[00:00:00] Speaker A: Kristen Marvin is a colleague of mine. She's become a friend. She is another restaurant coach and she's the author of a brand new book called the Hospitality Leaders Roadmap the Move from Extraordinary to Extraordinary. On today's episode, I have a great conversation with her. She is remarkably transparent and vulnerable in her own journey towards leadership over the last two decades in this industry. And I think her stories, her journey is gonna all of you out there, I'm so excited for you to hear this conversation. All of that on today's episode of the Restaurant Strategy podcast.
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Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in. My name is Chip Close and this is Restaurant Strategy, a podcast dedicated to helping you build a more profitable restaurant. Each week I leverage my 25 years in the industry to help you build that more profitable and sustainable business. I work with owners and operators all over the country throughout through my Mastermind program. It's called the P3 mastermind. And I also wrote a book. It's called the Restaurant Marketing Mindset. You can get that book for free. You just pay shipping. It's $3.92 for me to ship it to you anywhere in the United States. You get that by going to our Instagram page. Right. So our account is estaurantstrategy. Just send us a DM with the word book, B O O K. We've got an automation set up that will automatically respond and send you the link to get your book. My book, the Restaurant Marketing Mindset for free. It also comes with free 30 day access to our foundations program. So this is an online course resource bundle. You get a monthly masterclass and so much more. You get that free for 30 days and then it turns into a $97 recurring payment. We've got hundreds of people already in that program. It's an incredible opportunity, a real, a real set of resources for people that are growing their business. It's free for the first 30 days. It ends up being a nice compliment to the book. After that it's $97. You are free to cancel absolutely whenever you want. You get to that end of the, you get to the end of that free month and you want to be done with it, fine, just let us know and cancel. Go do that. Get a free copy of the book. You'll get free access to the Restaurant Foundation's program. You do that by visiting our Instagram page, estaurantstrategy, and we will send you the link.
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[email protected] restaurant that's T O R K U S A dot com restaurant and yes, you're gonna find that link in the show Notes so my guest on today's show is Kristen Marvin. Kristen is a restaurant coach. She's the owner of Solutions by Kristen and she's author of a brand new book called the Hospitality Leaders Roadmap. I've gotten to know her a little bit over the last couple of years and I'm thrilled to be able to welcome her to the show. Kristen, it's great to have you.
[00:04:10] Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me on the show. It's great to always spend time with you, Chip. I appreciate it.
[00:04:15] Speaker A: Talk to me we're going to go back, but not before we talk about the present and the future.
Why a book? What made you write a book and what's the thrust of the book?
[00:04:25] Speaker B: I have been on a mission to provide as many leadership development resources as I can to the industry. Spending the last 20 years in the industry. I was constantly looking for resources to develop myself and beyond setting the table and boarding books, there wasn't really a lot out there. And so I see a major need for this.
In creating my business. I really wanted to reach people on a level of no matter where they were, I know how busy restaurateurs are. So whether that's, you know, short form content on LinkedIn that they need a little nugget before they walk into pre shift or a newsletter that they want to sit down and just read something for three minutes or a podcast episode, I really wanted to just look at all the ways that I could really provide value and just give, give, give. So I after when I created the content and the newsletter and the podcast, the book just felt like the Next natural thing.
This was a huge hurdle for me. I've never been a writer, and I started writing the newsletter so I could prep for writing the book. And this was something that I just really wanted to challenge myself to get really uncomfortable with and see if I could do. And it's been incredible. So, yeah, I love it.
[00:05:41] Speaker A: So talk to me about getting uncomfortable, because I know the.
I know there's some uncomfortable stuff in here, and you do get personal in the book. And I think the act of writing anything, of saying, this is what I believe, and all of that, I think, brings out some vulnerability. But talk to me about the process of writing the book, what was uncomfortable about it. Talk to me about the decisions you made of what to include and what not to include in the book and some of the vulnerability that was on display there.
[00:06:10] Speaker B: Yeah, I struggled with being vulnerable as a leader my entire career. I started in fine dining, and so I was really trained to leave your shit at the door and show up and be polished and be in your uniform and just work hard and do everything you could to go above and beyond for guests.
Those times have really changed now. And when I started working with my coach, it was because I wanted to reinvest in my leadership, because I was completely burnt out, and I felt really lost, and I didn't know what I wanted to do. And when I talked to my coach and said I want to write a book, he immediately, as great coaches do, challenged me to get uncomfortable and write two chapters. And then through that process of starting to write, he again challenged me to really get uncomfortable. And, you know, in my role as a coach and, you know, this, we want to create really safe spaces for people to get uncomfortable, to get gritty, to just really unpack a lot of shit. And I want to be able to set that example for my clients by doing that work myself. And so it's been a very transformative journey. And I think once I started to write that stuff down, I just. I started to get comfortable with it, and I started to understand the importance of it, and I started to feel how therapeutic it was, and I just decided to go all in.
