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The Speed of Success
You need to push into growth right now or you’ll drown in your own irrelevance.
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More Asinine Inflation Behavior From Clueless Operators
Some restaurants adding ‘inflation fees’ to bills amid rising food costs. Dumb move!
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QFO: “What should you do if your employees are complaining about wages?”
“What should you do if your employees are complaining about wages?”
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QFO: How Can We Overcome Poor Service Delivery?
How Can We Overcome Poor Service Delivery?
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Lost Opportunity Cost
Most operators consider the cost-benefit between two (or more) choices they want to consider. The problem lies in how they chose the options being considered and whether or not there were better alternatives.
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“How Do You Build Volume?”
An age old question in Hospitality is still, “How do you build volume?”
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QFO: What are the biggest challenges an independent restaurant faces in its first 5 years of business?
The timeline is irrelevant. But the list of challenges is the same as it’s always been…
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Georgia governor candidate Stacey Abrams is $200,000 in debt. She’s not alone
Bring to the table win-win survival strategies to ensure proactive domination.
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This 10 Min Stretch Routine Can Eliminate Back Pain, Sciatica and Stiffness
At the end of the day, going forward, a new normal that has evolved from generation.
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Seattle’s proposed tax to fight homelessness may hit Amazon hardest
User generated content in real-time will have multiple touchpoints for offshoring.
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When SMBs Go to the Cloud, On-Premises IT Infrastructure Is Still Necessary
Capitalize on low hanging fruit to identify a ballpark value added activity to beta test.
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TOH: Delusional Process Management Syndrome
“Many of the managers I come into contact with suffer from what I call: Delusional Process Management Syndrome”
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Inside The Box Thinking
“For the longest time, I didn’t believe in the rants of gurus who said to think outside the box.”
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Labor Costs Double And Will Double Again
“In the past 18 months, restaurant wages have risen at double the rate of menu prices and will double yet again in the next 18 months.”
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Hands-On Or Hands-Off: What Type Of Leader Is Best?
“The “hands-on” approach thinking is one of the most confused and abused phrases in management today.”
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The Problem With Employee Contests
“It’s amazing to me even after 4 decades of service how we desire teamwork and collaboration but every policy and formal behavior is about something other than either of them.”
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4 Really Bad Training Nuggets & 1 Good One
“Training, as it stands in most companies, is broken. It’s transactional at best and completely irrelevant at it’s worst.”
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The Duality of Hospitality Employees
“If you spend any time reading industry blogs and forums of front-line employees, you will quickly begin to see the ginormous difference in thinking between them and professional hospitality managers.”
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Different Is Better
“It’s very tempting to see something being done and convince yourself that you could do it a lot better.”
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9 Reasons Your Guest Experience Is Built To Fail
“Guest experience management is not defined by intentions or even a few choice actions but by the commitment to an analytical, deliberate, organized GuestX approach.”
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Five Things Restaurants Need To Do But Probably Won’t
5 Things your restaurant business needs to do in the coming year to achieve long-term success.
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What Is The Guest Experience?
First off, you have to understand what goes in/on/around your business from the guest’s perspective is how the Guest Experience (GuestX) is defined, not yours. And from the guest’s point of view (POV) an exceptional guest experience holds meaningfully differentiated value.
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The Problem With Problems
This is a vicious cycle. It’s caused more band-aids to be applied to more operations than you can imagine.
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Performance vs Values
You’ve heard it time and time again: “Hire For Values, Train For Skills” here’s why that’s critically important.
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13 Statistics About Restaurant Technology
Guests now expect (demand) that businesses cater to their appetite for technology. Here are some statistics that will help you understand what restaurant guests say they want from their dining experience.
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The “Experience As Business” Approach: Howard Behar’s ” People First” Master Class
Operators often scoff at the idea that the product of Hospitality businesses is a “social product” inasmuch as it’s not about the food and eating or the bed and sleeping.
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Virtually All Highly Successful Restaurants DO NOT Have a Weekly Huddle
The idea that you need a weekly manager’s meeting in order to do anything is just plain dumb. And the idea that it is a “characteristic of successful independent restaurants” is complete hokum. It is not.
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Marketing Re: Social Media
Too many operators are focused on the media and not the social. The most effective way of communicating with Guests is at the point of experience by informed, engaging and empowered employees who share your values. Everything else is blatant advertising
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9+ Ways to Improve Employee Performance & Engagement
Do all 9+ of these and you’ll have that rockstar culture you’ve been denied for years.
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14 Typical Coaching Participant Traits For Success
These are behavioral 14 traits of our most successful Coaching program participants.
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17 Hospitality Leadership Best Practices
We’re always talking about Leadership so here are my top 17 hottest best practices.
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Six Traits of Really Successful Restaurant & Hotel Marketing Leaders
Successful strategic leaders — the kind who thrive in today’s uncertain environment – do these six things well.
