Today, we're gonna have a little bit of a different episode, if that's okay with you. We are not gonna talk about systems or leadership frameworks or quarterly meetings. Today, I'm gonna share some really big, exciting news about what is happening next at Columbine Hospitality. News that is deeply personal to me and that I believe is going to open a lot of doors for a lot of people listening to this episode right now. Whether you're a multi-unit operator or former operator wondering what the hell comes next for you, this is the episode that you're going to want to listen to. 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 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 kristinmarvin.com slash contact for a complimentary coaching session and let's talk about what's possible for your restaurant group. When I was launching my first company a few years ago, I was excited, but I was also terrified. I mean, becoming an entrepreneur is a huge leap and it takes a lot of risks. I was confident in myself, but I didn't know how to get to a place of building a really successful company. And this is something that I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I had 20 years of restaurant experience. I had coach leaders, I had opened 13 restaurants, I had built just an extraordinary amount of teams and incredible people and surrounded myself with incredible people, but I really still had no idea how to turn all of that experience into a business of my own. I didn't have a roadmap. I tried to find people online that had similar businesses to what I looked, you know, what I was looking to build and could see what they had built and had kind of a vision of where I wanted to go, but I just really didn't know how to get there. I had a community of people to help me be successful in my 20 years of restaurant experience, but I didn't have a community of entrepreneurs who understood what I was trying to build and the stage that I was at. What I did find was a program called the Blueprint and a guy by the name of Jim Taylor. And that changed everything for me. Today I get to pay that forward, which is very exciting. Columbine Hospitality is officially going to take over the Blueprint program. This is a coaching program built by Jim Taylor of Benchmark 60. Jim and Benchmark 60 is the second one of the largest, I think it's maybe the second largest restaurant consulting firm out of Canada. And it's for hospitality professionals. The blueprint is for hospitality professionals who are ready to turn their operator experience into a coaching or consulting business of their own, like I did. We've been sitting on this news for a while. Obviously, there's a lot of things happening with the, you know, the acquisition, the transition, all the legal stuff, the planning, the curriculum, the you know, the systems, all of that good stuff. And so um, we are finally ready to share this news with you today. So we're super excited. When I joined the Blueprint, I was trying to build. Here's what I knew. I knew that I wanted to start a business that was going to give me the freedom to live the lifestyle that I want that I had designed with my coach at the time. I knew I wanted to work remotely for the first time in my life. I was nervous about working behind a computer all the time because I hadn't done that. So I was hoping for a combination where I could work work remotely, but then I also wanted to be able to be in restaurants occasionally to still feel that rush and make sure that I had that personal connection. I also wanted to build an international business. I had taken coaching courses and I loved the community of people and I loved diving deeper into coaching work because I knew that the coaching aspect and being one-on-one with leaders over my 20 years and in hospitality, that was my favorite part of the business. I also love creating systems. For any of you that know me, I'm a systems freak. And so um I wanted to be able to also have a company that would help leaders build systems, build confidence. So I had an idea of what I wanted to build for the business and for myself. I knew how much money I wanted to make. I knew kind of how many clients I wanted to work with a year. And I was just really kind of following some of the models that were set in front of me through some of the coaching courses that I took and some of the coaches that I met. I was terrified of sales. I think when when I thought of sales, and I think, and we hear this from a lot of people that we talk to and work with, you think of the used car salesman. You think of somebody that's cheesy or pushy or somebody that's at your front door and making you feel uncomfortable trying to shove something down your throat that you don't want and you don't need. And I didn't want to be that. I really had to get some help behind shifting what sales meant for me from uh mentality perspective. I was super, super naive too. I didn't think uh I didn't understand how much sales was gonna come into play here. I thought, oh my gosh, I've built all these relationships over the last 20 years. I'm gonna pick up the phone, I'm gonna call people, and everybody needs a coach. So this should be fairly easy. I didn't understand exactly what the sales process was gonna look like, how to build long-term connections, how to continue to nurture relationships, and how to how to value myself. Uh, that was a very, very uncomfortable thing that really held me back my first year of business, I would say. Um, I didn't know how to package