If you've ever had the thought that you might be the reason why your business is not growing and you need help getting out of your own way, you're going to want to tune into today's episode. We are going to start off with a really, really exciting announcement. We are so grateful and excited to share with you today about the evolution of what's coming for our business in 2026 and beyond. And we're going to talk about how to stop being the bottleneck in your business. I'm going to share with you the moment that I realized that I was the one stopping growth for the business and when I felt that pressure that there was more available and possible around me, but I just didn't have the energy to be able to take the company to the next level. And then the process that I went through in order to take those next steps and the scary process, the very thoughtful process of setting the company up for the next steps of growth and scaling, just like we do with all of you. So I can't wait to share this episode with you today. Again, thank you so much for giving us permission to be able to grow like this. And hope you enjoyed this episode. 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. After three years of coaching independent restaurant operators, I'm making a move I never thought I would make. Solutions by Kristen is now Columbine Hospitality. When I started this business, I was one person with a framework and a belief that independent restaurants deserve better leadership support. I was coaching one-on-one operators or coaching operators one-on-one. I watched them stop the bleeding, the turnover, the burnout, and the chaos. I saw restaurant groups go from surviving to scaling with intention. And then I hit a wall. I was becoming the bottleneck in my own business, which is the exact problem I help my clients solve. Pretty ironic, right? So I made the call. I brought on Andrew Mangan as my partner and COO. Andrew has spent 20 years building systems that drive growth, and he's the operational mind this company needed to scale without losing what makes it work. Andrew and I have worked together for over 10 years in various roles and have opened many different restaurant concepts together. So I knew he was going to be the exact partner that this company needed. So here's what's changing. We are adding coaches to serve more restaurants with the same commitment to excellence. Over the next 10 years, our goal is to bring on up to 10 coaches to continue to serve our worldwide client base, which is so exciting and very scary and overwhelming, but um but feels very doable and amazing given the demand that we've already seen and the needs that we know that are out there. We're expanding our one-on-one coaching and we've launched a group coaching program for restaurant owners and operators, which has been absolutely magical to give them a space month after month to come together as a community and share resources and also just have a space to talk about their challenges. We are building this wonderful community of people who want to think differently about the way that they run their business. And it's pretty awesome to see. We're building a team so that this independent restaurant framework that we've built can reach more operators everywhere. Here's what's not changing. My commitment to helping multi-unit operators build profitable people-first systems. We know that people is people are the most important part of any business, but especially the hospitality business. The weekly newsletter stays the same. Whether you get it on uh LinkedIn or you're part of our email list, uh, that's gonna continue to flow to your inbox weekly. Podcast episodes like this are gonna continue to come out on a bi-weekly basis. This year we're gonna shift the focus a little bit and do more solo episodes in addition to coaching uh restaurant owners and operators on the show to continue to introduce coaching to you and to continue to show you the strength of leadership when you show up vulnerable and honest and transparent. I believe that progress really starts as soon as you're honest about what's what the challenges are in your business. And so once we start having open, honest conversations about those things, we start to fly. Um same passion, same vulnerability and the results that you've come to expect from myself and from this team. Um, I've spent telling restaurant owners that they can't scale by doing everything themselves. And it was about time I took my own advice. So very excited to um to share this really big, big news and big announcement with you. I think, you know, I wanted to talk a little bit today about being the bottleneck in your own business. And again, after three years of coaching and being an entrepreneur and doing the sales and doing the marketing, you know, writing the books and and and producing the podcast, I figured out that really my unique ability and what I love to do and the passion, the thing that I want to do for the rest of my career, 20, 30 years, however long, is continue to build this connection and build relationships with restaurants. The, you know, I've been in the restaurant industry since I was 15. It's where my heart and my soul is, and I would not be the person that I am today, good, bad, indifferent, um, if it wasn't for the industry. And so I'm just so grateful for that and grateful to be able to give back. Um, I realize though, after really taking a hard look at the business and starting to feel, I don't know if you know any of you have felt this that are listening, feel that pull and that pressure of, I know there's more opportunity here. I know I can spend more time and energy doing things that are going to make the business better. I just don't have the energy. And that, you know, taking a moment to slow down and or be outdoors