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10 Things Really Amazing Restaurant & Hotel Employees Do
After four decades of hiring, training and coaching literally thousands of employees, I’ve come to look for certain behaviors that define really amazing employees. Here’s my top 10 list.
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The Parrot Conundrum
“When guests are angry, validate their emotions by saying, ‘I can see/hear how angry this makes you.'” Wrong!
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It’s Not About Teamwork
Bolting on the latest ‘teamwork’ thinking is just ridiculously ineffective and misses the actual psychology behind the dynamics of impacting either individual performance or true team development.
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10 Things I Do Differently
Here are 10 things I do to create meaningfully differentiated value for you and your business.
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Strategy & Tactics
Not understanding the difference between strategy and tactics means you’ll probably get both wrong.
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Driving (REAL) Guest Loyalty
Unless everything that goes on and/or is talked about in your business does not have you asking “How does this impact the guest?” you can’t be
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The Employee Engagement Model
We believe that aligning employees’ values, goals and aspirations with those of the business is the best method for achieving the sustainable employee engagement required for both individual and business success.
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Harvest great ideas from your company’s best assets
In particular, the initial state of the company’s sales and operations planning capabilities limited their ability to account for demand variability or raw material lead times in production and distribution. Improve sales and operations and production planning.
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Three Social Media Hacks for the Busy Entrepreneur
The teams focused their efforts on a few of the highest-value S&OP levers in order to review the current planning process, identify gaps in the planning infrastructure and analytically understand demand and supply variability.
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Stick with Your Concept but Do Your Homework
With hundreds of medications in the market, Pharm Ltd. needed a proper method to predict and manage their inventory. Using a mean absolute percentage analysis (MAPE), the teams defined appropriate levels for raw materials and finished products by mapping.
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Narrow Your Focus to Prevent Overanalysis
What is this highly valuable asset? Its own people. Says Morgan Fraud, the author of The Thinking Corporation, “Given that we are all capable of contributing new ideas, the question becomes how do you successfully generate, capture, process and implement ideas?”
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Marketers Are From Mars, Consumers Are From New Jersey
Marketers have lost touch with the average consumer. They are living in a dream world of their own invention. It is fed by a cultural echo chamber of books, articles and conferences in which people like them talk to people like them. This talk explores the gap between how marketers think and consumers behave.
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The Ugly Truth of the Loyalty Point Program
Facts, figures and insights about real, guest loyalty.
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The Millennial Delusion
Thinking in the aggregate about people born roughly 15 years apart is an inane exercise – a marketing construct of the dumbest order.
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Training Culture Vs Learning Culture
Dr Rae Baum shared this list on LinkedIn from “Training Culture vs. Learning Culture” by Stephen J. Gill and I thought it was a great start and added to it. How else are the differences defined?
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The Problem with ‘Not A Problem’
I suspect that more than once you’ve also received the same “not a problem” send off.
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How Fun Creates Results
This is how I have long explained to people that having fun at work gets you better results.
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The Insanity of Losses
There’s a reason nearly 72% of all food service businesses go out of business within three years (fact not fiction). This level of thinking is part of the reason.
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Restaurant Marketing: What Does An Empty Chair Really Cost?
I’ve always talked about the costliest item in a restaurant being an empty chair. Now we take a little peek into what it actually costs you.
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Questions From Operators: Making People Care
Q: “What can you do to make people care about delivering best service?”
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QFO: What Else Can I Do But Discount?
Q: Since most loyalty programs involve some sort of comp (discount) what do you propose instead as the incentive?
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The Yin and Yang of Restaurant Marketing
“…it becomes increasingly necessary for businesses to offer real value in the guest experiences by connecting with guests on a more social level at all touch points possible.”
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Rules Of Thumb
What is critically important to understand about rules-of-thumb however, is that each business is unique and not every guideline will relate to every business in the same way or with the same context.
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About The Guest
First off, you have to understand what goes in/on/around your business from the guest’s perspective is how the Guest Experience (Gx) is defined, not yours.
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The Difference Between Service & Hospitality
Being technically proficient is an important fundamental to master but the degree of hospitality necessary to add meaningfully differentiated value is much, much higher.
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The “Killer” Interview Question
I’ve never met an operator who had really great interviewing skills. Here’s a good start on how to get better.
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Shift Notes: 14 Things to Consider Before Your Shift Gets In The Weeds
Fortunately, time doesn’t stop.
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Why Discounting Is Bad For Business: Part 2
Suffice it to say that there are many, many options based on the understanding and execution by the operator of what a strategic marketing plan will do for those slow times and the business overall.
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Food Cost Is Not A Percentage
When we talk about food cost, we must keep in mind that overemphasizing percentages without understanding the dynamics behind them, can actually reduce real profits.