The Five Best Things I Told Restaurant Owners This Year… and Why

Our strength was tested in 2021.

Good news: We passed. 

One of the best coping mechanisms remains laughter.  

Above find my two favorite iconic pictures from 2021:

• The restaurant I drove by that put a hot-air balloon on the roof to attract talent, and
• The menu I found in my mailbox stamped with the message, “Tuesday: Closed; We Have Increased Prices.”

Sometimes we laugh. Other times we just do the work of improving our companies.

I’ve gone back and chosen five especially popular or meaningful posts from 2021 – a hectic but surprisingly successful year for the restaurants I work with.    

My clients and my readers told me that these messages were the ones that most helped them and put them into action this year.

1. Six Key Takeaways for Restaurants from My “Beat the Labor Shortage” Workshop
   Back in October, I hosted a screen-filled crowd on Zoom from around Texas to work our way through the biggest challenge of the year: workforce. Operators who activate these takeaways will truly beat the labor shortage, and won’t allow it to beat them. 
2. How Restaurant Owners Dominate Through Peak Confidence Now
   The greatest lesson from the past two years? The incredible job you did to move through the restaurant crisis portion of the pandemic. This post talks about how to use that experience to channel the confidence to create unprecedented achievement in the future. 
3. How Independent Restaurants Catch Up to Chains on Technology
   The chains we compete with figured out a while back that a large part of our future business will be tied to technology. Independents only recently woke up to the fact that they must have someone in their organization creating and shepherding a technology plan. 
4. 10-Point Checklist for Your New, Improved Restaurant Bonus Plan
   A lot of bonus plans met their own cancel culture during the dark days of the pandemic. That gave operators the opportunity to bring them back and make them more effective than ever. 
5. How Top Restaurant Owners Enjoy Freedom Now
   I consistently think about your well-being and reinforcing the opportunity a successful business gives you for personal freedom. If you ranked all the aspects of our industry that I talk about with restaurateurs in terms of importance to me, personal freedom takes a permanent position at #1.

I can’t remember a year when people worked so hard on so many aspects of our business.

The work we did took us from being negative and worried to realizing a rewarding upswing.

Here, at the end of 2021, I want to tell you how much I appreciate the time you take to follow my work and share it with others.