian: Yeah, and I would actually warn against that. I think it needs to be built into the workflow. In order to continue to scale and grow, you’ve got to have stuff in place that’s repeatable. As much as we might pick on the fast food industry, they’ve helped to scale beyond where they are because of these processes. If anybody’s ever watched the Ray Kroc movie, it’s all about that process to be able to grow. Taco Bell’s another example. And we’ve all been in the opposite. I’ve got an 18-year-old son who was working at a well-known thousand-unit fast food brand, and they had very little process — or they did and nobody followed them.
Three Out of Four, and the 83% Nobody Expects (10:17)
Jeremy Julian: Chloe, how big is the problem that you guys are solving for? I was blown away with not only the impact but just how big it is. The restaurant industry, second only to the government, employs that amount of people. So it has some of the largest impacts in the country. How big is the problem?
Chloe Rachel Howard: It’s a six billion dollar a year problem in the United States, according to Forbes. And just to break that down in a granular way for you — the data shows three out of four hospitality employees admit to stealing from their employer.
Jeremy Julian: Three out of four. Three out of four.
Chloe Rachel Howard: Three out of four. And out of that seventy-five percent, eighty-three percent of the thieves are the most trusted people on the team. So the bulk majority of your thieves are the people you trust the most, you count on the most. They are the most helpful, eager to be right hand man — oftentimes relatives, business partners, your most trusted vendors. And we were shocked, when Jauna and I were doing the research, at the amount of CPAs that were stealing from their hospitality clients. It was disgusting.
Chloe Rachel Howard: Because we need bars and restaurants. That’s where we celebrate everything, right? The anniversaries, the birthdays, the family get-togethers, the first date, friends reuniting. Restaurants are at the heart of all of it. And these businesses, many of them are mom and pop businesses — this is their dream. They’ve spent their whole life working and plotting and planning to one day realize this dream. And they just want to create an amazing place for people to gather and have memorable experiences. They view their employees as family even if they’re not related to them.
Chloe Rachel Howard: So it’s gross what is happening to these businesses, and it’s a tough conversation. It doesn’t make them foolish, it doesn’t make them stupid. It’s just human nature. Twenty percent of people will never steal from you. Twenty percent will always steal from you. And sixty percent will steal if you give them the opportunity.
The Product Pincher and the Bellagio Lobsters (12:50)
Jeremy Julian: I’d love for you to define what stealing even looks like. I’ve had the privilege of working 30 years in this space, so I’ve watched people get brought in where we were brought in as the point of sale vendor to catch somebody. They used to drive a Toyota Corolla. One day they rolled up in an S-Class Mercedes, and they were a cashier at a deli in LA. And I was there when the police came in and put handcuffs on the person, because they had stolen six figures. And they were one of the most trusted employees. There’s also my favorite pizza restaurant in Orange County — the guy’s business partner, somebody he’d known since high school, was stealing from him and almost bankrupted him. Ultimately he made it back. But those are two real live examples. Chloe, what’s your favorite one to dig into, or the one that you see most often?
Chloe Rachel Howard: Gosh, that’s a tough question, Jeremy, because there are so many holy smokes situations that we ran into. One of my favorite stories from the book that just blew my mind was the chef at the Bellagio. I mean, this dude is working in the Bellagio. We have all seen Ocean’s Eleven and we understand the level of security that an operation like this has. And this dude strapped lobsters to his legs with medical bandages to smuggle them out the back door.
Chloe Rachel Howard: So I think we see a lot of that. We call that a product pincher — somebody who’s actually taking large amounts of product out of the restaurant. And they could do it in a number of ways. They put it on their body, they put it in a bag, they shove it by the dumpster, they take it out in go boxes. There’s a tremendous amount of ways that people steal product, and it’s a very, very common thing in the hospitality industry.
Jeremy Julian: Let me dig in a little bit. This was a pretty sophisticated guy that’s bringing in medical equipment to take these lobsters out. But it happens even in my waste log — they’ll put it on the waste log so that it’s tracked, but at the end of the day it went out the back door. They won’t receive the entire case of things in the back door, and it shows up on the invoice, and then they go to do it and it’s like, it never showed up, we must call US Foods. What are you guys finding in these circumstances? What do I need a dozen lobsters every week for out the back door?
