I Found the #1 Mistake Killing Restaurants in 2026 and How to Fix it

Running a restaurant has NEVER been harder. 

Since 2020, the cost of operating a restaurant has increased by 35%… while margins were already razor thin. At the same time, competition is rising, staff expectations are changing, and consistency is harder than ever to maintain. 

So how do the top 10% of restaurants still win? 

In this video, I break down the real problem holding restaurants back and why most owners, operators, and managers are focusing on the WRONG things. 

👉 It’s not more complexity. 

👉 It’s not more training. 

👉 It’s SIMPLICITY done right. 

After working with 350+ restaurant groups worldwide and analyzing over 1,000 operations, we’ve found a clear pattern: 

Success comes from mastering the fundamentals... not overcomplicating them. 

What You’ll Learn In This Video: 

✔️ Why “keeping it simple” is the hardest (and most important) strategy in 2026 

✔️ The dangerous mistake most restaurant leaders make when training staff 

✔️ How rising costs are quietly killing your profitability 

✔️ Why your current systems may be outdated (especially with Gen Z + AI) 

The 5-Phase Framework used by top-performing restaurants: 

Advanced Leadership 

High-Level Systems 

Dynamic Training 

Follow-Up Mastery Accountability 

Here is the reality of restaurants right now... 

Most restaurants are stuck delivering transactional experiences… 

But the ones that WIN deliver true hospitality, and that’s what keeps guests coming back, spending more, and choosing YOU over competitors. 

In a world where guests are going out LESS, you need to give them a reason to choose YOU every single time.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So I always tell people the biggest thing that you can see if you're developing your restaurant or growing your restaurant, you're trying to scale your restaurant, and this applies to everybody, right? Because we've helped scale over 300 restaurants worldwide. That's actually getting close to 350 restaurants now worldwide. You know, we have a huge team too of, you know, people from Sam Fox, from Rich Carlton, from Chick-fil-A from Montage, Disney, uh an amazing team. Probably analyze a thousand businesses on top of that to help them out. And the one thing that is absolutely consistent is this, right? If you look at your biggest problem you have in your front of the house, trying to develop your, you know, whether it's your hospitality, whether it's buy-in from the staff, whether it's upselling, whether it's giving the guests the best experience possible, whether it's your leaders, right? Executing as leaders and not managers, um, having uh operator ownership mindset versus a firefighter mindset, right? These are a lot of problems that we've noticed 90% of businesses are struggling with, right? They're just they can't get their staff, right, to execute the way they want them to execute, but which basically bottom line boils down to consistency and hospitality, right? That's their biggest issue, that's their biggest problem. Because obviously that that hurts your bottom line, right? If you're not giving consistent hospitality A, you're now competing with the other 90% of your category. So any other restaurant in your area that's serving food similar to you, um, or even serving food, you're now competing with them because they're also not giving consistent hospitality, right? They can't confidently say, if anybody walks through my door, they're gonna get an amazing hospitality experience. It's subpar at best, right? It's inconsistent at best. And so that's obviously gonna lead to always gonna lead to loss of money. The biggest problem with this too is that if you had a bar manager and your bar manager came in and said, Hey, I just did the inventory, triple checked it, and we're missing$3,000 worth of um alcohol, you would flip, right? You would say, Let's find out where whatever the where the leak is, let's find out what happened, let's find out make sure it never happens again, and let's build things around that to make sure it never happens again. You would be on fire and brimstones to make sure this never happens again, right? Which is fair. You should be doing that as an owner. The problem is that what if an auditor came in tomorrow and said, You lost$10,000 in guest experience, right? Because of your guest experience being inconsistent, you lost$10,000, whether it was to someone that was upset, word of mouth, um brand value through one-star uh reviews, or you lost a loyal customer, right? Loyal guest, right? But you lost$10,000. You'd flip, right? You'd flip. But the problem is that you don't have that auditor and you don't see those numbers, and they're invisible numbers. That's what's scary. Just like if you were doing your if you weren't doing liquor inventory and you were missing$1,000,$1,500,$3,000 a month, you don't know. You wouldn't know because you're not tracking, you're not doing the inventory, and that's the problem. So with that being said, the number one problem that people see, the number one problem that people have with their businesses when it comes to front of the house, executing the way they want them to execute at a high level, all can be boiled down and distilled to people being underdeveloped. That's the freaking catalyst. It's people being underdeveloped. That's how you can boil it down. It's important to know that because when you have focus and clarity on what you're trying to fix, it's a lot easier to fix it. The problem is people don't have that focus and clarity, right? And they seem to to expand in this bigger problem with more things to fix and all these things to do. And just simply look at it as this. If I want to give an amazing hospitality experience, if I want to develop my leaders to be able to operate without me being in the business, if I want to develop my staff from top to bottom, from the moment they walk in the door to the moment they leave to give the best of guest experience, to care about the guests, to understand, deliver hospitality, to be fully bought in, to be motivated, all that stuff. I can boil it down to still into the fact that they're just completely underdeveloped, right? And what I want to do, my goal is to develop them. And how do I create a culture, create um a business where I develop my people at a high level across the board? I don't care if you're a leader, I don't care if you're a manager, I don't care if you're a host, I don't care if you're a buster, I don't care if you're um a barback, right? I'm going to develop you at a high level. You can do this in the back of the house too, of course, but that's what we want to focus on. The problem is we don't focus on that. We just severely underdevelop our people. We expect them to figure it out. They don't figure it out and we get pissed. They're not bought in, we get pissed. Of course, they're not bought in. You didn't train them, you didn't develop and spend any time with them. You treated them like a transaction. You know, that might not have been your intention or your goal, of course, but that's what they feel like. That's what happened ultimately, right? You're trying your best, you're you're you're an owner, you're running around or your GM or drug driverations, whatever it is, you're trying your best, you're spread thin. What we want to do is, I had a mentor tell me one time, if you had to name one thing that makes your business most successful, and then once you freaking hyper-focus on that and make that your obsession, that brought a lot of clarity to me and a lot of success to me, also, because we want to focus on those things. Because as an owner, GM, director of operations, whatever it is, you have a hundred things on your to-do list, and they're all on your to-do list because they're all important. But what's the most important? And the most important at the end of the day is always going to be what drives a consistent, elevated guest experience, bottom line, period. That's what's gonna be the most important thing in your business, right? Your product has to be consistent, your food and your drinks have to be consistent, but the hospitality experience, so important, has to be elevated and has to be consistent, right? You want to be branded hospitality. You want your own brand of hospitality, you want to elevated, you want to be consistent. To get that, you need trained staff that's bought in, motivated. And to do that, you need training and systems that develops them at a high level. That's what you want to focus on. That would that's your number one mission, your number one goal. Thank you so much for watching the video. I hope you enjoyed it and you got something out of it, right? But if here's the thing knowledge is not power. Everyone thinks it is knowledge with action is power. So if you heard something today, it resonated with you, and you want to use it, take action. Number one, come up with a game plan, take action today. Today, starting today. Leave the computer, leave the phone, whatever it is, and go take action today. Otherwise, it's gonna be a big waste of your time. We don't want that, obviously. And also, if you need help, right, training, systems, leadership, culture, hospitality development. I'm hosting a live event where I go over all that training. It comes with some cool downloads, some free tools. I want you to be successful. So if you're interested, click the link in the description.