or, you know, however I recharge and thinking about that, having that moment of insight was really all that I needed to take a step back and go, okay, I need to really understand where I want to be spending my time and my energy, what skills, special skills I can really bring to this business, and what things I need help and support with. And so I, you know, I've I've studied over the years in working on, you know, kind of self-development and how to become a business owner and better leader. I've really understood that I love being the visionary in the company. I love learning new things. I love writing different, you know, new pieces of content. I love exploring new leadership skills and working with a variety of clients that share different perspectives. But the admin stuff was really, really bogging me down. Um, I don't love building out email automations. I don't necessarily love doing the social media content every single week. You know, that's that's not why I got into this business. That's not why I started this business. Um, it's always been about people and connection and providing impact. Before we dive deeper into today's topic, I want to share something that's been a game changer for the restaurant owners I work with. You know how we've been talking about building stronger foundations for your restaurant? Well, I've taken everything I teach my coaching clients about creating core values, mission statements, and long-term vision, and I've turned it into three hands-on online courses. These aren't your typical watch and forget courses. Each one walks you through using AI tools like ChatGPT to create the foundational elements every successful restaurant needs. We're talking about core values that actually guide your hiring decisions, mission statements your team can rally behind, and a three-year vision that turns your growth from reactive to strategic. The best part is each course is only$49, or you can grab all three for$99. That's less than what most restaurants spend on a single food delivery order, but it'll give you the clarity to make better decisions for years to come. You can check them out at kristinmarvin.com slash courses. You can also text me directly in the show notes. There's a link at the top of the show if you want a special promo code to save an additional amount of money on any of the courses, including the bundle. Now let's get back to our conversation. Once I understood that I really wanted to be the visionary for the company, I immediately knew that I needed an integrator, an implementer. And I didn't know this at the time. You know, Andrew and I had worked together, like I said earlier, for so many years, but I didn't realize that he was the integrator and I had always been kind of the visionary. And that was another big moment of insight for me of like, oh, I need an Andrew. Um, and so of course, you know, you start to say things and put things out there, start to have conversations and see where things go. And timing just happened to be, you know, perfect for taking this to the next step and what we needed. And so then it was really about, okay, how do we make this work? What are the roles that we need to identify? Same thing I do with same thing that we do with a lot of the clients, right? Any of you that are listening or like that we've worked with before, you're like, yeah, yeah, I know exactly what you're doing. This is what we do before we scale. Um, we had to really understand what roles the business needed, first and foremost, and clearly define those roles so that we had clarity and focus and that we could make sure that both of us were flying at the speed that we wanted to fly with the business. And then we had to figure out, you know, how to come together every single week and keep that communication strong and flowing and keep that momentum going. So we we did it, we meet on a weekly basis, we do our quarterly meetings, same thing, everything that's in multi-unit mastery. Um, it's there. You know, Andrew and I got together, we defined our um revamped the mission statement, defined the core values for the business, put together that one year, five-year, ten-year vision. We have a really clear roadmap on where we want to go and exactly what roles we need in place to get there. And so, and we know what um what financial targets we need to hit, uh, you know, from a sales perspective to profit margin perspective and everything in between uh in order to get there. And so that really gave me a lot of comfort knowing, okay, we can do this. I've got support now. You know, being an entrepreneur is so lonely. And I've I have worked really hard over the last few years to build a community. You know, I've talked a little bit about this in the past, but when I first started the business three years ago, I had to take a second and think about what helped me be successful when I was a young restaurant manager starting out in my early 20s. And it was really being a part of a community like Eat Denver, which is a wonderful nonprofit in Denver that supports 400. I think we have 450 members now, which is just extraordinary. But it was going to meetings with them, it was being part of the group settings with them. It was, it was having that network and having those conversations about what they were celebrating and what challenges they were having. That helped me look forward and understand, okay, this is what life could look like for me. This is what I want life to look like, or this is what I don't want life to look like, right? Here are some of the pitfalls that I need to watch out for. So that community was really priceless for me. And I'm so honored to be a part of it again today. Um it was inspiring for me. It helped me, again, not feel so lonely and understand that there were people out there that