[00:07:26] Speaker A: I love it. So, okay, now let's go back to the beginning. Let's give the listeners some context.
Explain to me how you got into the industry, why this industry, as opposed to anything else. Talk to me about your trajectory and talked a little bit about fine dining, but talk to me about sort of your journey through that and take us all the way up to what you're doing now as a Leadership coach.
[00:07:47] Speaker B: Yeah. I started as a lot of people did as line cook at 15 at my family's favorite Mexican restaurant. And after that I moved from Missouri to Colorado. My mom called me, she had just moved and she said, I found the best restaurant ever.
You have to come get a job here. The people are amazing and the food is great. It was Outback Steakhouse. Okay. This is 1999.
We were all about the flair, right? It was so fun. And that was my first front of house experience. The money was great, the vibe was great. You know, I talk about in the book, chapter two is sex, drugs and alcohol. You know, at 19, I discovered all these wild things about life that I hadn't, I hadn't discovered. And I loved that experience because that first job in the front of the house taught me systems. I had great training, there was a lot of great structure there. Really built a strong foundation for me as to what a successful restaurant and great expectations felt like and looked like to be successful. So I did that for about a year and a half. I started bartending there.
Found my first night out of training. They put me in the well and there was a concert next door, matchbox 20 concert. And I just got my ass handed to me. And that was the moment that I discovered the rush. And I was immediately hooked in the industry.
From there I went to just kind of naively, when applied at a job fair at a five star, five diamond resort and was able to open a cocktail lounge that they were just renovated and put a million dollars into. That's where storytelling and the history of the hotel really played a huge part in delivering a really great guest experience. And I learned that I never, I could, I could be in an industry where I never had to say no. I was literally running across the lake to get bottles of wine for people because they wanted the same bottle of wine they had last night at the restaurant across the lake. But we didn't have it. So we just, we did anything we could to go above and beyond.
When I was at the hotel, I was there for five years. I had the experience of opening a restaurant that was my first fine dining experience.
And something that the hotel had never seen before was absolutely extraordinary. So my mentor worked for Union Square Cafe. We hired a Michelin chef. We also had hired Jacques Pepin's son in law. We hired master mixologists out of New York, Steve Olson, Andy Seymour, incredible guys. And I, it was just a playground for me to learn how, you know, I became a psalm, studied mixology. I mean, it was just an Explosion of like culture and food and service and hospitality. And the team was incredible. So I did that for five years, moved to Denver, opened a high volume restaurant in the heart of downtown.
And again, a concept that the city had never seen before. Wildly successful, became a managing partner with that group. We had two finding dine fine dining restaurants, one French, one Italian, opened the casual Italian and then we opened five more after that. They were all different concepts. So I was just playing in the sandbox of opening, opening, opening, creative, innovative, fun.
I wore many, many hats, as you do in, in the local, you know, independent world. And then after five years, we opened a restaurant that we, my husband and I had invested in. It failed miserably. That was my first experience of failure. Opened my eyes to a lot of things, but I ultimately determined that the partnership that I was in was not what I wanted. And so I chose to leave that group and go back, or I should say transition to working for a local group that had a lot of passion around sustainability and community. And they had six locations all the same concept, five in Colorado, one in California. And I started with them as a gm. I wanted to take a step back and continue my growth and development. And two weeks after I got hired, they took me to lunch, they told me they'd sold the company, private equity was coming in, we were going nationally and we grew from six to 48 locations in seven years. And I was a regional manager with them in Colorado. So I loved it until I didn't.
Once we stopped growing in my region, I realized I was completely burnt out and I had lost a lot of that creativity and empowerment and autonomy that I'd had in the independent space. I didn't realize it at the time. Took me years to come to that conclusion and I left the company. I was very unhappy with leadership there as well and started working in small batch ice cream during the pandemic and started to get my feel back for having that empowerment, being able to call the shots, being able to put some things in place that I thought was good. We're going to make a real big positive impact in the industry. And then the pandemic hit and then I started drinking really heavily, covered up a lot of stress and anxiety and avoided the real big problem of being incredibly unhappy and being in a position that did not align with my values. I found a coach, started asking for help, worked on my self awareness again, got realigned with my core values and decided that through that one on one coaching that I had a huge moment of insight that this was My favorite part of the business over the last 20 years. And then I wanted to start a coaching business. So I started taking some coaching courses. And after the first one, I started my company.
