Speaker 1: 0:08

Welcome to the Restaurant Leadership Podcast, the show where restaurant leaders learn tools, tactics and habits from the world's greatest operators. I'm your host, kristen Marvin, with Solutions by Kristen. I've spent the last two decades in the restaurant industry and now partner with restaurant owners to develop their leaders and scale their businesses through powerful one-on-one coaching, group coaching and leadership workshops. This show is complete with episodes around coaching, leadership development and interviews with powerful industry leaders. You can now engage with me on the show and share topics you'd like to hear about, leadership lessons you want to learn and any feedback you have. Simply click the link at the top of the show notes and I will give you a shout out on a future episode. Thanks so much for listening and I look forward to connecting.

Speaker 2: 1:14

Hi, good morning. I'm Emily Biederman. I am with Secret Sauce Food and Beverage. So the same week that I was asked to introduce our next speaker was also the week that I finally decided to address my doubts and try chat GPT for the first time. Needless to say, it was a journey.

Speaker 2: 1:37

Somehow I ended up. I downloaded the wrong one. Who knew that there was more than one? Ran into so many really special error messages, couldn't figure out how to upload the stuff that it needed me to upload it so that it could do what I needed it to do. Frustration levels were very high and the intended progress was exceptionally low. However, I kept trying and with a little bit of help, I finally got to where I had my first successful chat.

Speaker 2: 2:08

Now I know that that might not sound like a very big moment to a lot of you, but for any of you that know me, you know that my patience for trying new technology is not awesome. So for me, this was like a really big deal. It's not awesome, so for me this was like a really big deal. So I managed to get through and get to this point where I had an open mind to try this through some personal and professional growth work that I have been doing over the past few months and really learning what it means to show up and how to have the tough conversations, how to ask the hard questions, take the risks and really embrace the unknown, even if that's something like trying AI.

Speaker 2: 2:55

This small moment, as well as so many others, is why I am especially excited to introduce someone who really embodies that same spirit of growth and transformation Kristen Marvin. Kristen is a restaurant coach, she's an author, a speaker, she's the host of the Restaurant Leadership Podcast and, with over 20 years of experience in both fine dining and high volume growth concepts, she really has become a leader and an authority in our industry. As the founder of Solutions by Kristen, she partners with independent restaurant owners to tackle their toughest leadership and business challenges, helping them focus on what truly matters Through her personalized coaching and leadership workshops. She doesn't just give advice, she guides her clients through transformative journeys that break down barriers and unlock new levels of success, and I honestly I can say this with so much confidence because I am proudly one of her clients. So please help me in welcoming Kristen Marvin here to present the Smart Restaurant Playbook Using Tech Without Losing Hospitality.

Speaker 1: 4:17

Watching those little small moments, like Emily just talked about, with using chat to think differently about your business, is what this is all about. Thank you so much for having me. This very much feels like coming home. I had a conversation with a restaurant owner in Sydney, australia, last week, named Tim. Tim owns two restaurants one that's been open for 12 years and the other that's been open for three. The one that's been open for 12 is thriving and doing a really great job, but he's struggling with the one that's been open for three years. He's having a really hard time retaining his heart of house staff. He is now in the role of executive chef. He's been there for a year. It's not where he wants to be. He thrives in being in the front of the house. He knows how to drive sales. He knows how to motivate his team. He knows how to connect with guests. His sales are slipping because he's stuck in a role that he doesn't want to be in and unfortunately that is causing him to be burnt out. He's got a one-year-old, a three-year-old and a four-year-old and he's desperate for an exit strategy, but he's so prideful in what he's built that he wants to go out with a bang. And he reached out. He was desperate and he asked am I alone? I don't understand what's happening in the industry. Why is this so hard right now? And I assured him he's not alone. I hear this story many, many times of owners and operators being put in roles that they don't want to be in, and there are so many resources available to all of you today in the form of coaches and mentors and podcasts and books, but today we're going to focus on tech as a resource for you.

Speaker 1: 5:51

When I started my journey as a restaurant manager 20 years ago, tech was pretty scarce. We had a computer in the office, we had a POS system and we had a landline telephone I don't even know if those still exist anymore when we would occasionally. Well, we would often check guest reservations, and every once in a while we would field a drunken voicemail from a server that we had fired the night before, who went out and just had one more thing that they had to say to the manager, and they needed some closure, I guess. So, anyway, we saved those messages and listened to them on repeat. Don't worry, philippe, we didn't do it during service, it was only during the shoulder times.

