New Year And Episode Setup

Welcome back to the show, everybody. I hope you're having an amazing start to the new year.

The Hiring And Retention Challenge

We are going to talk today about how to hire the right people for your organization, how to be able to identify specifically what the right person is, how to create something when you're hiring that's measurable, not just for you to hire leaders, but also for every single member of your leadership team. And then also how to make sure that you are retaining those people and coaching those people in performance reviews, in one-on-ones to make sure that they are continuing to stay aligned with your business and what to do when they're out of alignment. Hope you enjoy this episode.

Who We Help And How We Coach

Welcome to the Restaurant Leadership Podcast, where we coach independent multi-unit restaurant operators to build systems that drive profitability and reclaim time so they can scale with confidence and spend their time and energy where they want to, not where they have to. I'm your host, Kristen Marvin, restaurant coach and author of Multi-unit Mastery. If you are an independent restaurant owner managing multiple locations, you know the chaos that comes with growth. Inconsistent execution across your restaurants. Managers who won't take ownership. Constantly answering questions your team should already know the answers to. You're stuck in your current role when you want to be playing a bigger strategic role as you scale. You don't have the right leaders in place or you keep losing them. And you're not sure how to find great people and actually keep them around. We work with passionate independent restaurant owners who found success with their first few locations and are ready to scale strategically. Our clients aren't looking to just survive expansion. They want to thrive through it. They're committed to developing strong leaders and creating exceptional guest experiences. Through the independent restaurant framework that we teach in multi-unit mastery, we coach independent restaurant groups to move from chaos to confidence by focusing on three pillars people, process, and profit. You can grab a gifted copy of the book at irfbook.com. On this show, we bring you real coaching conversations, leadership strategies, and the frameworks that you need to lead like a CEO instead of operating like a worn-out manager. And here's the thing: coaching has changed our clients' businesses and can change yours too. If you've never experienced what it's like to have someone in your corner who actually gets the restaurant world, we'd love to connect. We offer one-on-one and group coaching. Head to kristenmarvin.com slash contact for a complimentary coaching session and let's talk about what's possible for your restaurant group.

Planning For 2026 And Scaling Up

Happy 2026, everybody. I hope you all had an amazing holiday season with your family and friends and had very successful end-of-year business and a lot of great shifts and a lot of things to celebrate. I know that we have done a tremendous amount of planning, both with clients and with the business, with our business for 2026. We've got some really, really exciting things coming up. We are excited, you know, I can't announce everything yet. We're in the process of moving through our checklist, but we are scaling the business. We're bringing on a team. We've got some really exciting projects that we're working on for 2026. So we're excited to make an even larger impact in the industry. This is, you know, this is the purpose of the mission that we're on is to help multi-unit restaurants scale. So more to come on that.

Turnover After The Holidays

But there has been a theme that's been coming up with clients the last couple weeks. And I think it's a a nature of the nature of um the holiday season, and that is you know, healthy turnover versus unhealthy turnover. I've had some clients that we've been working with that have some key members of their leadership team that are really, really struggling. We're doing some coaching, we're doing some performance plans, we're having a lot of tough conversations, but um the turnover is now kind of rearing its head. I think post-holiday season, right? I think many people are scared to make those moves during the holiday season, rightfully so. It's it's hard to let somebody go during the holidays because business is so busy. You you need a you are leaning on that person, you rely on that person. You also potentially want to take some time off for yourself. But there's also just the human element that nobody wants to let anybody go during Thanksgiving or during Christmas, right? Like they don't want to put that financial burden on somebody. So it's been, you know, post-holidays, here we are. We've had a couple of clients reach out and say, okay, it's time we want to make this decision. And we've had some surprise uh turnover too.