[00:13:20] Speaker A: Talk to me about.
So I want to sort of bridge these two, These two conversations. Now, you said that when it comes to, you know, hospitality leadership or restaurant leadership, executive leadership in the restaurant space, there just aren't a lot of books out there. And I would agree with you.
Talk to me about your own education.
This is one of these things where I never got it either. When I went back during the pandemic, I went back to school, got my mba, and they actually have you take management courses and they have you take leadership courses. I mean, leadership. And I took four separate semesters, four separate leadership courses on what it means to be a leader and all of this. And I can speak now much more adequately. I can articulate what a leader does versus what a manager does and all of that. But I think it's. I would agree with you. I think it's something that we don't talk about enough. I don't think we don't put our money where our mouth is and all of that. So talk to me about your personal journey through leadership, because you were given opportunities all throughout to get bigger and bigger and bigger, and obviously you rose to the occasions there, or maybe there were areas where you didn't rise to the occasion. You can speak to that. But talk to me about your own education. How do you think about leadership? How do you think about management? The differences between those two. What makes somebody good at one, what makes somebody good at the other? And where do you think are our biggest gaps in the industry? Where can we really fill in the holes?
[00:14:49] Speaker B: Yeah, I think everything you just said is so important. I don't think that a lot of people today can articulate leadership in restaurants still.
You know, when I was. When I thought about development back in the day, for me it just meant doing more and opening different concepts.
I was striving to be a great manager. I never even thought about whether or not I was a great leader or what leadership meant. You know, management for me means being able to run a really great shift from start to finish. You've got great systems in place. Your team knows what the expectations are. They know how to go execute. They know what recovery looks like when things go wrong. They know how to handle emergencies. The steps of service are in line. Right. They know what to do from point A to point Z in order to be really successful.
From a leadership development Standpoint, I think it took me really doing the work internally with a coach and with a therapist to regain my self awareness and then really start reflecting and looking deep down about what, why I was making the decisions that I was making and what negative thoughts were getting in my way of informing my actions and really, really working on those soft skills. I think leadership is where the soft skills come in. And I had been really good at developing leaders, developing managers early on in my career and delegating and sharing a lot of lessons with people over communicating. But you know, it's interesting when I talk to people now and I share those little bitty tidbits, those are really eye opening moments. I had a conversation this morning with a restaurant owner who's wildly successful. She's been serving for 20 years and now she's a restaurant owner. And so trying to bridge that gap and make that shift of how do I stop doing and how do I start teaching and coaching and empowering people. It's very different.
[00:16:57] Speaker A: So how do you work? So I want to drill down on that a little bit. How do you. That's not a conversation you've had once. I know. That's not a conversation I've had once. It's a conversation I've had, I'll say more than 25 times in the last year.
How do you approach that? How do you help people get to the place where they're doing they're in? Right. We always talk about working in the business versus working on the business. How do you begin to coach somebody who does all that they know how to do and get them to do the other side, which is really crucial work, especially on the part of a leader.
[00:17:36] Speaker B: Yeah, it's about creating a vision about where that, where that restaurant owner wants to be. Right. Who they want to be and what they want to be doing. And so once we. Because a lot of. I'm sure you see this too, a lot of restaurant owners want to be able to walk away from their business a little bit more, whether it's two days off a week or go on vacation and be able to completely disconnect and unplug. And so it's really about start. We start with identifying characteristics of what that restaurant owner wants to be, who they want to be as a person. Then we start putting some action to that. Okay, what needs to happen in order for you to unplug? What needs to happen in order for you to trust your employees? What needs to happen in order for you to make sure that the shifts are being executed in the way that you want when you're not in the room. And so once we start putting action to that, then we make some commitments and we continue to move the needle. Now, this morning, one big thing that was really getting in the way was just having a crucial conversation and setting clear expectations with the employees. Right. The owners know when they're in the building. Exactly. They see all the things and they know what they want to have done. But sometimes they have a really hard time communicating that effectively to the staff. So I do a lot of coaching around. Okay, let's talk about how this conversation is going to go. Let's talk about how to position you as a coach and not somebody who's micromanaging or feeling like you have to be the constant teacher so that we can start to build the confidence of the employees and have them trusting their judgment a little bit more so that the restaurant owner can start to step away a little bit more from the business.
