There is a hiring practice so deeply embedded in corporate America that questioning it gets you looked at like you just said something dangerous. It has consultants, certifications, and decades of institutional momentum behind it. It is also largely useless for the independent restaurant operator who needs to know in 45 minutes whether the person […]
QFO: “What should you do if your employees complain about their wages? If your business cannot afford to raise their wages, does this mean a pay freeze or redundancies to create room for wage increases?” The question contains the answer, and most operators miss it. If your cast is asking for more money and the […]
Domino’s Pizza built a system for handling customer complaints that requires no human contact. An order arrives late and cold. The customer goes to the website, selects their excuse from a dropdown menu, chooses a resolution from a pre-approved list, and the transaction is complete. No conversation. No accountability. No human being on either side […]
The question assumes the problem is management technique. It is not. The problem is foundational — a set of misunderstandings so deeply embedded in how the industry thinks about itself that the management failures are predictable outcomes, not random failures. A misunderstanding about growth. Most operators in hospitality believe growth is a revenue event. It […]
Not with a training program. Not with a script. Not with a mystery shopper or a service recovery protocol or a customer satisfaction survey. You overcome it by understanding what produces it in the first place. Poor service delivery is not a knowledge problem. The cast member who delivers poor service is not unaware that […]
Every Guest Experience is produced by a person. Not a system, not a protocol, not a technology platform. A person. The cast member who greets the table, reads the Guest, makes the judgment call in the moment, and produces either a transaction or a relationship. Which means the Guest Experience is downstream of the Employee […]
The word loyalty has been hijacked. In the restaurant industry it has been redefined to mean a discount that rewards a Guest for dining with you or incentivizes them to return at some future point. The result is a system that trains Guests to think transactionally — to respond to points, rewards, and incentives rather […]
Probably nothing. Not because the market is too competitive. Not because the timing is wrong. Because differentiation is not something you create after you open. It is something you design before the first Guest walks in. If you opened without it, you did not forget to add a feature. You built the wrong thing. This […]
The question contains the problem. The moment an operator sits down to define what excellent Guest Experience looks like, they have already made the mistake that produces mediocre hospitality. They are defining it. From inside the building. Based on what they do, what they prefer, what their operational model makes convenient, what their training manual […]
Service is table stakes (pun intended). Every restaurant has a service sequence. Twelve steps, fifteen steps, however many steps the training manual specifies. Greet the table. Present the menu. Take the drink order. Suggest the specials. Return with the drinks. Take the food order. Check back within two minutes of the food arriving. Refill the […]
It does not appear on the P&L. No accountant will flag it. No audit will surface it. No lender will ask about it. But it is the single largest expense most independent restaurant operators are running, and it compounds every shift. The Lost Opportunity Tax is the cost of not maximizing your own potential. Not […]
The timeline is irrelevant. First year, third year, fifth year — the challenges are the same. They have always been the same. They will continue to be the same for every operator who has not built the system that addresses them. The Five Fundamentals. Perspective. The operator who cannot see the business accurately cannot run […]
It is a fair question. You walk into a restaurant, the host greets you, and within fifteen seconds you are being asked about your evening plans, whether you have been in before, or what brings you in tonight. The conversation feels practiced. It is not personal. It is not impressive. And it is not hospitality. […]
Get the read you cannot get for yourself. Most operators who fail in the first year failed before they opened. Not because they lacked passion. Not because the concept was wrong. Because they built on assumptions that were never tested, costs that were never modeled, and a Guest experience that was never designed for the […]
It is not the bad boss. The bad boss is a symptom. Every reason cited for why cast members leave — bad culture, poor leadership, inadequate pay, difficult Guests, broken processes, no work-life balance — is a symptom of the same underlying condition. They are descriptions of what the environment felt like, not explanations of […]
The question is wrong. The right question is: what does this specific Guest need from this specific menu in this specific market for this operation to be profitable at the price point it requires? The answer to that question determines the menu size. Not a best practice. Not a competitor benchmark. Not a theory about […]
Every business school graduate has an answer. Undercapitalization. Poor location. Bad concept. Weak marketing. High food cost. Labor problems. The economy. The competition. The timing. Every one of those answers is a symptom. None of them is the disease. Restaurants fail because the operator didn’t know what he didn’t know and didn’t ask for help. […]
By definition, best practices are what the crowd does well. They represent the aggregate experience of many operators across many contexts, distilled into recommendations that tend to work to varying degrees in most situations. Which means they are designed to produce average outcomes at above-average consistency. That is a useful thing. It is not a […]
Q: “I get so frustrated with myself on a weekly if not daily basis . Like how can I set personal or work goals and then continue to make choices that prevent me from achieving those goals ??? Sometimes it’s just forgetfulness , laziness , moments of weakness or taking the easy path instead of […]
Employee Engagement Is Not A Program The statement that employee engagement is “tricky to tactically execute” contains two errors in four words. It is not tricky. And the employer does not execute it. Engagement is intrinsic to the employee. It is a property of the person, not a product of the program. The cast member […]
