The Hospitality CEO Blog

You need to push into growth right now or you’ll drown in your own irrelevance.

Some restaurants adding ‘inflation fees’ to bills amid rising food costs. Dumb move!

“What should you do if your employees are complaining about wages?”

How Can We Overcome Poor Service Delivery?

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.

An age old question in Hospitality is still, “How do you build volume?”

The timeline is irrelevant. But the list of challenges is the same as it’s always been…

Bring to the table win-win survival strategies to ensure proactive domination.

At the end of the day, going forward, a new normal that has evolved from generation.

User generated content in real-time will have multiple touchpoints for offshoring.

Capitalize on low hanging fruit to identify a ballpark value added activity to beta test.

“One of the biggest myths is that we have a retention problem.”

“Many of the managers I come into contact with suffer from what I call: Delusional Process Management Syndrome”

“For the longest time, I didn’t believe in the rants of gurus who said to think outside the box.”

“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.”

“The “hands-on” approach thinking is one of the most confused and abused phrases in management today.”

“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.”

“Training, as it stands in most companies, is broken. It’s transactional at best and completely irrelevant at it’s worst.”

“I’ve never believed in “bad 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.”

“It’s very tempting to see something being done and convince yourself that you could do it a lot better.”

“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.”

5 Things your restaurant business needs to do in the coming year to achieve long-term success.

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.

This is a vicious cycle. It’s caused more band-aids to be applied to more operations than you can imagine.

You’ve heard it time and time again: “Hire For Values, Train For Skills” here’s why that’s critically important.

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.

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.

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.

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

Do all 9+ of these and you’ll have that rockstar culture you’ve been denied for years.

These are behavioral 14 traits of our most successful Coaching program participants.

We’re always talking about Leadership so here are my top 17 hottest best practices.

Successful strategic leaders — the kind who thrive in today’s uncertain environment – do these six things well.

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.

“When guests are angry, validate their emotions by saying, ‘I can see/hear how angry this makes you.'” Wrong!

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.

Here are 10 things I do to create meaningfully differentiated value for you and your business.

Not understanding the difference between strategy and tactics means you’ll probably get both wrong.

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
successful long term.

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.

What “A” Players Bring To The Table

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.

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.

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.

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?”

Lots of questions & answers about restaurant marketing.

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.

Facts, figures and insights about real, guest loyalty.

Thinking in the aggregate about people born roughly 15 years apart is an inane exercise – a marketing construct of the dumbest order.

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?

I suspect that more than once you’ve also received the same “not a problem” send off.

This is how I have long explained to people that having fun at work gets you better results.

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.

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.

Q: “What can you do to make people care about delivering best service?”

Q: Since most loyalty programs involve some sort of comp (discount) what do you propose instead as the incentive?

“…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.”

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.

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.

Some of the ins and outs of managing your food cost.

Being technically proficient is an important fundamental to master but the degree of hospitality necessary to add meaningfully differentiated value is much, much higher.

I’ve never met an operator who had really great interviewing skills. Here’s a good start on how to get better.

Fortunately, time doesn’t stop.

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.

Bad Service Is The Norm

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.