[00:19:07] Speaker A: So we talk about, you know, building confidence the employees and allowing them to trust themselves. It's easier said than done because in order to figure out how to do it right, you got to be willing to let people do it wrong a couple of times. How do you coach people through that? That. That sort of the rocky. The rocky waves of that.
[00:19:28] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:28] Speaker A: Letting mistakes happen and self correct.
[00:19:31] Speaker B: One of the things that I loved doing when I was a leader, and I didn't realize this till I wrote the book, was, you know, we would start every shift with a pre shift, Right. Whether it was a lunch and dinner restaurant or breakfast restaurant or whatever I was working in. And we'd come up with a plan for the shift. Right. We talk about the important reservations coming in. We talk about where the weaknesses were, where the strengths were. And then throughout the course of the shift, I would check in with the managers. We would usually divide the room in half so there were specific areas of focus. And then once an hour, the managers and I would get back together and we take a look around the room and we'd update each other. What's going on, where are the bottlenecks? Where do we need some attention here? How are we doing? And we would just constantly do that. And then the end of the shift, we'd spend five or 10 minutes talking about how the day went and then talk about any adjustments that needed to. We needed to make for tomorrow, whether it was going to buy more lines or, you know, having to restock some wine or whatever the case was, or shifting staffing levels. What that did was it set the tone for us to be able to celebrate the wins of the shift and see what success looked like in the moment, but also build a growth mindset of being able to identify every single challenge as an opportunity, every single shift. And that just when a new manager would come on, we would bring them into the fold and the younger managers would do the same thing, junior managers would do the same thing and develop those shift leads and supervisors and managers to develop that mindset. And so I do that same take that same approach with my clients as well.
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Talk to me about this difference between leadership and management and it's top of mind for me because I just did an episode on this on the podcast so it's already out now. By the time this interview airs, it will be out because I think really deeply about this because I think we misuse our managers all the time in restaurants. I think we use them as babysitters and I don't think we give them the credit they probably deserve. I don't think we give them the opportunities to step up and do the things I think they all are really able to do. And I say that because I was given opportunities at a very young age simply because I showed that I could apply myself. I was inquisitive, I was capable, all of that. But I was given opportunities nobody should ever get. I mean, it was 24, opening a Michelin starred restaurant as part of the opening team, like what? And then I was moved from there to open the next one, the other Michelin starred restaurant that they opened. I mean, I was 24, I was not in that league. And yet I was sort of thrust into situations that, where I had to like, sink or swim. And I recognize that now all these years later, 20 some years later, that what a cool opportunity that was and how hard that must have been for the people that I worked for to entrust me knowing that I wasn't going to get it all right, I was going to make mistakes, but in the long run, the mistakes weren't going to be so great that it was going to stand in the way of the success that they knew they could achieve. So all of that to say, I've just been giving this a great deal of thought and I got the right person on the, on the call here with me to talk about this. So how do you talk about them? How do you divide up the duties or how do you make. Because every manager is leading a team through a shift.
So how do you lay out that or how do you develop that in your team?
I don't think I'm asking this right, but I think you know what I'm trying to get at.
[00:24:31] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, it's interesting. You're, you're taking me back. I was a GM at the hotel at 24 and I, I just crashed and burned and, and one of the things, one of the things, you know, I was, I was partying with the staff after a shift every night. You know, I was, I was showing favoritism on the schedule. I was doing all the shit you shouldn't be doing.
One of the things that the food and beverage director really recognized in me that was that I was in the wrong role. And that's why I got shifted over to the fine dining restaurant as an assistant. I needed to learn from someone. It's interesting that you talk about leadership versus management. I've done some panels on this and I've had some conversations. And I will say that when I'm working with clients on this, we're not really designating the difference between leadership and management. It's more about the skill set that that person has and really defining who, again, like, who they want to be and the type of leader that they want to be.
I think you have to be a good manager. You have to show up consistently and deliberately and intentionally and show that you can do the basic needs of the job. But I think, again, leadership is a mindset, right? Like you talked about, that curiosity that, that willingness to learn, that ambition to raise your hand and say, I see problems here and I'm going to implement some solutions. I don't know that there's a switch, right, where we say, oh, we're going to put the managers in this category and we're going to put the leaders in this category. There's a natural transition that starts to happen, and there's a lot of gray area in there between the two. And I wonder what we're doing as an industry. I haven't really had this conversation. I'm just thinking about this now, having a moment of insight. I wonder, I love it, if we are pigeonholing people by putting them in a management bucket and holding them back from a leadership bucket.