Chloe Rachel Howard: Well, I think this guy might have just been taking them home to have a nice seafood feast. But there was a chef — and this was featured on one of the main restaurant shows, we write about it in our book — this dude was using the product at the restaurant where he worked to provide for a catering business he owned on the side. And he was stealing time too. So while he’s at the restaurant where he’s working, he is on their clock, prepping their food to send out the back door for a catering gig. People are bold.
Chloe Rachel Howard: In all of these instances, it’s like, well, how do we combat this? And I think the number one way that you can combat this is to provide a way for employees to report things that they witness anonymously. If they cannot report it anonymously, they won’t do it — because when eighty-three percent of the thieves are the most trusted people on the staff, they don’t want retaliation. They don’t want them to know that they tattled. So they just won’t tell. But it is almost impossible for a thief to navigate around on a consistent basis doing their thievery and not be witnessed by a colleague.
The Sweetheart and the Accidental Thief (18:04)
Jeremy Julian: Jauna, what’s your favorite thing that you guys found outside of the product pincher?
Jauna Werner: I’m going to take the “I don’t think I’m stealing but I’m stealing” kind of stuff. So one of the chapters is called The Sweetheart. This is the people whose friends come in and they comp them an appetizer, or they have a big table and they’ll comp some drinks or some appetizers to get a bigger tip. And their rationalization is, well, my friends came in just to see me, so if I’m comping them an app or something, it’s all good. So I think you see a lot of that.
Jauna Werner: The other thing I found really interesting is what I’m calling kind of the accidental thievery. Things like — a lot of restaurants will give you free sodas or free coffee on your shift, but a lot of the younger generation is drinking a lot of energy drinks. So they’ll go grab a Red Bull from behind the bar. And in their mind, that’s just their soda, that’s just like their coffee. But from a cost perspective, that’s a very different thing.
Jauna Werner: In fact, we came across one story where an owner was seeing such a problem with Red Bulls disappearing that he carried two different sizes — one behind the bar and one in a vending machine in the back for employees — so he could see if somebody was taking from the bar, based on the size of the Red Bull. But from an employee’s perspective, they’re like, well, if coffee’s fine, a Red Bull’s fine, because I don’t drink coffee.
Jauna Werner: So there’s a lot of that bleed-out where people are not trying to steal. They’re new to the business and they see the bartender that’s been here for two years crack open a Red Bull, and so then they just assume Red Bulls are fair game. So there is a lot of stealing that’s just unintentional, because rules aren’t clear and it’s not caught. It can go on for a long time and become the norm. So if somebody’s doing that, you have to catch it and correct it fast, or all of a sudden every staff member thinks Red Bull’s fair game.
Jeremy Julian: It’s ironic — my father started this, and now I am one of those people. When I’ll get a receipt at a restaurant and there are four people at the table, and I know that we ordered a nice tea and a soda and they’re not on the receipt because they were self-serve, I’ll say, there’s something wrong with this receipt. Well, what’s wrong with the receipt, sir? So I’m going to hand it back to you — you go figure out what’s wrong with the receipt. Because I’m not going to steal the soda and the iced tea from that restaurant.
Jeremy Julian: And it’s amazing how few of them even recognize it. Every once in a while: I’m so sorry, I forgot to bring these up. And it’s like, did you really do that on accident? Did you genuinely forget, or were you hoping that I wouldn’t notice and give you an extra two or three bucks? That’s not fair to the restaurant owner. I typically tip based on the gross amount of the check, not based on looking at which items you sold me. So at the end of the day, you’re stealing from the restaurant.
The Employee Beverage Write-Off Almost Nobody Uses (21:30)
Jeremy Julian: Chloe, you said something else in your speech — there are things restaurants can do in some of these employee benefits that they can also benefit from. Tax benefits from being able to give away these drinks that Jauna just talked about. Can you guys riff on that for a couple of minutes? Because quite honestly, I very rarely see this being something that restaurateurs are utilizing.
Chloe Rachel Howard: Sure. So in all of the restaurants where I’ve ever worked, you get soda while you’re working, you get coffee. You can drink a beverage while you’re working — it would be cruel not to let you do that. And they’re not charging you for it. They might charge you for your meal, an employee discount rate, but they’re not going to charge you for the beverage. However, most restaurants now are charging anywhere from three to four dollars for a Coke or a tea or a coffee.
Jeremy Julian: Yeah, to the consumers.
