Restaurant Leadership Podcast: Overcome Burnout, Embrace Freedom, and Drive Growth
Welcome to the Restaurant Leadership Podcast, the show that teaches you how to overcome burnout, embrace freedom, and drive growth
Your host, Christin Marvin, of Solutions by Christin.
With over two decades of extensive experience in hospitality leadership, Christin Marvin has successfully managed a diverse range of concepts, encompassing fine dining and high-volume brunch.
She has now established her own coaching and consulting firm, collaborating with organizations to accelerate internal leadership development to increase retention and thrive.
Each week, Christin brings you content and conversation to make you a more effective leader.
This includes tips, tricks and REAL stories from REAL people that have inspired her-discussing their successes, challenges and personal transformation.
This podcast is a community of support to inspire YOU on YOUR unique leadership journey.
This podcast will help you answer the following questions:
1. How do I increase my confidence?
2. How do I accelerate my leadership?
3. How do I lower my stress as a leader?
4. How do I prevent burnout?
5. How do I improve my mental health?
So join the conversation and listen in each week on spotify and apple podcasts and follow Christin on LinkedIn.
Voice Over, Mixing and Mastering Credits:
L. Connor Voice - LConnorvoice@gmail.com
Artwork by Solstice Photography, Tucson, AZ.
https://solsticephotography70.pixieset.com/
Restaurant Leadership Podcast: Overcome Burnout, Embrace Freedom, and Drive Growth
90: Do You Know Your Business Well Enough to Change It? Leadership Lessons from Restaurant Technologies
Send me a Text Message. I'd love to hear from you.
"Do you know your business well enough to change it?" In an era of economic uncertainty, this thought-provoking inquiry challenges all leaders to deeply understand their operations before attempting transformation.
Ever wondered what happens to all that used cooking oil from your favorite restaurants? Alissa Partee, COO of Restaurant Technologies, pulls back the curtain on an innovative solution that's transforming restaurant kitchens nationwide.
What began as a leap of faith joining a restaurant services company during COVID has evolved into a fascinating leadership journey. Alissa shares how Restaurant Technologies delivers fresh cooking oil while simultaneously removing used oil from 50,000 customers across the country - all with the push of a button. This closed-loop system not only prevents dangerous burns and slip-and-fall accidents but also creates environmental sustainability by recycling used cooking oil into biodiesel.
The conversation takes a compelling turn when Alissa reveals her transition from Chief People Officer to COO, highlighting how taking chances on talent can transform organizations. "We need less pirate ship and more Navy ship," she explains, describing her initiative to standardize operations across 41 locations that were previously doing things 41 different ways.
Through the creation of a specialized Operations Excellence team, Restaurant Technologies has reduced service visits by 40% while dramatically improving customer experience. The results speak volumes - one pilot location rose from bottom-third performance to runner-up for Depot of the Year within just 12 months of implementing standardized processes.
Resources:
More from Christin:
Grab your free copy of my audiobook, The Hospitality Leader's Roadmap: Move from Ordinary to Extraordinary at christinmarvin.com/audio
Curious about one-on-one coaching or leadership workshops? Click this link to schedule a 15 minute strategy session.
Podcast Production: https://www.lconnorvoice.com/
Alyssa, thank you so much for being here today and taking the time to share your story with our listeners and really, you know I'm excited to take a deep dive into your leadership today and just learn more about you. Restaurant Technologies has just been such a fabulous company to partner with, and so I'm excited to give people the opportunity to kind of peek behind the curtain even more. So welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here Good.
Speaker 1:Well, before we kick off, I don't know about you, I'm the worst at celebrating anything. I do, Anything good that happens. It takes me. I take about two seconds and then I move on. But can we take a moment to celebrate your 2025 women in business award?
Speaker 2:Well, thank you. Yeah, it's. It is hard. It's like I I don't do any of what I do for those things and occasionally when they come along it's nice, um, but it's hard. It's hard to kind of accept it or, you know, like kind of let yourself get wrapped up in it and I appreciate it. I'm glad people do it, but I recognize more of like the value of it to remind me that I have to do that type of appreciation to the team. So I don't necessarily need it, want it or look for it, but I know there's members of our team who do need that type of kind of shot in the arm and so it's a good reminder.
Speaker 1:I love that. So this was presented to you by the Minneapolis St Paul Business Journal. Is this something that you've known about for a while or a while?