[00:26:21] Speaker A: So, you know, Kristen, you know, what's really funny is that I agree with you. I don't see these as two separate things, but I think they are two separate hats. And I think one person has to be able to wear them. Both that a leader, like you said, and I agree with you, sets vision, right, is responsible for inspiring, you know, modeling behavior, like setting, setting the course. But I think somebody has to say, right, like, that's where we're going. And then somebody else has to say. Or that same person then has to switch hats and say, okay, now we know where we're going to go, but how do we get there? And so for me, that's like the best analogy I can make, that a leader sets vision, literally says where we're going. And a manager goes, okay, I'm going to figure out how to get us there. So, okay, I'm going to give everybody an oar. Everyone's going to sit in the same direction. We're all going to row in the same direction. I'm going to give you rhythm, and I'm going to tell says who rests at what point. Because, man, it's going to take a long time for us to get all the way to the shore across the lake.
That I think part of it is, you know, a leader takes risks while a manager sort of like mitigates risk. Or, okay, this is what we're going to do. It's going to be a new concept. This is how we're going to do it, or we're going to do a redesign. So, okay, And a manager has to say, well, how can we do the redesign as cost effectively as possible and, and as, as timely as possible so that we limit. Like, like, I think there are two sides to this conversation and I think we, I don't, I think we do ourselves a disservice by not talking about the different aspects of what makes a great restaurant manager a great gm, a great owner. That there, we do require both of these things. That's how, that's how I look at it.
[00:28:11] Speaker B: Yeah, it's really, it's interesting. I think in my, in my mindset, you know, leadership has been always the owner, like you said, the visionary. And the manager seems to be a lower tier, lower paid position. I don't, I don't think that it's, it's necessarily like that at all. It's like what you just said. You've got to have a visionary of the business and you've got to have the implementer and, and the. I think for a long time I was the implementer and kind of now I'm in a leadership role.
[00:28:34] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:28:35] Speaker B: Right. Because I'm more in a visionary role.
[00:28:37] Speaker A: Right. And so for me it's. A leader needs to be able to manage, right. Like, okay, I want to open a new restaurant. Okay, how am I going to manage my cash flow and raise money and manage the build out and all of that. There are managerial tasks that are required with setting a new vision for a new location or whatever. And likewise, I think from a restaurant manager, right. A, oh, just a floor manager. I think what happens with leadership is again, if we say it's setting a vision, it's inspiring and all of that. It is looking for problems. I think one of the best things you can do for restaurant managers is, is to get them thinking.
Not like firefighters, but like, hey, I want you to look around for things that might soon catch on fire. Rather than walking around your whole shift just dumping water on the fires. Let's get really good at identifying problems and coming up with solutions for things that may happen or a solution that will prevent something from happening. And I think if we get people really good at finding problems, there's always that one, you know, that one three, one rule you hear in like old, old management books, right? You don't come to me with a, with a problem unless there's a solution. And the one, three one principle was come to me with a problem, give me three possible solutions that you see and give me your one recommendation. Right? That that's how you'd go to a CEO that's how you'd go to somebody in the C suite level because they can't look at every single thing. So you say, hey, listen, dishwashers acting funky. I think we could do this, this, or this. My recommendation is we do this. Great. Sounds good to me. Go ahead and do it right. That we come up with.
We train people, we teach people to. How to have an agency, right? This is. How do we. How do we teach people to do this? Showing people how to have agency. That's how we put our money where our mouth is. Right? Every. Your job is to find problems. Your job is also to look for potential solutions and make recommendations to me. It's my job then as the owner, as the general manager, as the regional manager, to make the final decision. But oftentimes I will trust your.
Your recommendation. You think the president sits there with all his cabinet members and, you know, nitpicks. Every single decision, it says, here's the problem. These are the three things I think we could do. This is what I recommend. Great, go do it. Great, go do it. Like, I mean, it's just when you put very capable people in place, they'll tend to know. I mean, you know, a wine director, a bar director, a floor manager, a service director, they know each of those departments better than any GM does. GM is responsible for so many other things above that. But you have to put people in place who are going to own different areas and all, I think, and give them.
[00:31:16] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And pull them out of just that, that area, right? That bar and managing the bar, managing the wine list, managing the floor. Once they start to really excel in those positions, then pull them out of that. Start giving them the bigger picture, right? Start really bringing them more, even more into the vision. Because the more information that they've got around the numbers and the business and how everything is working together, obviously, then that's where they're going to be able to manage, to understand that risk and manage that risk on a higher level. Right?
