Who We Help And Why

The Real Cost Of No Plan

What Quarterly Planning Actually Is

Meeting Structure That Builds Trust

Review Wins Losses And Trends

Solve Root Problems Not Symptoms

Set SMART 90 Day Goals

Close Strong With Calendar And Homework

Alignment Effects On Team Guests Profit

How To Schedule Your First Meeting

Final Challenge And Resources

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Most underutilized tools and a multi-unit operator's arsenal, the quarterly planning meeting. By the end of this episode, you're going to know why most restaurant groups stall out when they skip this, what actually happens inside a great quarterly meeting, and how to get your first one on the calendar. Let's go. 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 Multiunit 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. Most multi-unit operators that we talk to are running their businesses on gut instinct rather than clear focus strategy. If you are one of those operators, this episode is for you today. Today we are going to fix that exact problem and give you more clarity and intention around your business. And we did one recently with one of our groups who has two different locations, two completely different concepts, and has just brought on a brand new executive chef and a brand new GM to one of their concepts. And it was imperative that we get the entire group together and make sure that everyone was really aligned on exactly what the specific needs were for these two new leaders to come in and focus on for the first 90 days. When we do these meetings for the first time with groups, it's so incredible to see this massive list of issues and challenges that we come up with with the in the business narrowed down to just simply three to five things that the entire team can start working towards in 90 days. And it really helps to, again, create a lot of focus for the teams, but also make sure everybody is super aligned and rowing in the same direction. It really gives these, especially young leaders, a sense of groundedness and comfort and confidence, knowing that they are working on these specific things that the owner of the business really wants them to work on and that the business needs and that their team needs and that the guest needs overall. So they're super pactful, uh impactful meetings to have. And it's amazing to see what happens and what the transition looks like when we do the first one and then we move into the second and the third and the fourth and so on. Before I get into the why behind these meetings, I wanted to make sure that you've got the full roadmap in your hands while you executed a quarterly meeting. Everything that we're gonna talk about today, the systems, the structure, the leadership framework that makes meetings like this actually work, it's all inside the book Multi-unit Mastery. This is a step-by-step guide. I wish every multi-unit operator had before they started scaling. I wish I had this back in the day when I was a regional manager and a managing partner. You can grab a copy of the book at irfbook.com and I'll drink the drop the link in the show notes for you. But as my gift to you, go ahead and grab a copy of it at irfbook.com. Now, let's talk about why quarterly planning might be the most important thing that you're not doing in your business. So, why do most operators skip this step? And why uh is it killing your growth? If your leadership team doesn't know what they're working towards this quarter, they're just putting out fires. That's not leadership, that's survival mode. The brutal truth here is that most multi-unit operators are in their business and not working on their business, right? You're constantly getting text messages from your team about little questions that they have or fires that you need to put out. And it's so rare that we're able to stop and slow down and spend one to four hours once a quarter really diving into what's working in the business, what's not working in the business, and who is responsible for what in terms of moving the business forward in a very successful manner, helping you all achieve your goals and your dreams. The quarterly meetings here are really what provides the buffer between reactive operators and really intentional CEOs. When you have sat down and spent time with your team saying, Hey everybody, we've agreed that these are the things that are the most important to the business over the next 90 days. When these new ideas and these new fires and these things come up, you can then have something to hold them against and say, look, is this something that we actually need to focus on right now in the business? Or is this going to help us get closer to achieving the goals that we just set for the last 90 days that we all agreed on were the most important? Or is this a distraction and it's pulling pulling us away from reaching our goals here? You can certainly table that idea or that challenge for another time, but these quarterly meetings and these commitments that your team makes, it holds everyone accountable to doing what you said you're going to do because you know that that's what the business actually needs. And we are in a wonderfully wild and unpredictable and ever-changing business that is full of ideas and innovation and creativity. And it's what makes the industry so exciting and so amazing, but it also is very, very distracting for us sometimes. So it's important to have this anchor established in your business, especially for your young leadership and um people that are very hungry and ambitious and creative, like your chef team that wants to constantly change the menu, keep up with seasonality and things like that. What quarterly planning actually is, it's not a budget meeting. I just want to be really, really clear about that. It's not a performance review, it's a dedicated space to really step back, get alignment, and solve the hard problems. Again, you're going to come up with a list of 20 or 30. We a couple of weeks ago, we