Speaker 2:They do this every year. Yeah, they have nominations every year for it, and then you know, it's just something I don't think we really have focused on necessarily, but I do watch it, and what's cool about it is when you see these nomination classes come up. The talent within the pool is remarkable, and so it's almost a forced connection point that you meet people who are really big movers and shakers, whether it's in the industry that I live and breathe in or in the markets that we get to serve. And every once in a while you got to get out of your home, you got to get out of your office, you got to get out of your place of business and meet people. And then that's where the power is. The power is through the connections that those platforms create. So first time for me, obviously, but also I recognize that the women in this particular group. It's just remarkable what they've been able to accomplish, so it's fun to see and celebrate that as well.
Speaker 1:I love it. Well, well, well-deserved Congratulations. Very, very exciting stuff. So let's talk about restaurant technology. So you joined the team in 2020 as the chief people officer, right yeah, how did you, how did your journey kind of land you to that position with restaurant technologies?
Speaker 2:So fully full disclosure here, total transparency. I did not know about restaurant technologies until I was approached for the role. I was aware that there were solutions out there for what we did, but not like we do it. And I think that you know God works in really mysterious ways because, if you remember, where we were in 2020, I was also with another. I was with a restaurant company. Where we were in 2020, I was also with another. I was with a restaurant company. I was with Caribou Coffee and Einstein Brothers Bagels had a couple other brands incorporated into the breakfast side of the industry or of the company.
Speaker 2:But you know, like the little tap on the shoulder, like hey, do you want to join a restaurant services company in the depth of COVID? And it's like like I'm not so sure. But one thing that restaurant technology does for me like personally I'm a big proponent of if you don't love what your company does, I don't know if you'll ever bring enough passion forward to build the brand. Like you have to truly love what we do. And when I had the luxury of you know, taking a look at RT and saying, wow, this is remarkable. It combined things that I'm deeply passionate about. I actually am a, I could nerd out a little bit on how things work. Okay. So this is a company that has a really cool service solution and how we do it is fascinating. And then it marries up to my deep love and commitment for the food industry, the food service industry, and I have said this for years, I've said it in other circles of conversation. I said for thousands of years food has brought people together. It brings us together in the best of times and it brings us together in the worst of times, and I think most of life happens with food involved. And so when I had a chance to marry up this love of how things work for an industry that I'm extremely passionate about, which is the food service industry, restaurant technology has brought it right together and it's how things work in the restaurant industry.
Speaker 2:Not only that, it's a service orientation. We get to serve an industry that serves others. And I've grown up to I've grown up in a position of saying you need to serve others, you have to find a way to give your, get your talents and pursuit of helping others. And if you're not helping, what are you doing here? So it just was it kind of rocked me to my core of saying I remember talking to my husband, I was like I have to do this. He's like it's restaurant services company in the heat of COVID Alyssa, like are, like, are you sure? And then I met the leadership team. I met some members of the team and I just said, yeah, this is where I want to be.
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Speaker 2:So it's been five years in two different roles now. But the company itself we can talk about that whenever you're ready, but what we do personally, why I chose it, is because it's something I'm like dually passionate about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, talk a little bit more about what you guys so that's so different from other service providers.
Speaker 2:So we are the premier solution for closed loop cooking oil management solutions. That's our primary product. We have an autonomous solution as well, which is around keeping clean hoods and flues clean. It's an auto cleaning solution or service, but our main product line is our total oil management solution and what we're able to do is in 41 different operating locations across the country. We are able to service roughly 50,000 customers from those 41 sites.
Speaker 2:We deliver bulk cooking oil simultaneously, picking up used cooking oil, and at the end of the stage we bring that used cooking oil back into the food and fuel chain and we sell it into biodiesel refineries. So it's a good for people, good for planet business, good-for-planet business. Our trucks are works of art. They are multi-oil type delivery trucks. We can deliver three or four different oils simultaneously on our dynamic route. We deliver to a customer who needs oil just when they need oil, and then we're able to safely handle their used cooking oil.
Speaker 2:What it allows a restaurant to do is stop manhandling their oil management. They don't have to lug around jibs of oil 35, 40 pound, you know boxes of oil and heave them into the fryers. We can, and they don't have to empty oil out of their old fryers and carry it out to a rendering tank. It's push button technology. It's like remarkable when to see it work. So it's safety oriented. It's helps actually customers use less oil because of our technology that helps them understand their oil usage patterns. And then it also is good for the planet by recycling the used cooking oil and it doesn't patterns. And then it also is good for the planet by recycling the used cooking oil and it doesn't and it goes into a good purpose.