[00:31:44] Speaker A: Okay, great. I love that you went there. So go further with that. I want to pull at that thread. Talk to me. Because now we're talking about development, right? How do you make sure a porter can eventually move into a dishwasher role, into a prep cook, into a line cook, into a sous chef, into a CDC and all of that? How do you take a busser to go to runner, to go to server, to go to manager, to go to bar director, to go to service manager? How do you do that? And I really want, if you can Give any examples here, either how have you done it or how do you recommend people do that? You get them really good in an area and then you start taking them along to the bigger picture. Drill down, drill down there.
[00:32:23] Speaker B: Totally, totally. There's. I think there's a couple ways that there's many ways you can look at this because we know not every restaurant operates the same way. So I'll give you two examples. One of the, one of the GMs that I worked with when I worked for the ice cream shops with seven local ice cream shops, all Gen Z, 60 employees, all part time, high school and college, it was wild. Turnover was 100 to 175%.
The best GM I worked with in that environment took the time to do one on ones with her team and just ask, what are you loving doing right now and what do you want to learn more about? And then she would find somebody on the staff. If somebody said, I want to learn more about how to make ice cream, she'd find the expert in the room and she'd pair them together. So it wasn't all about her having to develop this employee. She was constantly making sure that people were engaged and they were learning and they were growing.
There was not a clear path for us in that company that said, which I loved, that said, oh, you have to go from scooper to shift lead to ice cream maker to manager. There was no clear path there. It was whatever the employees wanted to learn. And it was really, really exciting because some people wanted to just decorate cakes and some people wanted to spend time with customers, whatever worked for them. Right? I've got another client that I'm working with.
I coached the entire ownership team of three. One's front of house, one's heart of house, one's financial visionary, the heart of house.
The chef owner had a hard time with communication, had a hard time setting expectations, had a hard time with turnover.
We started having him do one on ones about a month ago. Really, really uncomfortable. It was like, what do I say? Where do I sit? How do I, you know, it was just the basic fundamentals of not going into those conversations thinking that you have to have the answers. Just ask questions, right? Just be the coach in that he has been able to discover some steps, some scheduling changes that the employees would like to see, clarify some expectations again, understand what people want to learn more about and start to put them in different developmental places. And they do have a very clear path because they're Michelin recommended place. There is, you know, you've got to be Very intentional about the stations and how people work through that kitchen. But it's just about asking how people are doing, what they want to learn more about, what is exciting to them and why they're working there, and then just continuing to build on it. That's all development is.
[00:34:51] Speaker A: I love that I teach something similar and I love the way that you articulated it.
It's funny because we talk a lot about systems, or at least I talk a lot about systems and goals. I say coaching is really about setting goals, right. And then putting a plan to place to help us achieve that goal. That's it. System is just a repeatable set of actions. We do this and this and this to achieve the stated goal. We said, I want to make $10,000 every month from my restaurant in distributions. Great. There's a path to get there, right? I had, I was telling you before we hit record that I had John Taffer on the show, that that interview has probably aired by the time that this interview goes out.
But in it, he says, he says, we're not reverse engineering our restaurants. We're doing it totally wrong. I don't care if you want to open a restaurant. I don't care. This, I don't care. And he was talking about Taffer's Tavern, which he opened. He's got one in dc, one in Georgia. And he said the entire thing was reverse engineered so that we could get prime costs between 50 and 52%, because I know it's just too hard to make money unless we get prime costs down there, which anybody listening to this knows what an undertaking, what a feat that is. But he talks about how everything is about reverse engineering it, which you've basically said now in several different instances here, what I will say about systems and goals and something you just brought out here and which ties into something he said, is that you need a system, but it doesn't have to be the same system that's working for the next place. So maybe for certain restaurants, right? You talk about Michelin starred restaurants. We've certainly been around the brigade system. There is a hierarchy. There is a path you take from one station to the next, to the next to work your way around and up. But for the ice cream joint, maybe they don't need that. Maybe some flexibility. So putting a system in place that sort of acknowledges and celebrates that flexibility is just what the doctor ordered in a place like that. I love the way that you put it there.
[00:36:48] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and sometimes. Thank you for articulating that, because sometimes I don't realize that there's a system in the system.
You know, when you came on my show, I know you and I have a love for systems that, you know, and that was one thing that really helped me be successful in my career, was every single shift, as I was talking to the managers and we'd say, what are the problems? What are the problems? My immediate, immediate next thought was, can we either incorporate this problem or solution into the system that we currently have, whether it's training or menu descriptions or what have you, and anticipate that other people are going to have the same question down the road, or do we need to create a new system for it? Right. Because systems are so beautiful because they allow you to step away from the business, but they. But more importantly, they support the hell out of your team. And teammates that have systems in place feel very trusted, they feel empowered, and they become really confident and really great problem solvers because they don't have to lean on you constantly, which is great.
