Restaurant Manager Training: Step-by-Step to Higher Profits

Restaurant Manager Training: Step-by-Step to Higher Profits

Struggling with inconsistent staff performance, poor hospitality, or missed revenue opportunities? In this in-depth restaurant manager training, I sat down with a general manager and we broke down the real reasons his team isn’t executing and I showed him a step-by-step system to fix it.

This isn’t theory. This is what actually works inside real restaurants and drives real results.

In this podcast, you’ll learn how to transform your restaurant from inconsistent and reactive… into a systemized, profit-driven operation with strong culture, better guest experiences, and higher sales.

We cover:
✔️Why hospitality breaks down (and why meetings & documents don’t fix it)
✔️The truth about managing Gen Z employees and post-COVID work culture
✔️How to build systems that create consistent execution every shift
✔️The difference between temporary motivation vs. real culture change
✔️How poor training is silently costing you thousands in lost revenue
✔️Why upselling isn’t “salesy”and how it actually improves guest experience
✔️The exact strategies top 10% restaurants use to drive retention and profit
✔️How to turn every guest into repeat business and referrals

You’ll also see:
Real-world restaurant scenarios
Proven training frameworks
Practical leadership strategies you can apply immediately

If you’re a restaurant owner, GM, or leader trying to fix staff performance, improve hospitality, and increase profitability…this video will give you the clarity and structure you’ve been missing.

Because…Better systems = better staff performance = higher profits.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Have you noticed that in restaurants lately hospitality is just atrocious, right? It doesn't even matter if it's a nice restaurant, hospitality is still bad. And when I say bad, I mean just mediocre, right? It doesn't seem like they actually value, and you're and you're tipping them. That's the crazy part. You're tipping the server, the bartender, and they still seem like they're being transactional, they can care less, like they're kind of entitled to that tip. Why is it like that? Well, that's because the culture's broken in that restaurant and in most restaurants, right? And so in this video, I'm actually going to be working with a real GM from a real restaurant, and we're gonna show him how to break it down because he's having the same issues that every other restaurant's having, right? Why are we not able to get our staff bought in and delivering hospitality consistently? It seems like we have to micromanage them. It seems like it goes in one ear and out the other, and some people get it and some people don't. That's how you create inconsistency in the restaurants, and as consumers, we feel it. And also as owners, as operators, you feel it because you see it and it's driving you crazy and it's costing you a lot of money and a lot of headaches, right? People don't stop eating out, they eat out less. They become more selective and they're gonna go where the people earn their loyalty, right? Where they're loyal. And that's where they're gonna go. I'm gonna go somewhere where I know exactly what I'm gonna get, right? And so we have to offer that as restaurateurs and as consumers, we have to demand it. We have to vote with our money. So I'm gonna be working with a real life GM. He runs a restaurant that does about$50,000 a week. They're trying to get that up to about$60,000 to$65,000 a week, which they can absolutely do. They're just missing some crucial pieces. It's a small operation, they have 70 seats, which means they have to churn, right? They can't rely on their Friday and Saturday night business and taking them up to that next level. They have to start getting people in the door Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, even getting a half a churn out of those days. And they've been open for six years now, right? And they're kind of stagnating in sales. They need to go up, they need to stay competitive. And also, competition's opening up left and right, and they want to stay competitive. Loyalty is what's gonna make you competitive throughout the markets. If you look at some of the bigger brands that have been around for 40, 50, 60, 70 years that are in the billion dollar club, what have they earned? Loyalty. How do they earn the loyalty? Through consistency of elevated product, elevated experience, elevated food, elevated ambiance, right? The trifecta of consistency. And so that's what we want to teach this GM today. We're gonna show him how to do it. He's having a huge issue. He's been in the industry for 30 years, absolutely crushing it, working with some of the biggest brands and biggest names. And now he went on his own journey to partner with a company to grow and skill it. They want to go to three locations and then 10. He's been a high functioning, very high successful, very accomplished GM. But now, how do we take things to the next level when you have to build everything on your own? And we're gonna show him how to do that. So tell me right now, uh as a GM, what's your biggest constraint in your business? What are you trying to fix? Like what if you can fix one thing right now, had a magic wand for your business, what would you fix?

SPEAKER_01 2:33

Uh, my main thing that would be hospitality, right? Because without hospitality, you're not gonna go anywhere. Without hospitality, you're handicapped, right? So, and nowadays, as you know, it's very hard and tough uh getting through everybody's head, you know, how to be hospital to the guests coming through those doors. And it doesn't matter you trim blue or green and you say one time and another time, and it still goes through here and comes out to the other. So that would be the the main thing that I would like to fix at the restaurant.

SPEAKER_00 3:09

Okay, so right now you're you feel like right now your hospitality is not where you want it to be, it's not your standard.

SPEAKER_01 3:14

Correct.

SPEAKER_00 3:14

Okay, across the board.

SPEAKER_01 3:16

Across the board.

SPEAKER_00 3:17

Okay. Um what have you tried so far to try and fix a problem?

SPEAKER_01 3:22

Well, try to have uh meetings, uh, try to teach them about hospitality, um do uh documents where they agreed and sign and agree to, but yeah, it goes out the window. Where do you see the disconnect in your opinion? I believe that nowadays the quality of employees it's not where it used to be back in the day. You know, the uh the work ethic, it's not there. Uh they just go there just to make a quick buck and and and leave. I believe that's the issue whether I'm right or wrong.

SPEAKER_00 3:58

And that's something I talk about all the time, and and and I try and get the point across to owners, to leaders, is that you have to understand who you're dealing with, right? And the the employee has changed, employees have changed. Um you're looking at Gen Z, right? Who's a completely beast of their own, right? And that's just generations. Our generation before us thought we were lazy, yeah. The generation before them thought they were lazy, right? And they're right to some degree, right? The work ethic just kind of dwindles as we go on from generation to generation with technology coming in, um and and you know, another generation treating another generation just kind of kind of snowballs. So we have to understand who we're true who we're training when it comes to Gen Z. And then we have post-COVID mindsets, correct, right? And that's something you did bring up earlier, where people got a taste of free money and they're and and and what it was like to not work, right? And that kind of lowered the bar and that work ethic for a lot of people, right? And you're seeing it. Um, and we kind of have to snap them back into reality. Correct. The fact that AI is around, and AI is gonna change the way people learn and buy in. Right now, if I were to create a document, I would I could just put it on on Chat GPT or Claude or whatever, an AI thing, and it would start the document for me and I'm gonna edit it. And there's a lot of people now that are operating that way, right? There's a lot of people that are getting information that way. They want to learn something new, they go to AI, right? The reason why that's important is because it the way people are learning is changing, right? And it's gonna be a whole generation that was brought up on that. And so we have to do two things as owners and as managers and leaders. We have to understand that now, right? Has an effect, right? Um a small effect, but still an effect, right? And number two, it's gonna have a huge effect in the future. So we have to future proof our business thinking about stuff like that. Yes, yeah, absolutely. So those are some things we want to focus on when we're coming into this. But a big, a big point of uh what's happening with with uh your your situation is first of all, every restaurant is dealing with this, right? I mean, I have not talked to a restaurant who said, you know what, our training's just perfect and our hospitality's everyone's just executing it, right? Correct, yeah. Um it's it's and it's also a high-level problem, which is a good thing. You know, there's there's just different phases of a restaurant. First, you have to understand your your food needs to be consistent, first and foremost, right? That has to be number one. Without that, you fail.

SPEAKER_02 6:19

Correct.