Chloe Rachel Howard: A large portion of that is profit. But the concept here is very simple. You open a check at the beginning of the day as a manager, and every time an employee — I mean, there are a couple of ways you could do it, Jeremy, you’re a POS guy, so you probably would write a macro button on the sign-on screen and just have it automatically bring up a beverage and prompt for the employee’s name. But you keep this check going all day. So every cook, every server, every host, every bus person, every bartender, everyone on the floor throughout the entire day rings up their drink. At the end of the day, you comp it. You get to write that off.
Chloe Rachel Howard: And I checked yesterday — I was creating a social media piece for this very topic, and I was like, let’s make sure the IRS rule is still the same. It is. For bars and restaurants, and they’re the only real business in the US that can write this off. They can write off the expense of employee beverages consumed while they are on the clock. So do the math. It’s huge.
Jeremy Julian: Yeah, even if I do it at half of what the retail cost is, and it’s 15 drinks a day, that’s a huge benefit that I hadn’t even considered. Yes, it’s a little bit tedious. Yes, you’ve got to build a process, you’ve got to track it a little bit. But it’s tens of thousands of dollars if you’re a really big restaurant with lots of employees. And even a small restaurant, it’s a huge piece.
Ghost Employees, Rogue CPAs and the Wendy’s Finger (24:44)
Jeremy Julian: I’m going to throw out to both of you — what’s the most unique thing that you guys saw in your research that you’re like, I never would have thought this would be something that would come up? Jauna, I’ll turn it to you first.
Jauna Werner: Yeah, I’m going to talk about one where a CPA was using the EIN and the company accounts. So this restaurateur had their bookkeeper slash CPA doing their day-to-day bookkeeping, and that person basically used that business information to go buy electronic equipment on the company. And they had a friend on the side at the vendor that was selling the electronics, to resell. So they were using their access to bank accounts and EIN numbers to basically funnel an electronics resale business through the restaurant.
Jeremy Julian: That’s insane. And now they’ve got tax implications and so many different things. How about you, Chloe? What’s the most unique and interesting story that keeps you up at night — outside of strapping lobsters to your legs, because that’s weird.
Chloe Rachel Howard: I’m going to throw a couple at you, because you can’t ask me to just pick one, Jeremy. I think repeatedly we talked about how people, whether it was a CPA or a manager, created ghost employees. They literally created fake employees and would clock them in and out and then funnel the money over to their own bank accounts. This was a pretty big scam and it happened at quite a lot of the restaurants that we found.
Chloe Rachel Howard: But I would say the one that was just like, man — the finger. So okay, there was this Wendy’s, and I’m sure you guys remember back in the early 2000s there was a Wendy’s in California and they had a finger in the chili. Do you remember that?
Jeremy Julian: I do.
Chloe Rachel Howard: So we interviewed the director of operations for that franchise, and we found that it was a shady customer that did this. We have a whole chapter on things that shady customers do. This customer acquired the finger from her husband’s coworker, took it home, cooked it, went to the Wendy’s, popped it in the chili, and was trying to say, look, I found a finger in my chili, and get millions of dollars. Even though Wendy’s wasn’t responsible for this, it did so much brand damage to them — over $20 million in brand damage. Just insane, the lengths that some customers would go to to extract money from a bar or restaurant.
Drive-By ADA Lawsuits (27:59)
Jauna Werner: This was happening in Florida, and I saw it in the California Restaurant Association newsletter as well. This is where a customer comes in and basically audits a restaurant, kind of on the sly, for Americans with Disabilities Act compliance. And then they file a lawsuit.
Jauna Werner: There is an outfit in Florida that was going around. And we’re clear in the book — ADA is a wonderful thing, and you as a business owner should be ADA compliant. But these people are not saying, hey, I don’t know if you noticed, but you guys aren’t compliant, you should go fix the bathroom. They’re specifically looking for where they can do frivolous lawsuits. And it’s a pretty common scam. This one particular person was working their way through the Port Orange and Daytona Beach area and had hundreds of frivolous lawsuits. And just in the last few months, the California Restaurant Association was talking about a similar ring doing similar things in California.
Jauna Werner: So the kind of folks that are looking for ways to sue small business owners are really big things. Again, surveillance is your friend. And I think restaurateurs think a lot about food safety and those types of regulations, but also highlighting that there’s other exposure that may give somebody a door to come in and sue you in a frivolous lawsuit.