had about 50 issues that the business needed to address before they could scale and open their next restaurant. And once we got clear on what those key three to five items were, we realized that we were getting to the heart of the problems and the root cause to the issues. And that knocked out about two-thirds of the rest of those 50 problems. So it's a great way to actually stop putting band-aids on things and really get to the root of what's going on in and what the challenges are in your business. The connection here that we infuse into these meetings through our framework is the people, process, and profit. Those, these three pillars don't improve by accident. Again, there's a lot of intentionality here. When they improve, they improve when your team has a really clear 90-day target and accountability to match that. There's something very magical about the number three, 90 days. You know, we as humans lose focus after 90 days. And so that's why these meetings are so imperative to keep your team really, really on track. It is a very magic window. It 90 days is just long enough to move the needle, but it's short enough to stay focused. I we do these in our business too, and I get so excited every time we walk out of a 90-day meeting, but I then I immediately have a little bit of anxiety and stress of, oh my God, I've got this list of things that I have to do, and I only have three months. It seems like a lot a lot of time until you actually sit down and start looking at the calendar, go, well, that month's already gone, or I've got vacation here, or we've got a menu rollout, or we're launching something new in the business, right? So 90 days may seem like a lot of time, but again, that's why it's so important. We know how fast we move in this industry. So um it's so important to just get really, really clear and focus and intentional on just a handful of things during this time. What it costs you not to do this, again, is misaligned teams, poor decision making, leaders that are constantly pulling in different directions, installed growth. I, you know, again, I've experienced this in my business and um running restaurants for the last 20 years, and I'm sure that a lot of you listening to this episode have too. You've got these amazing hungry leaders that are coming to you with all these amazing ideas, and you have to say to them, I'm so sorry, that's just not what we're working on right now. That's not what the business is focused on. And that's a really good indication that that leader is just not simply aligned with you as an owner or the executive leadership team of where the business is growing and how it's growing and what things need to be focused on. So that's a really clear indicator that bringing them into a quarterly meeting would be so beneficial for them. When we start working with an operator, we've got to get a you know, a restaurant group or an operator specifically. We really have a you know very clear process of things that we want to focus on with them. But as soon as we can, we grab all those leaders and get them into a quarterly meeting because it just calms so much chaos in the business. So let's talk about what happens during a quarterly meeting. We do, and I'm gonna teach you how to, we, you know, like I said, we do this with clients often, but I also want to give you the framework today and teach you how to run a really efficient quarterly meeting on your own. We typically set aside four hours for these. Uh, we're really efficient at them. You can do them for eight hours, but again, keeping in mind that we are always on our feet, we are moving around a lot. It is really hard for people to sit and stay focused for over four hours. We've found whether we do these in person or virtually, it's a challenge. So you're gonna want to take a lot of breaks. People typically lose focus after 90 minutes. So I would caution you to try not to go over that before you take a break. Make sure you've got plenty of food, make sure you're hydrated, coffee, whatever you need. So we start with a pre-shift and kind of a check-in. It's not really small talk, it's really, really intentional here. We're building trust, we're kind of surfacing what's really going on with people, and then we're setting the tone. Um, your team needs to know that this is a really safe space, to be honest. This is one of the things that I love the most about quarterly meetings because we are creating a space for people to really talk about their challenges, and that is the thing that moves momentum forward. I have worked for companies before that focused on the positive to a fault. And what that does is cause a lot of mistrust with the teams. And I know it did for me of thinking about like, what are they hiding? What are we not talking about? This can't be sunshine and rainbows all the time. That's just not how the industry works. So it's important to in that pre-shift really design. Um, you know, I love working with the teams to say, what does everybody want to see out of this meeting today? What do you want to walk away with? And what do you need in this meeting today? And how can everyone else in the support in the in the group support that goal for you? And that really just kind of breaks down barriers, opens up some communication, lets people know that it's going to be a very engaging meeting, not a meeting that you're gonna sit through for four hours and be lectured to because we've all been through those and they are a complete waste of time. Then we go into a prior quarter review. This is probably one of the most impactful parts of the quarterly meeting because we celebrate the wins together. We look back at 90 days, and it's incredible when you give your teams a little bit of homework before these meetings and they sit down for 15 or 30 minutes and they look back at their calendars and they start to write down all the wins that they've clocked and they bring that into the room. It just completely shifts the focus. And look, I have been very, very