[00:37:45] Speaker A: Absolutely. And which, at the end of the day, that's what we're really after. Right. I find that so much of what I do is I'm trying to help restaurants make more money and make more money without the owners there all the time. So it's time and freedom, or it's money and time. You know, however you want to, however you want to talk about it. But if you put a system into place, just a repeatable set of actions, if you can, you know, write it down, then it can be repeated, it can be taught, it can be. Be scaled, and all of that can happen without you being there. And then what happens is you make systems for the limited tasks that actually need to be done by the owner. And even that systematize, it's like, okay, well, I can. I'm gonna set two hours aside on this day and three hours aside on this day. And, man, I mean, I just. I helped a restaurant owner literally get out of 50 hours down to five. And we again, we set goals. We said, how much do you want to be working? She's like, 20. I said, how many hours a week? She says, 20. I said, how about five? She said, well, that would be crazy. I said, the number you wanted to tell me was five because of everything you just told me about the other. The other drives you have, the other things that are important to your life, like your kids and your husband and your. All this and that. So the number you wanted to say was five, but you didn't say five. And she's like, no, five would be amazing. But I don't think five is realistic. I said, let's deal with reality in a second. We have to say, what do we want? So you're working 50. You thought 20 was already a stretch. I'm telling you, five is where we're going, because that's what you're telling me. And literally, she said, well, what would five hours look like? I said, now let's talk about. Let's say what are the most important use of your five hours? And we delegate everything else. So everything came down to what do you need to be doing and what do you desperately want to be doing? Because if you've built a company that's three restaurants, soon to be four, and it's not exactly, exactly what you want, man, life's too short to be doing stuff that. That other people want you to be doing. So there's a season.
There's a season in a restaurant. There's a season in a company where, yeah, you got to do everything. Yeah, you got. You got to do it all. But at a certain point now she's, you know, 17 years into her business, it's like, man, at this point, kids are getting older. They got sports, they're going into high school. They're like, it's okay for you to want to be there, because when we say, what are the things that only you can do? Guess what? They only have one mom.
[00:39:56] Speaker B: There's not yet literally a job that.
[00:39:58] Speaker A: Only you can do. And so if we don't honor that, we're sort of missing the whole point at it. And it was like, so let's just be really clear with what we're doing. I want to ask you. I want to be really aware of your time. I want to be really respectful of your time. Talk to me. I want to. I want to drill down, spend our last few minutes together really talking about the book. What's the. Who's this book for? What's the biggest takeaways that you hope somebody would. Would get when they closed the book?
[00:40:23] Speaker B: What I'm hoping people really take away from this book is that leadership development is in their hands. They. I hope that people take 100% responsibility for growing themselves. There's. There's more resources out there now than there ever have been before, right? All of us podcasters and the newsletters, there's so many beautiful resources out there. It's just about being curious and finding those resources around what makes the most sense for them.
I hope, too, that people can really look back at this story and relate to exactly where different points in their career. You know, again, this journey goes from me, starting at line cook of 15 and going to AGM to GM to regional manager to managing partner back to GM and why I made those decisions and steps. And there's a lesson learned in every single chapter. You know, 1 through 36 here.
There are things that people can immediately take and apply where no matter what stage they're in in their career, no matter what concept they're currently working in, there's something here for everyone. And I love that this book is not one that you. You just read and then never come back to. You can come back to this at any point in your career as well. I made the chapter super short for a reason. There's just little bitty nuggets in here. There's podcast episodes, too, that go along with the chapters if people want to deep dive or just want to learn the material in a different way.
Yeah, I'm just. I'm super proud of it. And I think I could go back and read it over and over and over again. I know you went through this editing process, right? Did 10 or 15 edits. Every time I go back, yeah, every time I go back, I learned something different and I get a different perspective. And it's so true of anything. Anytime I listen to a podcast, I get a different perspective on something. So the more that you engage yourself and the more that you're learning and the more you're flexing that muscle and becoming mentally fit, which is one. You know, again, one thing I work with clients on, you're just growing and you're developing and the sky's the limit.