SPEAKER_00 6:20

Once you get to that level, then you go into finance, make sure that your numbers are good, you're watching your numbers, your PL, you understand your labor, understand your costs, because that way you can monitor revenue coming in. And when you understand finances, which you do, when you understand finances, that's how you control your profit. Correct. Right? So I can have this much revenue. Me knowing my finances, me monitoring my finances and managing my finances only controls this. It won't help with revenue, right? It's only gonna help with this, right? It can affect revenue. If you're saying, like, oh, I want to cut labor a lot because I'm trying to save money, that can affect revenue. But just you like monitoring your your food waste, monitoring uh uh liquor inventory, right? Monitoring um uh uh uh labor, right? All that stuff can just mess with your profit lines. And so you can make sure that's that's being handled. The the high level phase is is where you go into the top 10% of restaurants, and you've been in the industry for a long time, right? You've seen a lot. Yes. How many restaurants have consistent elevated hospitality dialed, right? Like a as a system. It's very rare. Yep, right? It's a battle, it's a constant fight, constant battle. That's the top 10%, right? And that's what you're trying to get into, and that's that's hard to do. And so it's a constant battle because you have employees, right? And they're a wild card. You have guests, they're a wild card. It's not one size fits all. Exactly. Because in a kitchen, you can say, Here's here's a recipe card, here's the ingredients, here's here's the time we need it out, and and and here's your station, right? And then they just have to go to work. Boom, boom, boom. It's just it's just it's it's it's a conveyor belt, right? In the kitchen. When you go on the floor, now you're dealing with guests. Now you're dealing with uh other employees, now you're dealing with staff. It it becomes a wild card and you have to create an experience for each person. Will Godera calls it one for one, right? It's not one for all, it's one for one. I'm gonna give you a great hospitality experience, and I'm gonna have to, I'm gonna have to figure out how to do that with you. So it's not like a chef where he's like, I'm preparing these dishes in the same dish every single time. I just gotta get fast and make sure it's accurate, make sure it's good. We're going to a guest and having to give them a hospitality experience, and that's one for one. So this is where it gets really complicated and people fail. And so, what do you think right now, like what should what's the biggest pushback you're getting from your staff?

SPEAKER_01 8:30

Uh it's not really a pushback. Uh uh, I believe again, it's it's how they were brought up coming in, you know, it starts from the moment that you hire them and the quality of employees. It's just it's just it's just it's really it's really hard to to get through them, you know, to get them to buy in it. And as much as I sit one-on-one and I go with them, what the expectations are, it's still at the end of the day, you know, they go with it with one day and then the next day they they forgot about it.

SPEAKER_00 9:10

So you teach them something, then they that day they go, okay, got it. They do it, and then the next day they stop doing it. Yeah, and that's so common. And that's just I'm gonna show you that's that's lack of systems, right? That's all it's saying. You just you're lacking systems, and there's some things around that that you have to build to do that. I'm gonna show you how to fix that. But you know, you gotta think about it like what you're doing, is kind of like putting on a contest for upselling, right? Yeah, so I have restaurants that do that all the time. We're gonna upsell this weekend. If you guys upsell this one thing, we're whoever wins gets a you know a gift card or they get a bottle of wine or they get to pick their own schedule. So I want you guys to upsell whoever upsells the most, right? And all of a sudden everyone's sales kind of goes up, right? And then you know, the sale goes on, sales go up, but what happens the next day? It's it's over. It's over. No one's everyone stops upselling, right? And so there's a study called the Cobra effect. This is a real, a real uh story. This is way back in the day. It was, I think, in India, they had way too many cobras, okay? This back in the day. And so you could be like walking down the street, a cobra comes out, nowhere bites you. Okay, and so the government said we got to figure out the cobra problem. So they um they said, if you kill a cobra and you bring us their skin, we'll give you$10, right? Or whatever,$10,$10 in their currency. And so uh they were trying to motivate people to go hunt and kill and and lower the cobra population by doing that, right? The problem was what people started doing was they started gamifying it. Okay, so what they were doing was they're opening cobra farms. They would start cobra farms, breed cobras, grow them, kill them, and then turn in the skin, right? And so they started doing this like crazy, and all of a sudden the government caught on, right? They go, China would happen. They got mad and they said, No more, we're done. This we're not doing this anymore, right? And so then the cobra uh farms that were all over the place had all these cobras, what do we could do with them? Right? They released them into the wild. So by the time it was done, the cobra problem was worse than when the government got involved because of that. And so the moral of that story is you know, the motivating people the wrong way sometimes leads to bad results, right? And with good intentions. Yeah, so I always talk about that, right? When you're having a sales contest, this is just an example, right? Because people do this all the time with motivation, different ways to motivate. If we motivate the staff to do something, but we have to incentivize them basically to do their job, right? We're incentivizing them to do their job, we're gonna fail, right? That's why sales contests don't work, they're temporary. We want to make stuff like that part of the culture, right? We want to make hospitality part of the culture. That's my second question. And and this might not even apply, but do you feel like your team upsells consistently?

SPEAKER_01 11:49

No.

SPEAKER_00 11:49

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 11:50

Yeah. No, that's that's yeah, they don't do that. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 11:53

Right away, you're leaving five percent on every check average, on average, right? You know, you're losing about five percent, seven percent in sales without upselling. Now, there's two things. Okay, one, if you have this is a study, right? It's it's a it's a statistic. If you have, if your staff, your friend of the house staff knows the menu inside and out, then your check average is raised by five percent on average because they know the menu so well. It's not even upselling, it's just knowledge. Having that knowledge makes them upsell. Number two, if they do upsell, which becomes like a simple ask at every table, your check averages increase by by three to seven percent, depending on on your restaurant. So those are numbers, those are like real numbers that we want to like pay attention to, right? Because you're talking about knowledge, you're talking about upselling, that could be a 10% increase in check averages, a 10% increase in revenue a year, right? Which seems crazy, but at the same time, uh, a lot of restaurants leave the money on the table, and we're consumers, we go out to eat. I see it all the time. I go to a restaurant, I'm like, they didn't upsell me one time, they didn't upsell me one time, they didn't even try, right? They're not even asking. But then you go to some restaurants and they masterfully upsell. Yeah, and I always use this uh example. I went to a steakhouse. Again, this is menu engineering, which we'll go over in a minute, but they had a steak, right? And it was like all obviously they're known for their steaks, and then at the bottom they had steak butter because you want to add a steak butter onto your steak. And so I ordered like a fillet for like it was like 50 bucks, and then the server was like, By the way, you have to try that with our bone marrow butter because we make it in-house from scratch. We use a special type of butter. We take the bone marrow from actual bones and we make it uh to order, and then when you put it on top of the fillet, it gives it a the like that rich, fatty flavor of a ribeye, but it's a filet, so you have to deal with any of the fatty and the trims and all that stuff. And he's like, Did you want to try that? Yeah, I it would be crazy for you not to. And I was like, Yeah, let's do it. We'll both take a scoop of the butter, right? We get it, so good. It's amazing. We're like, oh my god, we're eating it like this. Is so good, right? And that partially that's because the server sold it so well. Correct. You know what I mean? Because he got us so excited, our mind was like geared towards enjoying it. Yes, right? So we enjoy it even more. Yeah, it's kind of like at a restaurant and the Somalier is telling you, like, you're gonna taste bark and earth. Yeah, and you go and you taste, you go, okay.

SPEAKER_02 14:04

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:06

Yeah, yeah, you're like, yeah, I get it. Do you taste it? Probably not, but your mind is pulling what he said. Yeah, exactly, psychologically. So you're pulling for that, you're trying to taste it. And so when people when you when you upsell properly, right, you now you're pulling for that, those flavors, and so, but it was a good, it was a good product, right? So just it was it all worked out like to make it go parabolic for us. And so at the end, we get our bill, and it's sixteen dollars for a scoop of that butter. Yeah, 16, right? And so normally I would, you know, it's a little sticker shock, it's high. But at the end of the day, I said, you know what? I really liked it. It was worth it. It was worth it. And I'm glad he wrote, thank you for recommending it, right? It's not like, oh my god, what the heck? Thank you. Yeah, I thank you for making me have a better experience. Yeah, that's great.