Core Values As Hiring Filter

And so the first thing that always comes up when turnover happens is let's slow down, let's reflect on the process of how we hired this person, what worked, what didn't work. And then my question is always did this person align with your core values? And with the majority of the clients that we work with, we tend to do a lot of work on defining their core values. Because when I ask that question, nine times out of ten, I get a blank look and a stare, and and somebody, you know, the client will say, or clients will say, I I have no idea. Uh I don't, we don't have core values. And I get really, really fired up about that because I've seen in my experience a company, you know, working for multiple companies, I've seen companies that have core values in place and how they use them to drive decision making on all levels, especially hiring. And I've seen how powerful that can be. Um, I

Living Values Beyond Buzzwords

I sometimes cringe at the word culture and family. I think it depends on the business and how those terms are used and how they're clearly defined. But I would say that core values in a business absolutely strengthen the foundation of that business and they give the teams, everybody on the team, whether it's leadership or hourly, something to measure their decisions against. And they ensure that everybody is moving in the right direction. Really, really important. They also ensure that everybody on your team shares these core values and truly has belief in what you're doing, right? Because when the days get really hard, as they do often in the restaurant business, it's important to have those core values top of mind because that's what's going to help you get through, right? They provide a sense of purpose for when challenging moments come up and and when those tough times come up, you've got to, you will often, I know I do with this business sometimes, sit back and go, why am I doing this? You know, there are days I wake up and go, what am I doing? What am I thinking? Do I really have what it takes to do this? And those are just common moments that are, you know, that come with being an entrepreneur, and they're never gonna go away. Those moments are never gonna go away. I hope they don't, because they kind of, for me, they're kind of a check of a little bit of humility and um a gut check of am I on the right track? Am I staying true to who I am and and my purpose? So, in terms of core values, you know, I'll tell you that we had a client last week that we had a conversation with, and they've been through so many sous chefs in the last, they've they've been burning through one to two a year for for several level years. And and I really my heart goes out to them because I also had a problem with turning over sous chefs when I was at a point in my career and and we really looked at pay, we looked at the workload of the job, there were a lot of factors, but people wanted to go somewhere else and make more money. And that was that was challenging because we tried so hard to drive home those core values and make sure that they were showing up in every single aspect of how we were operating. But I don't know looking back on that time now, I don't know that we were living those core values as employers to the employees. And so that's a really important distinction, I think, between understanding where and when you're using your core values. Yes, of course, use them to hire people, but are they living and thriving in your organization? Not just around the decisions that you make in the business on what new systems and tools to bring in or to or things to roll out in the business, but how you're actually treating your people on a day-to-day basis. Here's

Free Book And Systems CTA

the thing 80% of restaurants fail because they don't have the systems, not because they have bad food or service. 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 irfbook.com 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 irfbook.com.

Chef’s Table Lesson On Sustainability

Um, I was watching Chef's Table again the other day, uh, the episode with um the owners of Masala and Maisse in Mexico City. If you haven't seen it, it's just a tremendous episode. They talk about purpose and drive and what motivates these the uh the owners. They are just incredible people. But um they had said when they opened the restaurant that they were working so many hours, they weren't taking days off, right? All the things that come with being an entrepreneur typically. And they were getting to the point where they realized it wasn't sustainable. And that in itself is such a powerful moment. I have conversations a lot with clients when I ask them about the biggest challenges of their business and how their leadership structure is designed and what role they're playing. And when I ask them if it's sustainable, some of them laugh at me. Some of them are very aware that it's not. And some think that it is because of the time and the due diligence that they've put into the way that they've structured their business. But what really struck me about the episode around Masala Maíz is that the owners realized that what they were doing was not sustainable. They realized they just could not take a day off from the restaurant. They were constantly in panic on watching their phones, waiting for that text message to come in that an order didn't arrive or something had gone wrong. And they decided to bring in somebody to help them with this. And that person really checked them and said, What kind of restaurant do you really want to be? You say you're people focused, you say these are your values in the business, but you're not treating the staff the way that you are trying to run the business. And so there was a misalignment there, and that was a really eye-opening moment for them when they realized they do need to take a step back. They need to delegate more and empower the teammates more, they need to put three or four key leaders in place. And there were beautiful outcomes that came from that. You know, they they they took time off. They um there was a cute moment where they said they were standing out in front of the restaurant, watching the restaurant, the employees are like coming outside, going, get out of here. Like we're totally fine, we've got this. And so it's really hard in those moments to let go. Um, but some magical moments came out of them creating a little bit of that space. So values can be very, very powerful to both how you live your life and how you run your business.