Speaker 2:I love it. Yeah, um, we're in restaurants across the country. We've got big brands that we support and serve. We also service universities, casinos, hotels, so anybody that cooks with oil. Um, generally benefits for our system and the employees love it.
Speaker 2:The employees love how easy and safe it is and if you've ever worked in a kitchen like I have with Buffalo Wild Wings, or even we didn't have the oil solution, obviously at Caribou Coffee and Einstein's, they're tight spaces and there's slips, trips and falls. There's hundreds of opportunities to get burned. So we reduce, we take out that risk and we've been helped companies minimize their insurance premiums related to their property casualty insurance because we have and workers have, excuse me, because it helps keep things safe.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. Yeah, it was. It's it's horrible to clean up, it's heavy, it's dangerous, it's it's all the things right. It's not a job that anybody really loves doing in the restaurant. I'd love that you guys have the solution. So you joined the team in 2020, took a huge leap of faith and then this massive growth happened right when you had a thousand employees and you exploded to 1500. So, 50% increase in people. Was there demand for that? Were you guys short-staffed? I mean, what was that growth all about?
Speaker 2:We really had to be creative on attracting people into our growth story. So we needed to hire drivers and technicians. Our drivers they have the benefit of running a 313 schedule generally or a 410 schedule, so that for a lot of people, was an attractive point. They said, wow, I can have a full-time job, full benefits, and I can also have a three or four day weekend. Sign me up, right. Our technicians are either a 410 or a 5.8 schedule, so a little bit more kind of in the norm schedule.
Speaker 2:So we did a lot of promotion to bring in the talent who would support the customer growth. And we had to be creative because people had a lot of choice coming out of COVID and in some cases we were in a very competitive position with, especially in the trucking side of things. So we were creative. We had a high referral percentage we had at any given month about 40% of our hires come from internal referrals. So we juiced that. We're creative on our sign-on bonuses.
Speaker 2:We did a market study to make sure we were as competitive with our wages. We did some cool things with our healthcare. We reduced the premiums on one of our healthcare plan to zero. So people were like, wow, I can have free healthcare. Here. We promoted the benefits of a three or four day weekend so we were able to attract people in and over the last three years, four years, we've seen a consistent rise in our retention as well. So people when they come in, you know we retain 85% of our workforce in a given year. That's light years ahead of kind of the industries that we compete with. So once we get them in, we want to keep them and we try to have them. You know we make sure we're supporting them, giving them what they need. We're opening up doors for communication so we can hear directly from our frontline, learn from them, respond to them and just keep that employee experience front and center.
Speaker 1:If we take care of them.
Speaker 2:they can take care of our customers, but if we're not meeting their needs, they spend time to figure out how to close those gaps before they can kind of pay it forward in service.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it sounds like you guys really care about your people and you really are thoughtful about their lifestyle and making sure that this, this career, fits with their lifestyle. Where's that people focus? Coming from within the company.
Speaker 2:Well, it's all over? I would say it's all over. It definitely starts at the top, but then you also have to inspire within. I can't be in 41 depots at a time, so our focus is making sure that we've got general managers at each of our locations. Where people are like I want to work with this person, I want to be part of their team. That is a critical layer in our organization.
Speaker 2:As the general managers who help support each of these depots, we have a lot of work to do still. To be honest, there's a lot of good going on, but kind of the next evolution that we're working on is building out some of those things that we haven't yet had which is around like leadership development. Had which is around like leadership development. We're refreshing our. It's called a level up program, which is a development program that our frontline leaders or frontline employees can go through to level up in the organization. So there's a lot. We had to kind of do some of the food, water, shelter, basics first, and then the next thing is around development. So a lot comes from it. But you know, when you're a healthy, thriving business, you have earned the right to invest back into the business, and one of the ways we do that is through better quality equipment, better quality tools, and then that that investment right into the people through through development and support.
Speaker 1:I love that. I want to have. We should schedule another time and talk, just for you know, 30 minutes to 45 minutes about this level of program, because it's I, that's what I focus on the leadership development across multi-unit locations, and we'd love to just learn more about that and talk about the challenges and successes. That's awesome, absolutely. So you made the jump from CPO to COO. Yeah, what, what made you decide to make that leap?