SPEAKER_01 14:48

They're for you.

SPEAKER_00 14:49

Yes, exactly. He made me have a good experience and it cost me more money, and I was happy about it. That's upselling, right? And you can do that any restaurant. I've seen we've worked with burger places that do the same thing. It's menu, menu engineering, and then uh strategy and training, right? We gotta have the strategy first of all, menu engineer uh correctly, and then we have to have the training for the staff.

SPEAKER_02 15:08

Correct.

SPEAKER_00 15:08

And there's some things that go around that. But let's talk about hospitality. I want to go over here. Okay, so there's a couple of things when you talk about hospitality. So, right now, the way you're working with hospitality, you're saying that I have okay, I talk to my staff, right? I'm talking to them, I'm having conversations with them, they're not listening. Or they they listen, it's impactful, and they get it, and then you're excited, you see them on the floor, you're like, all right, they got it. And then you go back a week later and you walk in, you see that same server, and they're doing they're going back to their old ways. And you're like, So what do I do? Do I have to go talk to them every day? I have to keep going over it every single day, right? So there's a couple things that are broken. Okay, and now I know you're coming into this job, right? Correct. You didn't open this location because it's six years old, correct? Yes. And so you're not, you didn't open it. So you're coming into the job, which means you have employees that are already trained, already set in their ways. Correct. So that's what we call a culture flip, right? So we have to do a culture flip. That's first things first. This is definitely gonna be the hardest part of your job. I'm just gonna tell you that right now. Okay, so a lot of times when someone in your situation, right? It's like, and I'm not saying you do this, but a lot of times someone in a situation says, Hey, I want to, I want to flip the culture, right? Come in, hospitality is not really the standard, and we need it to be, okay? We understand one thing. Like, this is this is what you want to tell like ownership and everybody that will listen, right? We're running a restaurant, right? And so the our restaurant is contingent. One thing is contingent is off of revenue. Revenue is the ultimate dictator of what we are, how successful we are, right? We can walk in our doors and say the beautiful is the restaurant's the most beautiful, the food's coming out as consistent as possible, everyone's super happy, right? But if our revenue is low, we're it doesn't matter, right? We're failing somewhere clearly as a business, right? We're doing we're doing something wrong. Um so we have to figure out what that is, right? So revenue is obviously the driver. So when we reverse engineer from there, right, what drives revenue more than anything for a restaurant, it's always going to be guest and customer retention. Retention. That's it. That's the name of the game. How do we master that? How do we solve for that? How are we getting retention? How do we get people to come back? How do we get people to um tell their friends and family? And how do we get people to leave reviews? That's one thing I want you to like start talking to your team about and your owner also about like, hey, this is what we want to focus on. Every time a guest walks in the door, every single time a guest walks in the door, our mission and everybody's mission in the building, okay? Food runner, busser, bartender, hostess, manager, our mission is to say, how do we turn them into three guests? Okay, not how do we get them to make sure they come in? They leave happy. How are they doing?

unknown 17:34

Right?

SPEAKER_00 17:34

They're doing good? Okay, awesome. Right? That's not enough. We got to make sure that we turn them into three guests. Does that make sense? Yes. Okay. So how do we do that? Again, we want to make sure they come back. We want to get them to tell their friends and family, and we want to get them to write a review. That's the most we can get out of someone coming in the door. We want to leverage that guest that's walking in, leverage them to make us to make to drive up revenue in the next 30, 60, 90, uh 365 days, right? We're leveraging everybody that comes in. So we're not extracting cash out of them, right? We're not extracting, what is it, per person average,$40? 40 bucks. We're not extracting$40 out of them. Yeah. That is that is the that is the minimum. We don't want that. What we want to do is we want to leverage them to make our our year end better, right? To make year two, year four, year six, year ten better, right? We're leveraging everyone that comes in to propel our sales and our revenue the next month, next year, next 10 years, right? And so the way we do that is we say, what do we do when I make sure A, that when they go through this experience, they come back. Okay? I'm gonna make sure that A, B, what do I do to make sure that they have such a good experience, they're gonna have to tell their friends and family about it, right? What'd you go to eat last night? I went to Dawn Orange. Oh my god, how was it? That place is freaking amazing, right? And one of the things that's important to understand to put perspective into this, and I encourage you to do this. Talk to your staff, right? Have a have a pre-shift with your staff, right? And let's say there's four or five of them. Ask them, what was your best experience you ever had at a restaurant? Tell me about it. And think about it, take time. But what was the best experience you've ever had at a restaurant in your life? Okay, now, what was the worst experience you've ever had at a restaurant? And then have them tell you, right? First, best, best best. Okay, no, worse. Now, what you're gonna see nine times out of ten is they're gonna say, if it's the best experience, it's gonna be people, right? The people were responsible for it. Meaning, what was the best experience you ever had? Oh, I went to this uh this restaurant and the server was so nice. They did this, and then the manager came out and did that, right? Or I went to this restaurant and they messed up my order, but then they did all this stuff. It was so I could not believe how awesome it was. Worst experience is gonna be a freaking person, right?

SPEAKER_01 19:39

The server was this, and then the manager had the audacity to say this and this and that.

SPEAKER_00 19:44

Exactly, yeah, right? Yeah. I walked in and the host was this, and then the the the freaking host had the audacity to do that, and then they pissed me off because they did this, right? And you can see them get all emotional. They're never gonna say, What was the worst experience at a restaurant? Uh I went to this restaurant and the food took 40 minutes. That was the worst experience, right? No, no, that's not it. No, because even if it was the 40 minutes, it's people are getting pissed. People don't stop going to restaurants, people don't leave bad reviews because of long ticket times, right? Because of cold food. They they get pissed because of the way the the business responds. So the reaction of the employer, yeah. Exactly. So you sit there and go, oh, you didn't care, right? Oh, so sorry about that. Yep, so sorry about that. Well, take that off your bill. Enjoy, right? My name's Pressy. Anything else, let me know. That lackluster response is why we get pissed, right? You don't care. And that's that's so that's that's where we fail. So we have to understand that the reason why people come back, and the reason why people don't come back is because of people, right? They'll come back for the food only a couple of times before that wears off and the service isn't up to par. Because you guys are in Mexican food, right? Mexican food, you guys are at modern, elevated Mexican food, but we're in California, there's a lot of places that are like that, right? So I can take my pick. I can take my pick. And if I'm gonna go to the place that treats me the best versus a place that everywhere serves uh good food, right? And people actually take lesser desired product as long as it comes with comfort. So comfort comes from consistency, right? I know if I walk in the building what I'm gonna get. That's why McDonald's is successful. No matter what McDonald's you go to, even though it's not the best burger in the world, I know exactly what I'm gonna get. And I pay for that. That's why McDonald's has a success, and that's why uh the you know, restaurants with the great best hospitality give that consistent experience, right? So we want to get this down. So that's why this hospitality piece is so important. So we have to do a culture flip. So a lot of managers are and and leaders and owners think that training is the solution, right? It's training is a solution, right? So um first things first is hiring. Oops. And then we have uh onboarding, right? Okay, so oops. So we have hiring, we have onboarding. Right? And then we have uh I'll just say floor ready. Okay, so I want to just break this down for you really quickly so you understand this moving forward. These things do matter, but this is the most important thing right now, and this connects to this, okay? So hiring, right? When I hire someone, most people hire completely incorrect, especially in restaurants, awful practices, right? It's just kind of like, hey, you interview them and then have them interview, have them interview, right? And then let's all talk. Good. Yeah?