Coaching Through Personal Struggles

And the conversation that we had, you know, with one of our clients, unfortunately, they had lost another sous chef unexpectedly. They had this person had been with them for a few months. There was, there were a lot of red flags popping up that there was a lot of stuff going on at home for this person and they weren't able to perform and deliver on the things that were being asked of them. And again, it's a it's a tough call, right? When you're in those situations of, do I coach this person in this moment because they're already having such a tough time? And I would challenge you to lean into that. I would challenge you to, yes, coach, be that for be there for that person, understand what their level of capacity is in the moment. Uh, you may need to redesign their role, you may need to, you know, delegate some tasks to other people, but I think it's never a good sign when we see that somebody's struggling with something in the industry and we completely back off. And so I I, you know, I want to keep hold confidentiality for this for this client, of course, but in that moment, you know, I would question what values were showing up and where and what values weren't showing up. So we're in the process of designing core values now because they've had turnover, they haven't had core values for the business before, and there's options out there, right? You can hire a recruiter, you can look internally, you can look within your existing network to figure out if you know anybody. But they didn't have anything

Designing And Testing Core Values

to measure the hires against before they came in the door. And that's really where the values come in. So we spent a lot of time creating those values, testing those values against how the business is currently operating, and rolling those values out to the entire team to see what landed with them and what things needed to be addressed. And then again, where the gaps were. They wanted to understand from the team where you all, you know, where they were seeing those values show up in day-to-day interactions with each other and the way that they were treating guests and the in what they were saying to guests and the way that they were operating the business, and identify where those gaps are. So again, it's just a really powerful tool for clarity, adding clarity in your business, aligning the team, having people understand what the purpose is and what they're a part of. And that builds pride every single day when they come into the restaurant, right? It's more than just the team, it's more than just the name of the restaurant, it's more than just the people that they work for. These core values add a really thick layer of intentionality into why the business exists in the first place. And it and they're very, very important.

Operationalizing Values Daily

So now that we've designed these core values, we're using them to pay it forward in every single aspect of the business in job interviews uh with core value interview questions and with job descriptions. And then we'll move into incorporating these into some one-on-ones and perform interviews because you can't just create the core values once and put them on your wall or talk about them in orientation and expect your team to just be living and breathing them every single day. We as humans tend to forget things after 90 days and get a little unclear. And so it's really important to make sure that you are placing these core values in different moments of your business so that they are top of mind for your leadership, for your hourly employees. And the goal here is not to hire. I get this question a lot. Does somebody that I hire have to have to meet every single goal? No, but they should meet most. If you have five core values for your business, this person should be pretty strongly aligned with at least three or four of those. You can always coach and teach and mentor

Quarterly Reviews And Role Fit

to one of the core values. And there's going to be moments in everybody's life where those core values are not firing on all cylinders. And so, again, that's a time to coach and redirect and refocus. So they're an incredible power, incredibly powerful tool. Um, if you're listening to this and you have core values for your business, but you're not revisiting them on a quarterly basis with your staff meetings or with your leadership meetings. Let's have a conversation about that and dive in a little bit. Your core values should be revisited often with your business because your business is going to evolve and change. And so will your team and your leadership. And so it's important to revisit those often. Just check in and make sure that they still make sense for the type of business that you want to run. Um, if you don't have core values in place for your business, we should absolutely schedule an hour and do some strategy work around that. And we can also help with building out those job descriptions or updating them and building out some core values interview sheets, which will give your leadership team, especially those junior leaders, some really powerful questions to make sure that they are matching candidates with what works for your business specifically. Yes, experience is wonderful, but again, the goal here is to make sure that they are aligned for your business specifically

Support With Hiring Tools

because your business is unique. Every single restaurant is unique. And somebody with AGM experience at one restaurant doesn't necessarily mean that they're gonna be a wonderful AGM in your restaurant. It's not just a black and white job. They're they're so different in every single restaurant. Um, so we'd be happy to help you with those interview questions, with those performance reviews, and with the job descriptions.

Closing And Contact Info

That's gonna do it for us this week. Any questions, reach out at kristenmarvin.com and we'll talk to you in a couple weeks.