Speaker 2:Um, first of all, I showed interest. I I have a. I have a deep kind of love and background in operations. I've always had a more operations focused role, whether I was in a chief people officer role or kind of in my human capital roles in the past. It's always been a very tight connection with that large part of organizations. So I certainly showed interest in it at RT.
Speaker 2:And then I have to acknowledge the fact that that's not a common switch. So as much as I could sit here and say I would like to try something different formally, I had to have people who also were willing to take a chance on me and say, yeah, let's try it. What's the worst that could happen? And so we were really intentional about thinking through that. And I remember when I had a great conversation with our CEO, jeff Giesel, one day and he said, do you want to give it a try? And I was like I do and the it almost kind of re relit a little bit of a fire in me of like, okay, I don't want to fail here, so what do I have to do differently? But the nice thing that I've had the luxury of having is being able to bring in or kind of recreate the leadership team that I get to work with on the operations side.
Speaker 2:And they are. They are fantastic. So I have the privilege of working with them. I had the chance to try it. I had somebody who was willing to take that chance. I take chances on talent a lot. Right, I say, let's try it. What's the worst that we can have? What can happen here? And so I had. I had somebody who was willing to take a chance.
Speaker 1:Hi everybody, we're taking a quick break to offer you an exciting opportunity. If you're a restaurant owner or manager looking to enhance your leadership skills, I invite you to join my 12-day leadership challenge. In just 12 days, you'll receive a guided packet with actionable strategies to transform your leadership in less than five minutes a day. Join the challenge and the community and grab your copy at kristinmarvincom slash 12 days. Now let's get back to the show. I love that. I love when you said, when Jeff asked you like, is this something that you want to do? There was no hesitation in your voice, there were no kind of nerves. You just showed up really confidently. Were you excited? Were you scared? Were you confident? And what were the emotions? I love it.
Speaker 2:I love what our operations team does. So it was almost like let me at it, like, yes, I want it because I'm passionate about it. If I didn't love what we do, honestly, kristen, I probably wouldn't be here. I would. I would look for something that I I felt that deep connection with. So there's a heart and soul that exists in operations and, yeah, I'm just, I feel really lucky to be part of it.
Speaker 1:I love it. So, when you moved into the this COO role, what were some of the you know? I want to talk about the, this nine person ops excellence team that you put together, like what were some of the challenges that you really identified, and then talk us through the strategy that you used to put this team together.
Speaker 2:So this was about two years ago. We were enjoying some of the benefits that we had of installing a commercial excellence team. So commercial ops is what we call it. It's on our commercial side of the organization and we did that. They built out about four years ago, so what their purpose was was essentially to make it as easy as our as possible for our sales team to grow and find find new customers and onboard new customers. And we went through like a two-year learning cycle with commercial ops that helped us redefine, standardize and codify our go-to-market strategy. And, as that was off and running, at the same time we were doing some big investments into our service technology, which is Salesforce Service Cloud.
Speaker 2:And as a follow on to that, I remember I spent a lot of time out in the depots and what was hard was we have our operators, who were born and bred into running their own territory, doing it with 41 depots doing it 41 different ways. And I remember saying, hey, if we're going to grow and scale as an organization, we can't have 41 depots doing it 41 different ways. And I remember being at one of our leadership meetings national business meetings and I said we need less pirate ship and more Navy ship, which means we need less kind of everybody doing it their own way and we need more standards, because the standards allow us to build on very similar to. Everybody does it the same way, so we can train to the one best way. We've adopted the one best way and then we're going to benefit from doing it one best way. And so we sat down and we kind of hashed through what this could look like on the operations side and we're not the first company to do it, but it was a unique setup to put it under the human capital side of the business, because that's where I was. I was sitting in HR, still knowing that if I was going to move into operations I'd take it with me. But we built out our operations excellence team and it was focused on ops technology, operations process and eventually it will take on operations training. And that team is a team of we've got a mix of former general managers and service managers, different people in the business, and we infused some talent from the outside as well and their sole job was to identify the variability in the business, identify the one best way, create the process in any program that would get us to all operating under the same you know kind of course and training people to it. We're about 18 months into it now.