guilty of being the type of leader who is constantly focusing on how do we get better, how do we get better, how do we get better? And I am still very much like that, but it was out of balance for me for a while where all I could focus on was how do we constantly get better? And I really didn't take enough time to celebrate the wins. When something good happened, I took about two seconds to celebrate it, maybe gave a high five, maybe told the team good job in a very loose manner, not really specific about what we did. And then it was immediately on to the next thing on my list. I'm very much a hyperachiever. And so this one really resonates personally for me, but we again see this a lot with operators where they're constantly in the gap mindset of why can't my teams be at this level? Why aren't my leaders developing at this pace? I want them to be farther along than they are, instead of recognizing how great your shifts are running, how how happy the guests are, how engaged your team is, and how how you're getting those wins on a day-to-day basis, the cleanliness of the restaurant, the communication amongst the team, the new system that your leader just put into place that they've been working so hard on the last, you know, for the last 60 or 90 days to implement. Those wins are so magical. And so when you bring your leadership team together and you're able to hear from their perspective what they're really working on, it helps pull you back into that gain mindset of and remember of just all the wonderful things that are happening in your business on a day-to-day basis and why they're contributing to such a wonderful organization. You also, we also take time to look the losses in the eye. We celebrate the wins as a team, but we also celebrate the losses as a group as well. We look over uh your scorecard if you have one. Um, if you don't, that's in the book two. We look over your PL, we look over your guest feedback, we talk about what's working, what's not working, we really slow down and identify what the trends are in the business because you and your leadership team may be saying the same thing as we go around the room, but you haven't yet connected the dots that there is a common thread or common theme happening in the business that is a major issue or a major win that you need to celebrate and continue how to keep keep moving forward, or a major challenge that needs to be addressed immediately. It's very much a great learning moment. Then we move into problem identification and solving. And this is where most meetings fail. I again, we talk to operators all the time that say we have two-hour operations meetings every single week. It's just a bitch fest, nothing gets done, and we're not walking away from the meeting with specific action items for each person about how they're going to go move the business forward. I have also sat in these meetings where I thought and led these meetings for many, many years. I had an agenda, we had points to cover, but it was more about information than it was momentum and moving things forward. So this is a really, really important step. Operators that we see jump to solutions before they can really understand the real problem. And so we take a lot of time and care in making sure that when something is brought to our attention, that first problem, we dive deep because I'll tell you what, the first problem is never the real problem. We've got to peel back the layers of the onion and really understand what's going on. Is this something, is your issue something that is a coaching moment that needs to happen with one employee? Or is this a systematic breakdown that we need to create some structure and some framework around to make sure that this problem can go away forever? This um your job and our job with you, again, like I said, is to get deeper here on the issues. We want you to get uncomfortable. We want you to talk about things that you've never talked about before and create some vulnerability with your team, which is powerful, powerful leadership, right? Next, we go into goal setting. And so we really work with teams to set SMART goals. So SMART, if you're not familiar with those, stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. So each leader walks out with one to two SMART goals for the next 90 days, not 10 things, right? The goal is that they walk out of this meeting feeling inspired and excited, knowing exactly what they're going to go work on, not a list of 10 things going, I've already got a million things on my plate. Now I've got 10 more, right? We want them to be really excited about these meetings in the beginning and you know, all the way to the end. So it's not, this is not a laundry list of little piddly-to-do things. This is one or two very clear, specific goals that are tied to your annual vision and written in a very specific format. So an example of a SMART goal would be by Tuesday, I'm going to have my first coaching session with this employee. And the impact this will have on the organization is that this person's going to have more alignment with our core values. I want them to increase their behavior around these specific areas and it's going to connect them more with the team and it's going to impact the guest experience. So very, very specific goals. I when we do leadership workshops, this is always the thing that we end these workshops with. And I see that leaders struggle the most with how to create smart goals. They don't know what they are, and that's okay. But when you ask them to get really, really specific and put a date and a time behind something, they struggle with it. And I and that helps us understand why there's a lack of momentum in business. Because when you put a date on something, it really brings uh it holds you accountable, right? It brings accountability to the entire organization. So think about the way that you're setting goals now. This may be the thing that can move the needle forward for you in your business. The next steps and the way