SPEAKER_02 22:28

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:28

All right, cool. We really need a server, so let's just hire. Instead, hiring should be all mapped out. Uh, you should ask the same questions every single time, same questions, and they should be the right questions that we're asking, right? And then we set expectations. And so that's why I say this is an expectation phase, right? This is the expectation phase. So, meaning I'm you are setting expectations in this phase. Hey, by the way, just let you know, we're obsessed with hospitality here. Like, this is a number one thing. We do our number one focus is guest experience hospitality, okay? Not talk, actually doing it. So there's a couple things that one, if I ask you to go clean something in the bathroom, I'm asking you to do that for the guest experience, right? And so you would be in this situation willing to do it because you're gonna be as dedicated as we are to the guest experience. It's a group effort. Are you okay working in those conditions? Are you sure? Okay, because I just want to let you know right now, if you don't, if you're not adhering to it, then we're gonna hold you accountable. We're we're a we're a company of accountability, and we're gonna hold you accountable, hold everyone accountable. And if you know, after a couple of times, it's probably not gonna be the place you want to work. So I want to save you the heartache. Are you sure you're okay working in these environments? Do you think you'll be able to thrive in those types of environments? And then, you know, oh wow, okay, that's intense. But yeah, okay, now they're going home, they're like, okay, I see what they're saying, they take it serious. Now I'm gonna take it serious, right? And I want and and and then the onboarding process, expectation phase, and onboarding process is a commitment phase, okay? So the onboarding process is a commitment phase. Okay, so this is training. When I take them through, how many days of training do you guys have right now?

SPEAKER_01 24:00

Um five to seven.

SPEAKER_00 24:01

Five to seven, okay. So five to seven training days, right? That's the commitment phase. Okay, so for example, right now, if you said to the staff, um if you said to the staff, every night we're going to you you you prep the salsa for the next day, okay? To the servers. So the night before every day, you're gonna cut the tomatoes and cut the cilantro and prep the salsa. And that if you did that on the onboarding phase, right, while they're training, they might go, well, that's kind of crazy and weird, but if that's what you guys do, that's what you guys do, right? I will commit to that because no one's just sitting there and go, no, that's not I'm not gonna do that. What's next, right? No, that's kind of crazy, but I'll do it, okay? So we can set the expectations during the hiring phase. We can get them to commit to those expectations in the onboarding phase, as long as the training is done right, which is a whole nother beast of its own. But here's where the culture flip is important because here's where you'll fail. Because if I were to come in and set this up for your restaurant, if I said I'm gonna set up all your hiring practices, right? I'm gonna set up all of your training, and I'm gonna train your trainers to train, and I get this all dialed in for you, right, over like 60 days. We will fail because this is the problem, is the implementation phase, okay? Now, that what does that mean, right? So, by the way, all the stuff that we train and build and all this stuff is from my experience, right? I see where restaurants fail as an employee and why it didn't work. And I also saw what did work, right? And so that's why we are so effective, is because we are the people that are actually we understand the from the inside out, right? Um, so imagine I get hired and we say, we're all about hospitality. Hospitality is our number one focus. Can you commit to that? We're gonna hold you accountable if you don't. Can you commit to that, right? Yeah, of course. Okay, yeah, I want the job, so I'll commit to it. Okay, cool. Now we're gonna train and we're training them, and we're saying this is the onboarding phase, this is the hospitality part, this is this, this is that, right? We're going over and over and over again. Hospitality, hospitality. We're smiling at every table, we're talking at every table. We put our hands behind our back, whatever it is, right? Put our hands behind our back, right? We when we see a guest, we always give the guest the right-of-year, right? We always point with our open hand, right? Always. And keep saying, by the way, your trainer's just saying, if you guys, I'm gonna warn you right now, if you don't do this and leadership sees, which they will, they're gonna hold you accountable. They're gonna write you up, they're gonna verbal warning, write you up, and then eventually we'll get let go of. I'm warning you right now, okay. Okay, just letting you know. They're like, okay, got it. Okay. And so this is intense, but they're like, okay, I get it. Expectation is set, I get it. I want this job, I want to keep this job, so I got it, right? And so after that, now here's where everything fails with most restaurants. This even if you have even if you have this fixed, here's where you're gonna fail and is floor ready. Now, this is this is why you fail as like leadership, because I hear this all the time where they say, you know, Preston, when we're training, I talk to them all the time. We talk about hospitality, right? I talk to them when I want when they're onboarding and I tell them I sit them down to see how important it is, right? But this is where we fail, floor ready, the implementation phase is because now they get on the floor, half the people aren't doing this stuff, right? Half the people. So they told me I have to smile at every table. They told me to, they told me I have to open hand when I point, but I just saw a guy do this, right? They told me that I have to run food when it's busy. They told me I couldn't be on my phone. It's absolutely unacceptable, but I just saw two employees on their phones. So now every expectations that you set, and then the um commitment that I made during the that that you had me make during the training process is now shattered because when I got on the floor, every employee isn't adhering to the standards that you said we had to do, and if we didn't, we'd be held accountable. So listen, you set the expectation. I committed to it. I committed, I was committed fully right here. I was bought in. I got you bought, you got me bought in, but now I get on the floor and half the people aren't doing it. So you, leadership, ownership, business, prove to me that this is all BS, right? And now I you just shattered all that work you did to build that up, you shattered it. And now I see even 30% of the people not doing the things you told me to do. I now know there's no standards here. No one's watching. Yeah, because if they can get away with it, I can get away with it. If they're comfortable enough to get away with it, then they can't. And so that's where we fail, right? Floor ready. So we have to focus on that. So we need to do the culture flip. And so the culture flip is really important, right? The culture flip is how we fix things first. So most people say, I want to, I want to fix my training. And they hire people, go fix my training, train my current staff, blah, blah, blah. So two things, okay. Number one, we don't want to fix training first. We want to fix our culture in our restaurant first. If we're floor ready, right, if the implementation phase is fixed, then we can start fixing the training phase and then we start fixing the hiring phase. We go backwards, okay, right? Because we want this to be fixed first. The biggest part is broken, is which are our current standard. We if this is not if our current standard is not being lived up to by all of our employees now, there's no way we're bringing a new employee and telling them to hold the standard, right? Can you imagine how crazy that is? I want the new employee to hold the standard, even though all the seniority and they're not doing it, right? Well, how? That's impossible. That's not how business works, right? It's not how people work. We have to lead the way. Our staff has to, our current staff has to lead the way. Number two, you don't want someone training your staff, right? You want yourself, your trainers in your business, and your leadership team to be training your staff. For example, if I go in and I train your staff for 10 days and I make them rock stars, I train them for 30 days and I make them rock stars, awesome. What happens when I leave? All that goes out the window. You know, it's just a matter of time, six months, whatever. But all that investment, all that time goes out the window. You guys weren't properly trained to train. And more importantly, your business doesn't have a self-perpetual perpetuating system to train people. That's what you want. You don't want, it's not, the success doesn't lie in the trainer. The success lies in the system in your business to train people. Okay, you build that, you're gonna be successful. Like, what do you think one of the number one restaurants are? What would you consider one of the number one restaurants in in hospitality in the world? Um, the rits. In your opinion. Yeah, the Ritz. The Rich Carleton. Okay. So you think the Rich Carleton was like, what do you think their strategy was? Let's hire a really good trainer and have them train my staff? Or let's build out a training system that lives in the business. It's not contingent on any manager, it's not contingent on any trainer, it's not contingent on any employee. It lives in the business, it runs itself. We just have to manage it. And we can train people to manage that. And that's how we train our people, and that's how we get our success. Which one do you think they did? They they build a system. They build the system, a hundred percent. They build the system, right? And so that's where most restaurants get it wrong, too, right? They're like, well, let's hire, they want, they want a quick fix, let's hire someone to train our people. And they can have videos, and it's that's not the solution. You want to build systems. That's always gonna be your solution. That's long term, right? 10%, top 10%, bottom 90% are saying we want a quick solution, have someone come in and train them. Now you can have the system and have someone come in and train that system. That's one thing. Training actual people, that's not gonna work. So that's what we want to focus on. So the culture flip. How do we fix this, right? How do we fix our current culture? How do we fix our current culture without having to spend a bunch of money or a bunch of time on it, okay? There's a way to do it, okay? So there's three mechanisms you need to focus on right now, right? How many leaderships uh leaders do you have underneath you or with you? Uh right now I have uh three. Okay, so you have three leaders plus yourself, right? So, first things first, this is the most important piece, is you have to have a leadership. Okay? So if you want to do a culture flip, we need a leadership. Okay. Now, what's really important about leadership is a couple things. Leadership needs to be developed. Okay, so they have to under they have to understand hospitality, they have to understand how to talk to staff, right? We call it the four corners of leadership, okay? And I'm gonna give you a uh it's it's this is gonna be in the book, okay? Four corners of leadership, which is emotional intelligence, which is basically I understand my emotions, right? I understand to control my emotions, I understand to read your emotions. We can do that, we can be, we can, we can we can be a lot more successful, right? So instead of me getting angry really quickly or getting judgmental of staff, I understand why staff's work in a certain way, I understand to control my own temperament, my own, my own issues, and I'm gonna be able to navigate as a human being and as a leader much better. So most staff, most leaders never get trained on this, right? Guess recovery is number two. Have you ever so guess recovery? Do you think right now your leadership team, if someone is upset that you trust them 100% to go fix it, like like the best out of best in class? No. Yeah. So that's a problem because we have to understand that 90% of people, statistically, 90% of people will never raise their hand and say, I'm having a bad experience. Correct. What do they do?