Jeremy Julian: The amazing part to me is to hear you guys say that sometimes these people are getting called out by their own team members, or they’re in collusion with people that are already working there. And this is the part that’s so baffling to me, because as you’ve both said, people treat these employees and team members like family. So the fact that the family is out to get them is really, really hard.
Awareness, Signage and Anonymous Reporting (30:01)
Jeremy Julian: The thing that I heard you say early, Chloe, is the whole idea of having a way to report these challenges in a non-threatening way. Talk to me a little bit about the power of that, and what are the things that you guys are encouraging people to start to think about and look at? Because there are a lot of people out there like, my gosh, I don’t have any more time for anything I’ve got going on. So what are the first or second steps — the 80-20 rule? You probably have two or three things happening within your brand that can solve 80% of the problem.
Chloe Rachel Howard: I totally think the first thing that should happen is education. Awareness is your first line of defense. If you don’t know the scams and you don’t know the supervillains that are trying to take you down, you can’t protect yourself against them. So with awareness being the first line of defense, I would take a course on it — we’ve created one for you. I would read a book. I would learn the scams.
Chloe Rachel Howard: And then making your staff aware that you’re aware. So when these career criminals walk in the door and they’re going through the kitchen, they can look up on the wall and see a sign that says, hey, I know all your scams. I don’t tolerate it. But if you see it and you report it, I’ll reward it. So there’s an aha moment that happens not only with employees that come in and see that sign, but shady vendors too. We have a whole chapter on villainous vendors and the terrible things that they do to the bars and restaurants that they work with, oftentimes colluding with a manager or a member of the staff to pull off their heists.
Chloe Rachel Howard: So a deterrent with signage is great. Those are the first two things. I’d educate yourself, and I’d make sure everybody understands you have a zero tolerance for this kind of behavior. And you’re going to weaponize your staff — the 20% that are never going to steal are going to show everybody. And then I think you have to control opportunity. And you do that through technology.
Let the Technology Do the Heavy Lift (33:04)
Jeremy Julian: They do put point of sale systems in, but oftentimes they’re not even looking at the reports. I have people that don’t even run the reports. They don’t even know what they should have sold. It’s just, is there enough money in the bank to make payroll next week? Then we’re good to go.
Chloe Rachel Howard: They don’t get into business because they want to be undercover cops. They get into business because they want to entertain guests and they want to cook and they want to be a part of those warm, fuzzy experiences that you have in restaurants. So don’t try to become something that you don’t want to be. Find the technology and put it in place to do that work for you.
Chloe Rachel Howard: We have a lot of affiliate partners that we’ve pre-vetted for our bar and restaurant clientele, as well as for the point of sale dealers that we work with, that provide technology that does the heavy lift. You know how many people put surveillance in place but either they don’t monitor it or they don’t keep the recording? So what good is it? It’s not.
Chloe Rachel Howard: So I highly recommend using a component that will tie the surveillance and the point of sale together and produce actionable instances of theft for the owner operator to move on. That way they can focus on what they enjoy doing and their technology is doing that heavy lift — and putting other things in place like the anonymous tip reporting. This is how you combat this problem. But awareness is the first step. If you aren’t aware of all of it, you’re screwed.
Become an Unpredictable Owner (35:02)
Jeremy Julian: Jauna, I’d love for you to speak straight to the heart of that owner out there listening who’s saying, they don’t know what they’re talking about. My sister runs the cashier, my brother runs the bar. This is not this big of a problem in my business.
Jauna Werner: Yeah, this is what I would encourage them to do, and what I would encourage everybody to do to prevent theft as a first step. Become unpredictable as an owner, of when you pop in for close or cash register. If they can’t predict when you’re suddenly going to pop in and be like, you ready to cash out the register? Here, I’ll help you with that. Hey, I see I have a delivery today — I’ll help you check it in. Or an hour after they check it in: hey, let’s just go do a quick inventory check.
Jauna Werner: It’ll tell you two things. It’ll tell you if there’s theft. Sometimes there are just process gaps. But if your staff — including those trusted people who may or may not be taking advantage — if you’re just popping in, if it’s no problem, it’s no problem. They are not going to have a problem with you popping in to help them close. They’ll be happy for the help.
Jauna Werner: But you will identify if there’s something going on that you should be aware of, or maybe there’s just a little bit of an opportunity to have a conversation with your night staff. Some of what we saw was owners just sort of completely delegating and never showing up for a certain shift. If you just vary your schedule and start popping in at unpredictable times, you’ll catch stuff that’s going on if it is. You’ll make people a little more nervous about being a thief in the restaurant, and you’ll also start finding just general opportunities for improvement. Shooting the ball with your bartender as you close out and seeing stuff. So that would be my recommendation.