Speaker 1: 6:27

So back in the day, but when it came to onboarding and training and inventory, we had to create our own systems. It didn't mean that we weren't innovative. We used our binders and our clipboards and our spreadsheets and our plexiglass and our China pens, but those systems only gave us the amount of visibility into our business that we really possessed in order to build those systems. It was a very different world than it is today Didn't mean we weren't innovative. We figured things out, we adapted and we built the tools that we needed for our businesses to be successful. We adapted and we built the tools that we needed for our businesses to be successful. Here's the thing 80% of restaurants fail because they don't have the systems, not because they have bad food or service.

Speaker 1: 7:08

If you're ready to stop being the bottleneck in your own business and start building something that can actually scale profitably, I want you to put Multi-Unit Mastery my new book, directly in your hands for free. Go to irfbookcom right now and grab your copy. When you do, you're going to get access to some additional tools that are not available anywhere else. This is about building a legacy, not just another location. Stop putting it off and go get your book Again. That's irfbookcom. Creating those tools took time and a lot of guesswork. Is this going to be right? Is it going to show me what I need to truly operate the business? It allowed us to enhance the hospitality, but only as far as the skill sets we had to build those.

Speaker 1: 7:53

My first experience using technology to enhance hospitality was rolling out OpenTable as a general manager. In my mind, opentable completely revolutionized the way that I ran the restaurant Overnight, we were able to fill seats in our sleep. We didn't have to worry if we had cancellations. We managed a wait list like it was no big deal. We had guest notes and were more prepared before the guests walked in the door than we'd ever been in our entire career. It turned running the restaurant, and the door specifically, into a game for the managers and the servers. We had an absolute blast, and we started competing with each other to see how many covers each manager could accommodate on any given shift. Open Table didn't and I'm not an affiliate of Open Table, by the way. I'm just going to say that I just loved. I still love them, but I loved them very much back in the day.

Speaker 1: 8:46

Open Table didn't just improve the guest experience for us, though. It made running the restaurant more enjoyable for our entire team and helped improve their confidence in the roles that they were doing, which is so important when you're talking about a guest-facing role, especially at the front door. More than that, though, opentable, from a leadership perspective, helped us develop our strategic thinking skills, become better problem solvers and engage with guests on a different level. This single tool streamlined our operations, strengthened our hospitality and made the restaurant more profitable, all without losing the human touch. But here's the reality what we did 20 years ago is not enough. Today, the industry is changing so much. Labor and food cogs need constant oversight Guess what experiences that fit into their lifestyles and the margins are slimmer than we've ever seen them before. On top of that, today's restaurant employees have less experience than we've ever seen before, and that's putting pressure on you, as leaders, to spend more time solving problems and putting out fires and answering questions from your team than it is actually running your business.

Speaker 1: 9:56

By the end of this talk, I'm hoping that you'll have a new perspective on how tech can work for you, understand how to use data to enhance the guest experience, how to choose the right tools for your business and how to implement them without losing the human touch that makes hospitality so special. I'm a coach, so I've got to challenge your mindset a little bit when it comes to technology. Today, instead of seeing tech as just another tool that you're going to have to integrate into your business and train your team on, I would challenge you to think about tech as an assistant for you, a strategic thinking partner that works for you 24-7 to give you insights, help you streamline decisions and make better business decisions. What if, instead of adding complexity to your business, the right technology could actually free you up to spend time and energy where you want to most in your business? Before we dive into specific tools and strategies, we need to start with mindset.

Speaker 1: 10:50

If you're thinking about technology in terms of it being intimidating or unnecessary, you may be thinking about it the wrong way. Many operators avoid technology because of three reasons. One, they tell themselves that they're not tech savvy, to which I call bullshit, because we have more tech in the world today than we ever have before. Two, they don't necessarily understand how it's going to impact or benefit their restaurant. Or three, they feel like adding tech makes them corporate. The truth is that these limiting beliefs could be holding you back from running a more productive and profitable business. Think of tech as your most reliable employee Never calls in sick, it never gets tired and it's constantly working for you behind the scenes to provide data to help you make better decisions every single day. Once you shift your mindset and start to see tech as an ally, the next step is learning how to use data to make smarter decisions. Data removes the guesswork and really gives you clarity on what's actually happening in your business.