SPEAKER_01 32:24

They, I mean, you can see on their face, or you know, they're still looking around, and you have to know so to watch out for those little signs.

SPEAKER_00 32:31

Absolutely. We have to uh we have to see the signs before they happen because if they if we don't, if we don't identify someone having a bad experience, they're gonna leave and they're never coming back. Correct. And they're gonna tell their friends and family and they're gonna write a bad review, right? So guess recovery is something we need to train on. But most people never train their leadership team on that. No, it's it's crazy, okay? And then we also have to have inspiration. Now, inspiration, what does that mean? Inspiration means that they actually are inspiring to the staff, which means I'm on the floor, I'm working, right? I'm not in the office, I'm on the floor, I'm making your job better, I'm here to support you. I truly make my staff feel supported. That doesn't mean that you bend your knee to your staff. That doesn't mean that you they take their excuses, let them do whatever they want. That just means we're on the floor. I'm gonna do everything in my power to make sure this runs as smooth as possible, even if it means getting my hands dirty, rolling up my sleeves. If you're gonna see me in the dish station, right? Sometimes. Yeah. Because I'm freaking dedicated. That's inspiration, right? We got to train on that. The this the freaking manager in the office, like to just get a desk job. Yeah, seriously. That's right. Yeah. So these are the first three. The fourth one I don't even want to get into right now because it's gonna be too deep. These are just the three we want to focus on. If we can just get them to have a little bit of emotional intelligence, a really baseline level, I can read you and I can read myself. Guess recovery and emotional intelligence. Now, we uh so leadership has to be developed a little bit. Now, more importantly, or just as importantly, they have to be aligned, okay? When alignment's important with accountability. You can't have the good cop, bad cop. You can't have mom and dad, right? Yeah, have you experienced that before? Yes. And what happens? Nothing happens. Yeah, nothing happens. That's a perfect way to put it. Yeah, nothing happens. Exactly. Nothing happens, right? Because good cop, bad cop. I can walk in, this boss can hold me accountable for this and that, and this boss won't. Yeah. So there's no consistency. I always tell people the number one thing that leads to guest retention being broken is lack of consistency. You cannot ask your staff to be consistent if you, as leaders, aren't consistent. If we're not consistently holding pre-shifts, if we're not consistently holding people accountable, right? If we're not consistently sending the same message, if we're not consistently being inspirational, right? If we're not consistent, there's no way they're gonna be consistent. The consistency starts with leadership. Starts with us, right? And so we have to, all four of you guys, we hold people accountable. Someone came in late, you didn't write them up, talk to me. What happened? Why didn't you do that? Yeah. Oh, their dog was, did they, but did they call? Did they go to the right procedures? No. Okay, that's a verbal warrant. What's a problem? Like unacceptable. So you just signal to the rest of the staff that now everyone could be late. That's okay. Yeah, because if I let her be late, yeah, well, I let I I just let everyone be late. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:03

We're in California. Yeah, you can do nothing now because they say, well, you didn't do nothing for her, why are you doing it for me? Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 35:08

You so you just exactly you just put yourself in a corner.

SPEAKER_01 35:11

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 35:11

Right? Why do that? Instead, we're gonna take control as leaders, okay? So we're gonna hold people accountable no matter what. We're gonna but we have to train them properly and we have to we have to set expectations, which they don't have expectations set yet. And so the way we're gonna do this is a first step you're gonna take with your team. Okay? This is the first step. We gotta get aligned, okay? Number one, we have to get aligned, we have to be inspirational, okay? We are never in the office during business hours. If you have paperwork to do, we'll give you four hours a week, six hours a week. Before shift or after shift, right? Or or hey, I'm I'm on the floor now, you have you know, four hours, go jump in the office, do your paperwork, right? You have to become efficient. Yeah, it's up to you to become ineffective, but you have to be on the floor. I don't care if it's slow, your presence is there.

SPEAKER_01 35:58

That's right.

SPEAKER_00 35:58

You're not hiding. They know you're there. You know, they're gonna take you more seriously too. So we have to get aligned and then we have to get uh accountability across the board. We want to start talking about how accountability is us holding each other accountable for excellence. It's a good thing.

SPEAKER_01 36:10

Yeah, right?

SPEAKER_00 36:12

I always say if you run a red light and a cop sees you, what's that cop gonna do? Well, they're gonna give you a ticket. They're gonna give you a ticket, right? Right. But why do they give you the ticket in the first place?

SPEAKER_01 36:22

For to prevent something happening to you or you doing something to somebody else.

SPEAKER_00 36:26

So you're saying when you run a red light, you're saying as a civilian, I know best. I I don't need this light system because I know I can run this red light and nothing will happen, right? I can overcome that, right? I can overcome all that stuff. So I I don't need your direction, I don't need your rules, right? But of course, the problem is if everyone starts operating like that, then there's a lot of freaking accidents, right? So the cops have to step in and say, I know you think you know better, but you don't. You have to abide by the rules like everyone else. I don't care if you're in a rush, I don't care if you're you think you're you're special, you have to stop with a red light like everyone else. Now, if you were to run that red light and hit someone or get hit and you were to get severely injured or someone else was, that'd be a lot worse than this$600 ticket I'm about to give you. Okay, but I'm giving this ticket to hold you accountable to hopefully prevent you saving your life. And I'm gonna give someone else a ticket that might have hit someone that you love, you knew that you that or maybe yourself, right? Could kill you. Exactly. I'm giving other people tickets to prevent that as well. So accountability is a good thing. Accountability is how we how we reach excellence. No organization in the world is um high level that doesn't have a high accountability culture. Look at Chick-fil-A. Highly accountable. You get held accountable consistently across the board. And we and by the way, so we talked about the expectation phase, right? The commitment phase and the implementation phase. Think about it this way with accountability, right? If I'm setting expectations right off the bat, if you still if you're late by five minutes, or if you're late by a minute, a minute, one minute, you're your in times at one o'clock and you come in at 101, we're gonna give you a verbal warning. If it happens again, we'll give you a written warning. If it happens a third time, we're probably gonna see if you're still gonna be right the right fit for this company. And you're probably not, right? Is that fair? Can you work in those conditions? Yes. Okay, so I set the expectation. Cool. Then commitment phase, when they're talking to the staff, trainer every day is going, I just want to remind you one more time. Well, maybe it's super clear. They're very serious about it. It's not like a normal restaurant. If you're a minute late, they will hold you accountable. I would recommend if you take the bus, if you live far, just plan on being able to work 15, 20 minutes early. I'm just letting you know right now, okay? Is that fair? Do you get do you get okay? Yeah, I know. Okay, wow, right now, implementation phase, right? Four months down the road, they show up at 103. I talked to you in the office, yeah. Do you remember what we said about the and remember then we hired you? We talked about that, you signed that paper. Okay. And you remember what we talked to you about training too? We warned you like five times. Remember that? Okay, wow. Oh, nope. The play is like this. I get it. Yeah, please. And I though I sign up.