that we kind of close out the entire meeting is of course we get our calendar set for the next quarterly. Very, very important. Again, from an accountability standpoint, we assign homework and we really end on a high note. We love to acknowledge the work that that group has just done over the next over the last four hours, the group that you know, the work that your team has done. And um again, celebrate their openness in talking about the challenges, help them understand that we just had a list of 30 things that were really we thought plaguing the business. And then uh now we've narrowed it down to a very specific set of things that they can walk away with and make a real impact on. So the impact of this is absolutely incredible. It uh what alignment looks like and feels like between two or three business partners or an executive leadership team with your GMs and your chefs is absolutely incredible. To watch where those meetings start to the very end of the meeting when those leaders are clearly articulating exactly what their role is, exactly what they're gonna go get after, and their excitement around it, there you see their confidence increase in those four hours. They make better decisions, they stop running to you for every single answer. There's just a lot of empowerment that comes out of those meetings. Because when you empower your teams to get involved in these types of deep strategic conversations, you're increasing their strategic thinking skills. You are giving them more ownership in the business, and you're increasing their confidence. And that's what we want from our leaders and the industry, right? That's sustainable leadership. The downstream effect on your team is of course, when your leadership team is aligned, your hourly team feels it too, right? You're that chaos of the day to day and this leader saying one thing and then the Next day, this leader's saying we're going to focus on this, or the five challenges on the whiteboard that a different leader adds to the team every single day. And the team's like, we were focusing on these yesterday, and now it's these things today. My God, we're not doing anything right. This feels like chaos. I don't know which direction to go in. That's coming directly from your leaders on the floor, right? So again, it all starts with alignment with you and with them. And then it flows down to your hourly. And of course, the downstream effect on your guests, consistency across locations, the thing that we're craving and the thing that we want and need before we can continue to scale. And a culture that shows up in your dining room, a calmness, a confidence, an engagement level with your guests that they haven't seen before. When you calm that chaos down and you increase the focus, it creates space for your teams to be able to spend more time with your guests and be engaged because they don't have a running list of a million things that they've got to do in the back of their head. The financial case, you can't hit your profit goals without a team that knows what they're working towards. So this is the incredible impact, of course, that comes from taking care of your team, developing your team and the and increasing your guest experience, enhancing your guest experience. This, overall, these quarterly meetings, this is how you stop being the bottleneck in your own business. So let's talk about how to get started. First thing I want you to do is block out four hours on the calendar quarterly, non-negotiable. Do not start these meetings late. Do not move these meetings and make sure that you get this message out to every single person that needs to be there that these are non-negotiable. Get your leadership team in the room. Virtual also counts. But again, make sure everyone is ready and prepared. Come prepared. We've got a list of homework. I'd be happy to send it out to you that we send to clients, but have them come prepared with talking points on what line item of the PL they are responsible for, their scorecard or your scorecard for the business, and prior quarterly goals. Make sure you're not missing a beat in between each of those meetings. And if you don't trust yourself to stay out of the weeds, hire a facilitator. One of our clients does this with us. And we just had this conversation. He started, we've got a client that's a new CEO with a company, and he said, Look, I know how to run these meetings. This is the first one. We're going to have so many conversations, the topics of conversation that come up. Would you just please come in and make sure that we are efficient with our time? We're not going too far in the weeds on one topic, and you can help us move along. And this is really helpful because you want to be involved in the conversation as much as possible and be there to be truly present and listen for your team. But a facilitator can really help you stay on track. The first quarterly meeting that you hold is going to be messy, and that's okay. You're going to have a mountain of things to discuss. Do it anyway. You've got to start somewhere. Don't let perfect be the enemy of progress here. Okay. So again, I just want to reiterate here as we close out quarterly planning is not a luxury. It is the difference between a restaurant group that scales and one that stalls out. To get this framework and step-by-step process and agenda on how to run a really great quarterly meeting for your team, grab a copy, our gifted copy to you of multi-unit mastery at irfbook.com. And again, we'll put that link in the show notes for you. If you have any questions or you need any support, feel free to contact us at columbinehospitality.comslash contact. And we would love to have a conversation with you to help you prep for your meeting or to talk about how the meeting went after you get done with it and tips on how to help you make it even more productive and hold your team accountable in the future. Thank you so much for listening. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great day.