Speaker 2:It is unbelievable what we've been able to accomplish, not only to make it easier on some of our own teams, but also it's showing up in our what we call our customer in metrics. It's actually having a direct impact on the service model that we have with our customers. It's actually having a direct impact on the service model that we have with our customers, so the customers benefit from it as well, makes it easier on our internal teams, makes it better for our customers and we kind of benefit from having it. And a big thing about it is like what, if we went to McDonald's and McDonald's was like, well, if you go to this location in Boston, you're going to get curly fries, if you go to this location in San Francisco, you're going to get shoestring fries, people would be like, well, what's the benefit of McDonald's like national brand? Yeah, we, that's what we're headed towards is, when you experience restaurant technologies, whether you're in the Boston market, you're in the LA market, you're in the Minneapolis market, you're going to have the same type of experience.
Speaker 1:And that's what we're going to grow upon. I love that. How did you choose those nine people? Did you know specifically what roles you wanted to create?
Speaker 2:Yep, we did. We wanted to have somebody who really understood how our operations technology works. Eventually we'll do the training side that right now is still sitting in the human capital side, and then the operations excellence, business partners. That's actually. We plucked out our highest performing general manager. We said you're going to be a member of the team. Then another individual on that team, josh. He was kind of an expert in how work gets done at restaurant technology, so we plucked him out of that role and put him in this. And then we brought two other people in from the outside who are very, very process-driven lean management principals. And then one of our other director of business process. She's on the team as well. They're complimentary in terms of their skillset. You got the experts in how we do it today. You had the best and brightest when it comes to one of our highest performing general managers who kind of keeps it real with us and then when they work, they're constantly using general managers from across the country to calibrate the work. It's built by operations for operations, because we're not going to just create something and say, hey, this is a best practice, go do this, and then we get it out into the field and the field's like this doesn't work for us. So that we needed to have people who were excellent collaborators, people who could still balance what good looks like but understand the realities of the situation that we were in.
Speaker 2:And the team formed together and then our senior director of operations excellence. He's been there and done that. He came from the outside. He's at an organization that was 10 years ahead of us in this pursuit and his kind of strategic direction for the team was complimentary. We had to give them grace and space to to try some new stuff on right. Try it on. It doesn't work, that's okay, we'll pivot. But the intention was was really clear from the beginning. It also helped that we told a lot of people about it. I said, hey, this is what this function is going to do and this is what we expect out of it. So it was like self-calibrating to make sure it came true. We did partner with an excellent company called Beckway to also help mature our thinking faster in it. So they came in from the outside and said, hey, we've helped organizations stand this type of workup, but they were a great partner. They really greased our skids and then let us run with it and we've taken it from there.
Speaker 1:I love it. I was going to ask you how did you come up with this idea? Was this something that you'd done before, or, and then, what was the first step in kind of putting it together?
Speaker 2:When we I haven't done exactly operations excellence before. There's something that we did in when I was in operations in Marvin which was taking our massive 2.2 million square foot plant and building it into what is more like a cellular manufacturing arrangement which takes all of our processes and breaks them down into bite-sized pieces and standardizes them from cell to cell. Data is really important, process was really important, and then codifying it with any other type of technology. So the concept I was really familiar with, but the buy-in for it was actually quite easy. I mean, it was a conversation I was having with the senior executive team, jeff the CEO. He was like absolutely We've seen the benefits on the commercial side of the organization. I see how it can benefit it from the operation side.
Speaker 2:And again, it was maybe a little bit of a leap of faith but we started by bringing in that first leader, joe, our senior director of operations. Excellence gave him the right and the grace to build out his team and I would say 18 months in and I think the results kind of speak for themselves and we've cut our service visits by about 40%. By having a more complete service visit We've had increased our first time right for our installations, which means our new customers start off with us on a really good foot, like there's some basic things that we just had to codify.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. That's amazing Congratulations, yeah, thanks.
Speaker 2:Thanks, a lot of had to codify. Yeah, I love that. That's amazing Congratulations. Yeah, thanks, thanks, it's a lot of credit to the team.
Speaker 1:Did you, did you play with this? Cause? I've been in, I've worked for organizations before where we've kind of put together side side boards of employees for sustainability or for community practices, but it was. They were on a part-time basis that you know. They still did their regular full-time. So did you guys kind of play around with? Is this a full-time group of people or do we?