[00:42:25] Speaker A: You know, one thing I heard now, it's sort of apropos here. I was listening to Alex Hormozi's podcast, and he was saying, if you're not increasing the average of your employees, of your employee base, with every new hire, by default, you're doing the opposite. You're lowering it. And he said, it's inevitable that a GM is looking for an agm. They're going to find someone who's not as good as them, but maybe can be groomed to be. He's like, so if they see themselves as an eight, they're gonna hire a seven, because that's who's gonna take that role. And he said, it's absolutely wrong. You hot. You always hire nines, tens, elevens, whatever it is, because otherwise what you're doing is you're just hiring. You're hiring somebody who's not as good as you, and then you're asking that AGM to go hire the bar, the bar director and the service manager. And then they're hiring people that aren't quite as good as them, because if they were as good as them, then they would take that job. And he's like, that's how great companies fail little by little and die little by little by little. And he uses this, and he says, we should always be hiring people. And it's this thing, right? You are the sum of the five people you surround yourself with. Right? We are making sure that you're in a room where you're not the smartest person. And I think we can get better at this. I think companies. Right. Like, again, to use the example of the president in his Cabinet. Right. Does the president know as much about Housing and Urban Development as he needs to? Nope. But he hired someone who hopefully knows a whole lot about it that can say, hey, this is what you actually need to know, or labor or treasury or any of the areas of our country. And the same is true with any company, especially in a restaurant. Then hopefully we can get better. That's resonated with me. I heard that, like, two or three weeks ago. And you talk about returning to stuff. I kept listening to that same episode over and over and over again because there's so many great nuggets. And every time we got there, I said, man, I don't know how to do that as a leader. That's really hard for me to hire somebody who's better at this than I am. But, like, I understand that it's right. And I think there's. I think there's an opportunity to get. To get better in that way.
[00:44:35] Speaker B: I love that. It's. Yeah. One of the chapters in the book is titled hire people smarter than you. I realized When I was 24, 25, I was not great at numbers. I was not great at Heart of House Systems. I needed somebody in place that was. And we hired somebody, and that person and I ended up working. He's one of my best friends, and we worked together for over 10 years in multiple concepts because it was a great partnership. And I empowered him to go do and. But I understood that he wanted to constantly learn and grow, and it worked really well together. I had to let my ego go. I had to get out of my way. And I think that once leaders can really recognize that and just move on, that is when growth is going to happen for the entire organization. And I think the tone that that sets for everybody, everybody else in the organization is just beautiful. When you bring somebody, a new leader onto the team that is just inspiring and comes in and that first impression is we're going to think differently about this or I'm going to bring my expertise here. We're going to grow this. I mean, those. I've had those moments in my career and they were some of the most exciting I've ever had.
[00:45:39] Speaker A: I love it. Kristen. I love this conversation. We're gonna have you back. We're gonna have you back and we're gonna. We're gonna do a round two after you. After you do your book, launch your book tour and can share some of your stories because you'll. And you'll see when you put a book out in the world, people will start telling you what they learned from it and how they applied it and all of that. And I think that's gonna be a really cool round two. I appreciate you taking time to chat with me. Where can people go to learn more about you, everything you've got going on and especially the book. Where can they go get the book?
[00:46:07] Speaker B: Yeah. Thank you. So the book will be available October 15th on Amazon, ebook, paperback and audiobook. And you can get a hold of
[email protected] My name is spelled C H R I s T I m. I'd love to have a conversation.
[00:46:22] Speaker A: Perfect as always. We'll put all those links in the show notes. You don't have to hunt very far far to find what you're looking for. Kristen, I appreciate you taking the time. Thank you so much. Have a great day.
[00:46:31] Speaker B: Thanks for the opportunity, Chip.
[00:46:35] Speaker A: So once again, I gotta thank Kristen for taking time out of her day to sit and chat with me. I have already bought the book. I would urge all of you guys to go buy the book. Get it on Amazon. That link is in the show notes. Hope you get a ton out of today's episode. Hope you get a ton out of that book. One final reminder as well. If you want to get a free copy of my book, go to restaurant strategy on Instagram. So Instagram estaurantstrategy and send us a DM with the word book. B o o K. You can get a copy of my book for free. I'm giving away these last. I don't know, there's like 60 books left from this first printing. Giving it away. You just pay shipping. Totally worth it. I'm really proud of this book and I hope you guys all get it Again. Go to instagram@restaurantstrategy. DM me the word book to get your copy for free. You just have to pay shipping. As always, appreciate you guys taking time out of your day to be here with me, to listen to what I have to say, to listen to the people that I have on this show. Hope you get a ton out of this. I will see you next time.
[00:48:37] Speaker B: It.