SPEAKER_01 38:57

Happily sign.

SPEAKER_00 38:58

I get it. I messed up, right? And by the way, I saw you doing this with John and Steve and Tom. I saw, so yeah, so happily sign it. Now, what happens is most restaurants won't set the expectations correctly, they don't set the commitment properly, and they don't hold people accountable on the floor, right? And then you show up late 10 times and finally I'm so frustrated, I'm like, I'm gonna write you up. You're like, write me up. Well, what do you mean? I have all the excuses. I mean, you know, doctor, grandma, uh dog, car, I give you all the excuses and you didn't hold them accountable, you didn't write them up. Now you have this problem, right? That's where account, and then now a leadership, your manager's like, I don't want to hold people accountable. Yeah, right? Because I know I'm gonna go to a freaking war, it's a battle. Like we both leave upset. I don't want to do that, I don't want to go through that. So I'm gonna avoid it at all costs. But when we preset accountability of culture, then it makes it much easier to actually hold people accountable. Then your staff, then your managers are much more willing to hold people accountable. And we're giving them a structure to hold people accountable, okay? But we have to build that into our business first and we have to get our leadership aligned. You guys have to hold people accountable. It can't just be me. Now, as a GM, I'm gonna hold you accountable. If I find out that we got a bad review and it wasn't addressed, if I find out someone came in late and they weren't held accountable, if I find out that someone got a guest complaint, right? If I find out the chef tells me that he saw John on his phone half the night on the back while food needed be ran, and you did nothing, we're gonna, I'm gonna have a conversation with you. So you do the same thing for your leadership team, right? They have the expectation phase, they have the commitment phase, they have the implementation phase. Because again, if you have a leader come in, right, imagine your next manager comes in and they're all everyone's, hey, we hold people accountable. They're gonna do it. Yeah, they're gonna jump right on board. Oh, okay, cool, because you're empowering them. Right now, they're being stripped of their power because there's nothing, none of their the team is not set up for accountability. Yeah, they're set up for failure, right? And so we got to make sure that they're they're doing it. Um, so that's what you want to focus on as you're going into the culture flip. Now, once we get this down, okay, leadership is gonna hold people accountable. We get this down, this piece down, then we're gonna go into the next phase, which is a culture flip. And that's that this is the final phase, right? This is by the way the hardest part. Once you do this, everything else is cake, right? This is it becomes very easy. The culture flip, you gotta think about it. You're right, you're driving an old wooden ship. Imagine, like back in the day, the pirates, pirates of the Caribbean, the giant one, and you're sitting there and you're like, ah, and you're just like this, and you're just you know barely, and it just barely you're like, I can't, and but you're just like and there's times where you're like, I want to give up. I don't even is the boat even moving? Like, what's going on, right? Because you don't see it. That's the hardest part that you're about to do right now with the culture flip accountability piece. But once you get this down, it's it's smooth selling. I want you to picture a world where you come into work and everyone shows up on time. You come into work and everyone shows up the pre-shift happy. You come into work and everyone's giving hospitality a high level. You come into work and you have another 15, 20, 30, 40 five-star reviews in one night, even though you only had 50 covers. You come into work, sales are up again, day over day, year over year, month over month. You come into work and everyone's aligned, right? Teamwork, right? Smiling, no gossiping, no, no, uh, no, no talking about tips and money, right? No one's calling out, no one's showing up late. That's what this culture flip does, right? That's what a culture of accountability does. And that's but it's so rare because you've been in the industry for long enough, right? 30 years. 30 years. 30 years, you see it. It's so rare. The first job I had, claim jumper. And and they were back before they got bought, yeah, originally owned, their culture of accountability, of training, of systems. It was the best ran restaurant I ever worked for. I never worked with so many people that were happy to be held accountable. And you would be held accountable, right? Drop of a dime, one thing wrong. We're pulling you in the office, right? But everyone was everyone was trained to do it, everyone was built bought into it. That's how you get buy-in. Okay, so we want to focus on the culture flip. This is the last piece. So we have our managers, our leaders aligned, right? They know the mission and they know the goals, they know that they're gonna be held accountable. So now that we have that piece, right, which takes time, right? Then we're gonna go to the culture flip. So the culture flip works like this, okay? Our team, our leadership team is being held accountable, uh, uh, and they know they're gonna be held accountable and they know their job now, what we're looking for. So now we have to flip the staff, okay? The current staff. And so you could have some easy ones, mostly hard ones. People are gonna push back. More importantly, even worse, it's the people that say yes and just wait for you to freaking take your foot off the gas, right? I'll wait for you to give up and then I'll just jump back in my old ways. But I'm gonna pretend like I'm good. Yeah, right. So we gotta have a culture flip where that's not gonna be the case. This is the this is the opposite of the Cobra effect that we talked about, okay? So, first things first is we have to write a script. Okay? You're gonna write a script because you're taking this serious and this is serious business. So you're gonna write a very detailed script, and then you're gonna have a company meeting, right? And you're gonna have a company meeting. It could have two, it could be two different meetings or one. Your leadership team is gonna be there, you're gonna be there, the owner's gonna be there. The owner's gonna start with the announcement, right? We're gonna be running things differently here. We're gonna be starting this new way. What got us here won't get us there. Okay, that's the new mantra of our company. Why we're successful today is not gonna be what makes us successful tomorrow. And grow us to the next level. We're today, we're starting a new initiative to grow us to the next level. That means everything that made us successful up until this point is no longer valid. We are gonna do things differently to get to that next level. Because if we do the same things over and over again like we are now, we will not grow. That's not how you grow. You have to change things to grow. We've outgrown our current model. Okay, and then now we're gonna go over this. And you're gonna do the GM's gonna pop in and say, here's how we're gonna do this initiative. Okay? So first things first, everyone, appreciate you. Awesome job, great job. We're hitting the reset button. That means there's no seniority. Okay? We want you to understand that there's no what you did for us last week, last month, awesome. We appreciate it, and we've given you a job and we paid you for it. But now we're moving on to the next phase and we need you to be executing every single day. You're not building up points to Slack, right? It's I did a great job for the last two months, so I can kind of screw up today, right? Because I I built up some some some credit. No, nope. We reset every day, we go into the next day. I'll be here side by side, you'll be getting tipped out, we're gonna pay you, provide you with a job, all that good stuff, right? Is everyone cool with that? Awesome. Okay, now we're gonna go into the next phase. What's the next phase? And you can start going over the list. We're gonna be a culture of accountability. Okay, we understand that we have not done a good job, a good enough job of supporting you by holding people accountable. If you're an A player, then there's no problem here, right? You're gonna be fine. Anything we're talking about right now has almost zero effect on you, right? Not much is gonna change for you. The B and C players might get a little bit upset. So now, now you're making that, you're painting a picture in their head, you're framing it in their head to say, if I accept that I don't like this, then I'm accepting that I'm a C player, right? So if so you so you say, you know, so A players, you know, this is all I'm speaking your language. C players, you're gonna get upset. You're probably not gonna like it. And this might be a moment to where we say, are you gonna be a good fit for the company? This is going to be kind of part of the process that we're gonna go through. And so we're gonna sit there and say, we're a culture of accountability, okay? We're gonna lay out some rules. Everyone's gonna get a document, right? Here are some non-negotiables. You're here to show up on time, you're gonna be like uh smiling when you're working. Hospitality is number one. We're gonna start implementing some things like secret shoppers, and if we get bad secret shops in any way, shape, or form, it's gonna be taken very serious, okay? And you're gonna be you're gonna be expected to execute on these levels. Number five, um, that's not my job, is no longer part of your vocabulary and anybody's vocabulary. If you're not willing to accept doing things outside the scope of your job, if a leadership member comes up to you and asks you to take out the trash, to clean something in the bathroom, to go run food, right? You're you're okay with it. And if you're not, then we're, you know, we're gonna have to talk about if it's gonna be the right fit for you anymore or not, okay? Because we're asking everyone to do what it takes to get to make the guests the best experience possible. We're going to be a company of hospitality through uh through accountability. Hospitality is our number one focus. And then we're gonna go through a dossier about talking about hospitality, why it's important. And we're not just talking at them, okay? How many employees do you have right now? Um about 40. 40? Okay. So you have 40 people in the room, let's say, right? 40 people or 20 and 20, which would be better, by the way. 20 and 20, then it's like, okay, what's how do you feel about that last piece? Tell me about that, right? Okay, what do you think hospitality means to you? Okay, what do you think about that last piece I just talked about? Okay, and then if someone goes, Oh, uh, I okay, pay attention. This is s this is really important because this might cause you like your job, right? Because you're not paying attention. I need you guys to listen because we're taking, we are all taking this serious, and we want you to take it serious. So please pay attention, okay? And then we're gonna keep moving forward, okay? And then and then we're gonna talk about it. Now we're gonna sign a piece of paper. Do you understand that if you don't do what were your job requirement, which is giving guests the best experience possible under any circumstances? If you if you're gonna be late, you have to follow a procedure. And if you don't follow that procedure, then you're you know, if you do all these things, right, you understand, right? That that if not, you're gonna get a hold of a verbal warning, written warning, all that stuff. Does that make sense to you? Are we clear on that? Can you sign that? Okay, does anybody have any questions? Now's the time to speak up. Because after this, we go into accountability mode. Again, A players, not much gonna change for you. Just keep doing what you're doing, right? Show up, give the best experience possible, give 120% like you always do, make really good money and be on your way. Be you know, be an asset to the company. For the BC players, you're gonna have a lot of issues with this, right? And this is probably gonna say maybe you want to go somewhere where that's that that that type of stuff is allowed, not gonna be here anymore, right? But other than that, we're just asking you to show up on time, give the best hospitality experience possible, which is your job, and do it with a good attitude. Does anybody have any questions? Anyone have any concerns, problems? Okay, if you don't want to talk up, uh speak up right now, feel free to come up to me after to after this. I'm willing to talk to you. Let's talk it through, right? That's how you're gonna start everything off. And everyone's gonna be like, high alert. Oh wow. And then they're gonna say, we're gonna wait for them. There's gonna be a couple people that are gonna say, first of all, push back. What's up with this? What's going on, right? And then you just have a conversation with them and you let them like dig their own grave. What why, why, why would that be a problem for you? Why would that be an issue for you? Like, why would being on time, being on time be a problem for you? Why would you know, and then uh uh let them dig their own grave. Talk to them though. It's not a battle, yeah, it's a conversation, right? It's like let them like and then just talk to them and be like, listen, we just want to have the best experience possible. I understand that it's our fault as leaders that we've let things get to a point where it's not acceptable. But we're gonna so we're just taking ownership back of the situation, and we're gonna say that we're gonna help the A players succeed, help the business succeed. That's why we're here, right? We're not here to appease a server, we're here to build a business. And so you have that conversation. Then you have the second phase of people who are going to wait for you to drop the ball, right? Uh they're gonna don't, don't they do this all the time, don't worry. Like, give it a month, right? And you have people that are just like, oh, thank you, right? Your A players are gonna be like, thank you. Like if I was in that room, I'd be like, thank you. Because I'm so tired of having to work with C players all the time, pick up their Slack and not liking my job because I'm working with people that are lowering my status, right? I feel like like I don't feel like I feel like I need to be in a more professional environment, right? I'll I'll I'll freaking I'll I'll walk through fire for you, but I can't be the only one, right? And so that's why this culture flip is so important. Now they know this, then we start doing the training process, right? So here's how we're gonna culture flip. It's called drip training. Drip training is important because you can't have a lot of change at once. Very important, right? We don't want to say, okay, cool, you know that here's a here's a 20-page document, and we're gonna start training like we're start doing this from now on. We're gonna assume we're gonna go from zero, right? Zero to a hundred, yeah, and we gotta drip it in slowly but surely, drip it in, okay? And so we're gonna use pre-shifts to do this. Okay. How many how often are you pre-shifting?