Jeremy Julian: I love that. It reminds me of the whole Undercover Boss show that was on TV for a while, where these bosses are like, how are they operating this way? It’s like, because this is the way you trained them. People rise to the level of your expectations. So back to your Taco Bell example — I had a system, I had a process, somebody was managing making sure that I took the lettuce with my left hand.
Where to Find the Book and the Courses (38:13)
Jeremy Julian: Chloe and Jauna, you guys are on a mission to solve this problem. Can you walk us through the tools, and how do people engage? What’s the first step? Every single operator out there is going to learn something from this book. Bar none — I’ve been doing this for thirty plus years and I found and learned stuff in here.
Jauna Werner: Yep, so I’ll start on that one. When we talked about the book, you said it’s approachable. I’m glad to hear that, because we very much wanted this to be like a conversation with your bestie in a coffee shop. Like, hey, you run a restaurant, you really need to hear this stuff. And that’s how we wrote the book. But we also in each chapter gave you checklists on here’s how to identify, here’s how to prevent. So just buy the book — or we have a ledger if you want to have kind of a process in a box. We really gave very actionable, simple suggestions. You can take it straight out of the book, put it in your SOP, make your own checklist, do whatever.
Jauna Werner: And then from there — process is good, some of it is a technology thing, and then work with your provider. Most restaurants have a POS provider now. Have you sat down with your POS provider and asked them to do a loss prevention overview and have all those features turned on? Most restaurateurs already have loss prevention technology that they’re not really taking advantage of. So we started with a book that was very approachable and has checklists written right there for them to use, and then also recommending: work with what you already have.
Jeremy Julian: Chloe, I know you guys have got the posters and the training materials. Talk about all of that, because you guys are continuing to pour yourselves out there to try and solve this problem.
Chloe Rachel Howard: Whether you’re a bar or restaurant owner, or you work with bars and restaurants and consult with them and do business with them as a vendor, reach out to us on our website, howistealfromyou.com. We have all of the products that we sell on there. So if you want to lock down a copy of the book, the ebook, the ledger, the poster for the kitchen, we’ve got you. Take the course. You can go on there and get the course. If you’re looking to just have your managers take it, great. We also have a smaller course that’s a little bit more digestible for front-of-house and back-of-house employees that releases next week — so by the time this podcast airs, that’ll be live.
Chloe Rachel Howard: And then if you’re interested, we don’t mind doing training. We remote train, and we come out and train face to face for larger operations. If it’s a franchise and you’re having a large gathering and you’re looking for us to come out and work with your team, we’re happy to help.
Chloe Rachel Howard: Our mission is clear though. We want bars and restaurants to survive. It’s an industry that’s really hurting right now in this country. And we want to do good work. We also want to hold accountable the villainous vendors that are taking advantage of these businesses — whether they’re mom and pops or large operations, there’s no excuse for it. So we’re here to stay, and we’ve brought with us an army of companies that do things the right way. So we’re happy to always make recommendations, if you’re looking for a great surveillance brand, or you’re looking to find a company that’ll handle your social media or your anonymous tip reporting of instances of theft. We’ve got you. We’re here to help.
Jeremy Julian: Every time I get on the phone with either of you, or collectively when I saw you guys in Vegas, you could talk for days about how passionate you are about helping restaurants to thrive and how you really want to see people continue to live their livelihood. Chloe, to your point earlier, your family lived the opposite end of this and did not get to the book fast enough in order to stop these things. So I’m grateful for you both for coming on the show and for really being passionate about solving this problem.
Jeremy Julian: To our listeners out there — you guys know the reason the show exists is to help you guys thrive in the restaurant industry. This restaurant industry has given me and my family opportunities to do things that I never thought were possible. So I’m grateful for you guys listening every single week. If you guys are technology operators out there and want to learn some of these things, go check them out. How I Steal From You — go search it, they’re kind of everywhere out there. Or let me know and I can do a warm intro to either of the ladies. If you haven’t already subscribed, please do so, and make it a great day.
Back to the episode: Restaurant Theft: 3 in 4 Employees Admit It — How I Steal From You, RTG Ep. 363, with show notes, the full list of scams and all three players.