Speaker 2:do this part-time.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So that is a great question, because RT has tried this in different ways before, but it was always side jobs and so we had to jump into the deep end right and fully commit to the practice of it and it is all they focus on. It's 100% of their time is focused on that standardization, reducing the variability, training, process, orientation because there's that much work to do first of all. There's that much work to do first of all. And then the day job wasn't pulling them away from the continuous improvement mindset that you want everybody to have. There was really big building blocks that we had to put in place and it's just hard to you. Maybe eventually could get there, but it's going to take you many, many more years. You don't see and experience the progress fast enough and it dies out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, totally, and I'm assuming you're direct, you're working directly with Joe on the initiatives. So 40, 41 locations a lot of you know. You said they're doing everything differently. How do you help Joe stay focused on what the priorities are to make the biggest impact?
Speaker 2:Joe, there's a lot of buy-in from the general managers. We pilot a lot of our stuff in a handful of depots. This is just kind of a little bit of proof point that we were able to highlight at our last national business meeting. One of the things that he does really well is when he pilots it. He has good kind of tracking mechanisms of the befores and afters. He took one of our closer to home depots, which is our Minneapolis depot, and they were the full pilot for all of our first steps on ops excellence new work like new process or anything like that and I want to. The numbers are not exactly specific, but I want to say Minneapolis, in our stack ranking of you know, different performance metrics, was somewhere in the bottom third prior to being our guinea pig for operations excellence. Within 12 months, minneapolis was runner up for Depot of the year.
Speaker 1:Nice.
Speaker 2:So then you find the platform to say, hey, listen, this actually works. It actually helps not only that depot perform better, but there's less kind of aggravation of having to figure it out on their own and it pays off with better performance. So then all the GMs are like let me at it right. So I remember at the National Episcopal Museum they're like why does Colin only get to benefit from all of these things? We're at the national business and they're like why does? Why does colin only get to benefit from all of these things?
Speaker 2:Well, that when you have, when you, when you get to grandstand or put on stage, you're a guinea pig, um who, who went through a lot to go through it. Right he was. He had to try a lot of stuff on for size and like see if it worked. And then it works. And then you're like let's celebrate it and then inspire other people to try something different, because we have incredible retention of our general managers, but they've been kind of doing it their own way for a long time, so you had to give them a reason to believe.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and and how do you I mean that shift from them being able to do what they wanted to do 41 different ways? There's empowerment there, but then when you start to put this structure in was there any friction there between the GMs going? This feels different, or I don't know if I like this direction or I'm losing some of my voice here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would say a little, a little bit Um, and and you know I'm a realistic person I'm more like hey, I get it, I get it, it's different. I don't always love change myself too. Um, but what? I've also heard from them quite a bit, and this is a very specific example.
Speaker 2:We had a big kickoff meeting when we first brought operations excellence on and we kind of previewed with them what we thought would be the best things to focus on first, and one of them was how we install our oil system. So we put like seven of our GMs in a corner of a room with seven other GMs working on a different charter and I'm like kind of circling the room a little bit and I walked back into the install process, one the group who's mapping this out on the wall, and I think it was William Turner, our Chicago GM, and I think Andre Valdez, our Miami GM. I walk over I was like, hey, guys, how's it going? And he goes. One of them goes hey, alyssa, it's clear what we need, cause we're they're struggling through this.
Speaker 2:I was like, well, what is it? He goes. We just need more training. I'm like, oh well, are we going to train to the Miami way? Or are we going to train to the Chicago way? Or are we going to train to the Boston way? Like who's what should I build my training around? And then all of a sudden they were like, oh, like the light bulb moment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the light bulb goes off. So I was like hey there, podcast friends, I hope you're enjoying these impactful conversations and leadership insights I'm bringing you each week. Before we dive back into today's episode, I want to take a moment and reach out and ask a small favor. That would go a long way in supporting the show. If you've been loving the content I'm providing, please take a moment to leave a rating and review. Wherever you listen to your podcast, not only does it make my day, but it also plays a pivotal role in helping the show grow. Your reviews boost my visibility, attract new listeners and encourage exciting guests to join me on the mic. So if you want to be part of my show's growth journey, hit that review button and let me know what you think. Thanks a million for being awesome listeners.
Speaker 2:This is a perfect proof point. I said we don't have enough training resources to train it to 41 different ways if we're going to be a national company. And that kind of light bulb opened the door to saying there is, there is something here that is beneficial for the greater good. And yeah, we ran with some of that.