SPEAKER_01 50:29

Um every day.

SPEAKER_00 50:30

Every day? Okay, both uh because you have lunch and dinner, right?

SPEAKER_01 50:33

Yeah, but I'm most likely uh the one doing it in again. That goes back to say it. The other manager is not following the procedure. Whose procedure? My procedure.

SPEAKER_00 50:44

Yes, exactly. Unacceptable. Yeah, unacceptable. And that's the conversation you're gonna have, right? With the owner, by the way, say, I need your I need your back. You back me up here, right? And with the other manager, say, and it's not their fault, again, right? It's your fault, right? Do you agree with that? Yeah, okay. 100%. Because you've let it happen. Yep, right? We've all been there, by the way. But it's like, okay, let's take control back, right? And and and again, we're here to do this. There's no benefit for me holding someone accountable. There's no benefit for me putting these things in place other than achieving excellence. That's it. I'm gonna make you better at your job. I'm gonna make your job more fulfilling, I'm gonna make your job easier, right? But we're gonna have to do some work right now up front to get to that result, right? And you have to be willing to do the work with me. And by the way, I know I could tell by the conversations we have, you're the GM that rolls up his sleeves, right? Correct. So they're gonna be happy to follow you. And if you don't have a problem with that, then move on. Out the window. Yeah, please. Like I I can I could do more damage with two good managers and with three subpar managers, yeah, right? So drip training is so important because now we're gonna start implementing daily pre-shifts. Daily pre-shifts are important because we've got to break this down in a different way, right? Daily pre-shifts are gonna be huge because consistency is king, right? We are going to be consistent as leaders, and then that's how our staff's gonna have the best chance of being consistent. So we're gonna be consistent as leaders. Otherwise, we fail. We start with daily pre-shifts, have to be consistent, two things. One, a.m. and p.m. Okay? Two, we have to have their undivided attention, which means that if we have um staggered end times, which 90% of businesses do, yeah, we don't we don't say, okay, 4 p.m., 5 p.m., 6 p.m., 6 p.m., we'll have a pre-shift with everybody. Why do you think that's problematic?

SPEAKER_01 52:28

Because that's when you'll be CRA, the people cut they cut tables and they write it going like this.

SPEAKER_00 52:33

Exactly, right? So I'm we have to look at this is basically gonna be what makes your business successful or not, you guys successful or not. There's it's accountability and consistency, and it's how you hold your pre-shifts. Your pre-shifts are going to lock look at it, it's like this the chain, right? This chain will never break if you keep building it, right? Yeah. Day after day after day. It only breaks when you break it, when your leadership team breaks it. Otherwise, we build a super strong chain of hospitality, of training, of excellence, of consistency, right? We're building that into our brand by building this chain up, but it breaks the moment we decide not to do it, okay? We have every excuse, and so your leaders will have every excuse of why not to do it. Unacceptable. We do this every single day. I don't care if the freaking ship is burning down and half the people called out, and we got a crazy slam out of nowhere, and the fires are happening. When you come in, we're gonna pre-shift and we're gonna take it serious. We have to have their undivided attention, so that means if it's their four, five, and six, we're doing individual pre-shifts. So instead of having a 10-minute pre-shift, we can have a three to five minute pre-shift with each person. Pull them aside, you have a dossier out, right? Two important things. One is we do the pre-shift right. We don't talk about covers, covers. We don't talk about 86 items, we don't talk about specials, right? Because they can learn this on a piece of paper. We can require that, okay? What we want to talk about is what?