had similar challenges that I had, whether I was 25 years old or um 35 years old. And it didn't matter if I was a GM or a regional manager uh or managing partner, the the challenges were there. So that was really comforting for me. So I think, you know, understanding what I needed now in order to grow and what community we needed to build was really, really impactful. And I'm so grateful for the community that I've started to build and the community that's accepted me over the last three years in LinkedIn. You know, I've got this incredible group of people that are a couple years ahead of me. Some are just starting out, and we get together often and share a lot of resources with each other. And um, there are things that I've heard probably 10 times from this group, and it hasn't resonated with me until I've reached a certain point in my career, and then it's and then it's resonated. So there's so many wonderful things that are needed, I think, to be a really successful entrepreneur. And a lot of that, I think the toughest challenge of that in the beginning is figuring out where to find those resources. And so love that we're bringing this community together that's willing to share. Um I think now that we've got, you know, we've got Andrew on, we've hired our first coach, which is absolutely incredible and very exciting to have somebody come on that is that you know wants to be an entrepreneur, that's got a ton of experience in the space. Um we were he's he started working with his first client, and a couple weeks ago they paused in the middle of a session and they said, We just can't tell you how extraordinary this has been. Just our first 90 days into a year um working together with you. So many wonderful changes have happened in our business. We show up so differently, there's less chaos, we've got more intention. Leaders that we thought we were gonna have to fire, we've had some really tough conversations with, thanks to your help and guidance, and they are thriving. And so they, you know, they said we're we're able to spend time on the business now, which is exactly what we wanted. And so hearing that was very, very validating. Um, you know, I think especially when in restaurants, you've got a million guests that come in. You don't always know which ones are happy or which ones aren't, unless they're vocal about it. And and that goes for us too. Sometimes the feedback is um we don't ask for it or we're just not sure, you know, if things land during sessions. And sometimes they don't, sometimes they land six or 12 months later. Um, so anyway, point being, we've got this incredible framework now. I feel like I can finally position myself in my unique ability, spend the time and energy where I want to, and then um and bring on these incredible people that have these complementary um skill sets and ones that are completely different from what I consider to be my zone of genius. And I've been so excited to learn from them and to see their perspectives of what we can do better and how we can improve the hospitality and the experience that we're offering to clients uh with them coming on just in a short amount of time. So super, super excited for the future. Um, if any of you are listening to this and you're in that spot where you're you feel like you're stuck or you don't have the energy and you don't know how to scale or what roles uh you need to put in place or even what that what that next year or five years is going to look like, let's have a conversation about that. I mean, this is what we do every day. We absolutely love it. And uh, you know, I one of the things I told Andrew when he came on, I said, we we really have got to make sure that this business, our business, is modeling exactly what we're doing with clients. And so we had to, we had a lot of that structure in place. But as Andrew does, he always just helps take the quality of everything that I do to the next level. So it's a great partnership. I had a lot of people warn me, be careful about the partner that you bring on. We've had some horror stories. We've helped some companies, you know, some restaurant groups find new partners, um, say goodbye to partners that were not core values, core value fits for them. And so took this, you know, made this decision very, very carefully. I also know how thoughtful Andrew is and that he wouldn't just jump into something or or say no or say yes to something out of excitement. He's very thoughtful. And same thing with our coaches. This is a very, this is a big move for them moving into the entrepreneurial space. Um, some for the first time, some that have had their own companies and want to continue to grow and scale and have some strategic partnerships. So um thank you so much for all of you that listen to the show, that are listening, um, or listening to the audio books, listening to or reading the books, uh that are following the content on LinkedIn, following us on socials. It's because of you that we've been able to spread the message about what we're doing and the impact that we're making and really tell the stories of how we're supporting the industry and your comments and your, you know, thumbs up and your reactions to the post. And, you know, we see you reading the newsletters, we see we see you listening to the show, and that feedback is absolutely extraordinary. And so we're so honored. Thank you for giving us this gift of being able to grow the business in this way and continue to help the industry think differently and thrive in one of the most uh challenging moments that the industry's ever seen. So um immense gratitude for you. I can't wait to continue to bring more episodes and more coaching to you in 2026 and share even more success stories with you. I thank you so much for listening and hope you have a wonderful week.