“Fake it ’til you make it” is a horrible strategy for developing a multi-unit team, building a restaurant company, or come to think of it – anything else.
So how do you supervise your first operations director or marketing director? Or business manager or CFO? Or learning-and-development person?
Successful restaurateurs look in the mirror and ask themselves these questions constantly.
No Experience Outside Your Company
Many of the most successful people in our business have only ever worked at a high level in their own company. In my mind, I see a parade of faces of clients who had no work experience elsewhere.
As these clients became successful and added revenue and units, they built their corporate team and had to identify, enroll, hire, and develop people at a level they’d never even supervised before – or, in some cases, even worked with before.
Which reminds me of my almost-teenage daughter looking at me with that expression that beams out, “I know more about life than you do!”
A First Time for Everything
Remember: Everything we have ever done in life we once did for the first time. Then we learned from experience, trial and error, or others.
For you trial-and-error people, the stakes remain too high with your senior management team. Always seek out people with experience who will help: peers, mentors, advisors.
That’s where I come in – with these restaurateurs, not with my daughter.
I get asked questions like:
- “Is my operations director doing the right things?”
- “What does a modern marketing department look like?”
- “How do I hold my business manager or CFO accountable, and how much do I pay them?”
- “How does a full-time trainer allocate their time, and what results should I expect?”
People ask all four of these both frequently and lately.
Recently I sat down with an operator in the fourth decade of a great career to coach on significantly increasing results from the first operations director they had every hired. The output from the position looked minimal compared to the pay rate. Murky expectations existed. Not his fault.
Find External Experience
As I enter my clients’ situations with experience across multiple organizations the gap between supervision and expectation closes. Often, I coach clients on how to work with a new caliber of professional for the first time and am also asked to coach those new level of leaders.
The results?
- Owners start to work at their place of highest use and also enjoy life-affirming freedom and flexibility.
- Business results improve, and that equals better guest experiences, top lines, and bottom lines.
- Operations directors, CFOs, and marketing and training professionals receive the kind of clear direction they need. They no longer feel they’re on their own, as if they were entrepreneurs when they hadn’t signed up to be.
We produce high-single-digit comp sales growth in a tough market, interest among lapsed guests and non-users, a new level of data analysis useful for operations, and servers crushing steps of service to create greater experiences for guests.