Speaker 1: 11:48

Restaurants are super emotional businesses. We make decisions based off what we feel is right, but sometimes those decisions can cost us money. For example, I had a client who was writing a schedule for all four of his locations based off his gut feeling that the morning hours of operation were busier in the afternoon. This became alarming to him when he started to see a rise in turnover and negative guest complaints. It was only when we looked into his hourly sales and spent about 20 minutes that he had a moment of insight and realized that he'd been scheduling people in the wrong places and that his afternoon business was actually busier than his morning business. It's those little bitty moments that can completely transform your business. Show of hands how many of you in the room know if your sales are up or down compared to last year, okay, keep your hands up. If you know if that's because of guest count or average guest spend, hands up. If you know if that's because of guest count or average guest spend, great, love it.

Speaker 1: 12:47

Using tech to answer questions like these helps again remove the guesswork and gives you permission to strategize how you want to grow your business in that right area so that you can improve your profitability. I would challenge you to think about what your life looks like with a healthier bottom line, less stress, more freedom, an expansion plan, maybe an exit strategy. Once you start getting curious about how data can help you get clarity around your business, the question then becomes what technology should you actually invest in? There's so many options available and choosing the right technology can be really, really overwhelming. There's a tech solution for everything, but it doesn't mean that you need everything. The key here is to be really, really intentional. You do that by measuring your tech measuring the tech that you're looking at against your core values, your mission and your vision. Does it fit with how you want to deliver the experience and does it match where you're trying to go in your business? Ask yourself three questions when you're thinking about implementing new technology. Does it help us enhance our guest experience? Will it help enhance the employee experience, and will it make our restaurant more profitable? If the answer to these three questions is yes, it's worth exploring.

Speaker 1: 13:57

Another important step in the decision-making process is involving the right key people in the process your leaders and your managers the people that are going to be using this technology from the get-go. Including them early in the process helps increase their buy-in, identify potential pitfalls that you may not see as the owner, and ensure that technology fits within your current systems, instead of working against them. When your leadership team is involved, they become champions of the technology, which makes the implementation process so much smoother for your team. After you choose the right technology, how you implement it into your restaurant can make or break its impact in the business. A poorly implemented tool can cause a lot of chaos, friction and mistrust with your team, which all leads to a negative guest experience. The good news is, though, there's a proven process that helps owners and operators roll out new tech.

Speaker 1: 14:52

I lost my last page. I'm like oh shit, what am I going to do here? There's a proven process to help you manage change in your business. That process starts with a few key steps Communicating the why Thank you, simon Sinek Starting small, implementing testing in just one location before you expand to multiple locations, or starting in a slower day of the week, and then slowly growing as business ramps up, Providing ample training and support to your team so they can lead with confidence every day with the new technology, leading by example. Show them that you're invested so they will be invested as well, and monitor and adjust.

Speaker 1: 15:28

No system is perfect and I have yet to find a tech system that matches exactly the individual and unique experiences that you all want to provide, and so monitoring and testing for a long time and providing feedback is really, really crucial to ensuring the success. And sometimes it doesn't work and you have to pull the plug, and you've got to be willing to make that decision as well, which is tough. Change isn't just about adopting new tools. It's about guiding your team through the transition so the technology becomes an asset and not a roadblock for the guest. I know we've covered a lot today and by now I hope that you can see that technology isn't a burden, but it's an opportunity to create a stronger, more efficient and profitable restaurant.

Speaker 1: 16:10

Technology is not the enemy of hospitality. It's an ally to help us protect it. When used right, it gives you more time to focus on what matters most taking care of yourself, taking care of your team and taking care of the guest. So here's my challenge to you Think about the biggest problem that you're having in your restaurant right now and start looking for a tech solution that can solve that problem. I use about 20 tech systems to manage my business because I'm a solopreneur.

Speaker 1: 16:40

20 tech systems to manage my business because I'm a solopreneur, and when I'm starting to look for something, I go to chat, I tell it exactly what I want to see price-wise, guest reviews, customer support, functionality and then I ask it to narrow it down to five and kind of start from there. But I challenge you to get curious and take one tiny step and see the impact it can have in your business. The restaurant industry is not getting any easier. We all know that and you are not alone. If you need anything, I would love to have a cup of coffee. I'm on a mission to deliver as many leadership development resources as I can to you guys and I'm really honored that you let me share this space with you today. Thank you so much.