Speaker 1:I love that you uh do a lot of those exercises to letting them work through it together and try to communicate it, but I love that you showed them. You didn't just tell them what the needs were, but you showed them and let them work through it. That was just that's incredible. I love it.
Speaker 2:How do you bring them along? Right yeah, you just got to bring them along and we learn a lot from them. They learn a lot about kind of their own operations through it as well. Like, do you know your business well enough to change it? And a lot of people don't, actually, and I'm a big proponent of know your business inside and out, so when you start to see something working, you can attribute it to why, and when something's not working, you have that depth of understanding to react to it and do something about it. But when you surface level know your business, you don't. You don't, you don't know it well enough.
Speaker 1:You'll make mistakes.
Speaker 1:It's so I just wrote that down. Do you know your business well enough to change it? I think there's so much uncertainty right now in in the world and what's going on and we've been talking a lot about that with clients and coaches and and restaurant consultants of do what do you? What do you know that's working in your business? Like I done it. If you don't have it identified, identify it right now so you can just double down on that. You know, make sure your experience is top notch right now, make sure you're nurturing your guests as much as you possibly can, and then figure out what's not working and figure out if you need to let that part of your business go or if now is the time to invest in it. That's so important, love, that you brought that up.
Speaker 2:I remember a time it's a little bit of a different thing, but it's relevant for restaurants. I remember when I was at with Einstein's and Einstein Brother Bagel. So most of their business happens before 10 AM. The breakfast concept Okay, so that's really where where we make the money and serve the guests right Is in the morning.
Speaker 2:Well, morning before COVID especially, people were really sensitive to how long it would take to get their morning breakfast. They're usually on route to their work. It can't be late. They have dropped the kids off at a certain time. They needed to have predictability about how long it would take to get a bagel and a coffee.
Speaker 2:So we were tracking guest service time. How long does it take, how much of the wait in line, whether it's the drive through or they come in, what is that dwell time throughout the process? How long do they wait after the order is placed? When do they get there? When do they pay, when do they leave? And so these time studies hold us a lot, knowing that we're in a time sensitive part of the day. Most people don't have as much of a concern at the end of the day, but they're very time sensitive in the morning, right. So we did a time study, and what we noticed was years and years of technical debt had shown up on the POS system, the point of sale system, and so our baristas and our um, our, our employee team members would have to sort through pages of the POS that weren't relevant.
Speaker 2:Oh time offerings, uh, uh, ingredients that we don't have anymore, combos that we didn't have anymore, and I remember going through the experience with them because we did side-by-side studies with them and it was like, hey, order this, and so you're, you're on the clock, right. You're like, okay, I have to do this as fast as possible, but I have to make sure I don't hit this button, because if I hit this button, the whole POS system just blows up. It just stops working. We had to reset it, you know. So our first ask of the IT team was clean it up, simply just clean it up. And we did. We asked all of our general managers, you know over 1100 GMs. We said what is the one thing you need from corporate? They said clean up the POS. Wow, okay. So we did. Well, we took like minutes off of the guest check time simply because our team could. They only had the buttons that they could push.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love it. Wow, superb. I feel that energy. I was in breakfast for seven years and it and it was very high volume and same thing. Yeah, it's you make or break somebody's day and if you you have to cancel their food order, they they won't come back. You know it's awful.
Speaker 2:And the last thing I need is I need we cannot make somebody late for their job, right, we cannot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I love that. It's amazing. It's the little things, right, I think there is. It's all about. I love how you're so intentional about creating successful change in your business and it's about empowering people and testing things through. You know, like you're doing through piloting, but rolling it out and then constantly monitoring it and getting feedback. I think there's there's a lot of times people put so much into the rollout and then they kind of they're like, okay, we've rolled it out and step away, and then it's like no, no, no, no, you've got to continue to have a system in place to monitor that Um, whether that's people or or automation or whatever it is. That's incredible. So what, what are you most proud of with this new role?
Speaker 2:Gosh. I think it's just the amount of change the organization has been able to go through with successful results. I mean, it's truly like paying off, and when I say, how does it pay off, a lot of people say, well, it's just padding your pockets. But no, no, no, no. It allows us to make other investments, okay. So, as I was saying, it's fun to see. I think what I'm most proud of is that I'm not a person who's been