SPEAKER_01 53:50

Uh how make the experiences better.

SPEAKER_00 53:52

Yes. Right? What's our number one goal we're trying to fix?

SPEAKER_01 53:54

Hospitality.

SPEAKER_00 53:55

Hospitality. So that's what we're talking about every single day. We now have a tool where we can talk to them, reconnect them, realign them, right, with hospitality, right? We we get we we reset their brain. They're gonna come in, all of a sudden, people are turning into numbers. People are turning into numbers, people are turning into numbers, right? You're just a number, you're just a number. Hi, welcome, how's it going, right? We're gonna reset that every single day. Reset it. Remember, these are human beings that are coming in, they're spending their hard-earned money. They deserve your honor, they deserve your attention, right? They deserve the hospitality piece. We got to reset that. We got to focus on it. So we're gonna we're gonna use this to reset it, and we're gonna use this to drip train. So we're gonna break up the experience into pieces. What's the number one experience I want to fix? We'll start at the beginning, right? The greet. How are we greeting the guests, right? At the door, how are we greeting the guests at the door for the hostess, right? How are we greeting the guests at the uh when they sit at the table as a server, right? And we build that into our daily pre-shift training for let's say a week or two weeks, right? Nonstop. Every day. We're talking about the same exact thing, okay? And now you say, Well, Preston, what if I have an employee who sees it five times in a row? Right? I would ask you this question Would there be a problem with training someone on something five days in a row, the same exact thing?

SPEAKER_01 55:07

They can say it's repetitive or worst case scenario, right? Worst case scenario. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 55:12

Best case scenario, we're hammering him and they'll go exactly grain. Right. We're not stopping, we're not stopping, we're not stopping. And there's another important thing. So now we have the information down. The next phase is what's important is how we're delivering the information. So now we know what information to give, how are we delivering it? So if I go and I spot talk to you for five minutes straight, even if I'm looking at you like this and I talk for five minutes straight, you're gonna be anywhere but that moment, right? Uh-huh, uh-huh, right? Yeah, and you're gonna be thinking about everything else besides what I'm saying, right? Because I'm not, I'm just like, because you know, I just talk and then I'm done, you walk away. So instead I go, okay, so first of all, tell me what you did last month last night to give someone a hospitality experience when it's outside the box. You didn't do anything. Is there a reason why? No opportunity to give one person a hospitality experience, right? Okay, that's a problem, right? How about this? What do you do today to give someone a hospitality experience? Give me an example of what you can do. Okay, I want you to talk, we're gonna talk about after your shift, we're gonna do that. Okay, and now first things first, we're gonna talk about drip training. And uh, I want to let you know, real quick, when we greet the guests, every single time we're gonna ask them if it's their first time dining with us. Okay? And then when you when they say yes or no, if they say yes, we're gonna do this. If they say no, we're gonna do that. Okay? Do you understand that? Is there anything you don't understand about that? Here's a piece of paper that if we're not questions, can you just sign here saying that you understand? Awesome. So from now on, every time a guest walks in, what are we gonna do? Okay, cool. And what happens if they say yes? All right, what happens if they say no? Okay, every single guest, every single time. What if you're really busy though? Right? What so yeah, oh no, okay, yeah, because we're not we don't we're not about speed, we're about hospitality. Hospitality first, then speed, right? We have to get first. A bartender doesn't make a crappy drink, but he made it fast. Don't make the drink crap, make the drink right, then get fast at making the drink right, right? You don't just make bad drinks because it's busy and real, oh, this tastes like crap, but at least I got it fast. No, we're not a dive bar, right? So that's what we're gonna do. Now we have secret shoppers coming in, FYI, just a reminder, secret shoppers coming in. If they mark that you didn't do it, it's gonna be a verbal warning, written warning, etc. So you understand that, right? Every single table, every single time. And we keep talking about this for two weeks straight. We're just talking about this, talking about this, talking about this, talking about this, dripping it, dripping it, dripping it, right? How to go? I know you were at the pre-shift yesterday, how to go. What response are you getting, right? What are they saying? Okay, cool. How many new like on a guess guessing how many new people do you have? New or they're right from from yesterday. Uh like I don't know, like uh four or five, awesome. How did they say they found us, right? What did you build? Like, and then you're talking to them, talking to them, talking to them, making this part of it. And then every day you do that. Now we're so that's drip training, right? First, we do the greet, okay? And then this is how you take the food order, right? This is how you're gonna, like, if someone asks about wine or whatever, cocktails, you're gonna we're gonna just keep going down the experience all the way down until they're all mapped up, but we're gonna keep bringing this stuff back up, by the way. So when I'm going, let's say that we do the greet first, okay? And then the next thing we're saying is this is how you upsell an appetizer, right? I'm just giving you a random example. That's the next two weeks. So the first two weeks is the greet, the next week's appetizer. I'm still gonna talk about the greet here. We're gonna recap. Okay, remember we're talking about that greet, right? How's that greet going? Doing it? How's it going? How many people new people did you get? What did you do special for them, right? What was the reaction? Okay, cool. Now we're gonna talk about that, the the new the new uh appetizer upselling protocol. And then you for two weeks straight, hammering home, hammering home. It's not just you, it has to be your leadership team too, doing the same exact way that you're doing it as well. Exactly. Otherwise, it's not gonna work. Otherwise, it's not going to work, it's gonna fail, right? So that's why. And then they're gonna see that they're aligned. Then they're gonna start saying that these guys are connected, right? That's right. Like they're all the same, they're other same mindset, everything. I can't get away with things with certain people. They're gonna hold me accountable, they're gonna have a pre-shift, that's consistency. You're building consistency in your leadership, and that builds consistency in your staff underneath you. That's how you do it, right? Instead of saying walking up to them one time and saying, hey, here's hospitality. Come on, guys, let's do it. This is you'll make more money, yeah, right? More people come back next month, so it'll be more money. You're right, but they're not, that doesn't, that doesn't work. They'll take less money as long as they have to they can work less.

SPEAKER_01 59:05

Yeah, right?

SPEAKER_00 59:06

Less effort, less money, no problem. Most people take that as long as it's easy. As long as it's easy, I'll take less money, right? You have a rock star every now and then. It's like, give me as much money as you can, I'll freaking kill it, blah, blah, blah. But they're few and far between. We have to develop a culture that gets this. Okay. You think this is enough to get you guys started? I think so. Do you have any questions?

SPEAKER_01 59:25

No, I think I I get it. And then this way you can see the ones that don't want to be there, then I they will leave on their own.

SPEAKER_00 59:33

They'll leave on their own, 100%.

SPEAKER_01 59:35

Not to even worry about it. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 59:36

And just let them know, hey, I don't think this is for you. It doesn't sound like you're committed to making this place better. Listen, I'm gonna be honest with you, there's a lot of restaurants you can go coast at, right? And it's not a bad or good thing. We're just we're just looking to elevate this place and we need people that are dedicated. If you're not, I totally get it, right? I'm gonna be honest, there's a bunch of restaurants that'll that'll take it that you'll probably make the same money. Like, go for that. You'll be surprised though. A lot of times I'll go, well, I like it here. Yeah, right? I actually I like it. I and okay, I'll let's do it, right? You know, when they see that you're serious, yeah, that's all it takes. Your consistency will be their consistency. Exactly. All right, monkeys and monkey do.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:09

That's it, seriously. 100%.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:11

Yeah, exactly. All right, man. So I'm gonna have you go down, we're gonna give you some stuff uh before you leave here, and then we're gonna have you implement this, and then we're gonna follow up in 30 days. All right, fantastic. Are you making this commitment to me? Yes, sir. Yes? Yes, all right, man. Let's get this. All right, yeah.