my services. I didn't know how to ask for the right dollar amount. You know, I wasn't worried about setting up all the systems behind the scenes because, again, that's what I was really good at, but I didn't know how to position myself and get myself out there and ask people for things. You know, I've been in hospitality all my life and we take we take pride in serving others and saying yes to people and jumping in when somebody needs help. It's so I had to get used to learning how to ask, which was very uncomfortable in the beginning. So the program gave me so much of what I just talked about, I was struggling with. It gave me a framework, blueprint to know, okay, step one, here's what I've got to do, and then and then go to step two, and then go to step three. It gave me a community uh with Jim of somebody that had been in my shoes but was a couple years ahead of me. So I could kind of see what the pitfalls were, but I could also see what scalability was going to look like. Um and I could see how to, you know, I learned how to kind of structure my weeks so that I could spend time focusing on having great conversations with people, building those connections and relationships. But also one thing that I was really passionate about was providing as many resources as possible for people in the industry from a leadership development perspective. And so I knew I wanted to post content on LinkedIn daily to give somebody a nugget of wisdom before they went in for um service. I wanted to start a podcast so that we could deliver value to people and resources when they were in their car on their way to work or in their headphones doing prep or coming home from work to decompress, to have somebody that was on their side. We wanted to build that community online and um, you know, through through media to help uh let people know they're not alone in this struggle, uh, you know, in the struggle of building a business, but also being a leader can be very lonely, right? So I knew that I wanted to build all that. And so the blueprint gave me that structure, helped me understand here's the formula of how much time you could be spending on your content, how much time you want to be spending on your leads, here's how you package everything, here's how you price it, here's how you have those conversations. And then here's how you deliver great value to people because the goal is for us to work with clients for years and years and years, right? Not come in and do something for someone and leave. We want to very much do uh, you know, create partnerships here that are going to be long-lasting. So the program also gave me the permission, which uh which was huge, to take my operator excellence, you know, experience seriously as a foundation for something new. You know, there was an important mindset shift here that was made of I'm not just a you know, I'm not a coach for the first time in a year, you know, or have a coaching company for one year. I've been coaching my entire career. And so again, when we talk about value and how to price yourself and get in front of people and talk about your experience, I had to get out of, well, I haven't been doing this for very long and I haven't worked with a lot of clients and lean back on what experiences I had learned and the impacts that I had made and the and the ROI that I had been able to provide to the companies that I worked with. And so that was a completely different way of thinking for me. So this program really helped me shift that mindset to think bigger and challenge myself to take risks, which is really, really important. Um, as the program grew, we started to add more and more people with different levels of experience and operations. And some people came into the program that had been consulting for two years or three years or five years, and they had some similar struggles and they also had a lot of wins to share. So, again, it's so important as an entrepreneur to create an environment for yourself where you can constantly be challenged and learn and grow and just take a step back to look at something differently that you're doing and have a moment of insight that can completely propel you to the next journey. I have, I'm, I love being a part of the blueprint program. We're so excited to be able to bring it over to Columbine, but I also enroll myself in some other group coaching programs because being surrounded by people who are willing to support and share resources is what sets entrepreneurs apart from being successful. You will get farther along in your business faster if you embrace collaboration and vulnerability and are willing to raise your hand and ask really tough questions. The moment I think in the program that I realized that there had been a shift and that this was gonna work was when I got my first couple yeses. You know, you get your first yes, and it's like, oh my gosh, it's it's amazing. You're like, this is incredible. I've got my first client. And then you've got to see if you can rinse and repeat and rinse and repeat and then continue to add more value. So I think hearing those yeses for the first time was really great. And then having people say yes again and re-enroll with us was the sign that, oh my God, we are offering value here. We're really serving people powerfully. That's the goal, and that felt great. That was the moment where I realized, okay, this can be a really sustainable business. It can be one that I'm proud of, it can be one that I love doing and make really great money at. I think the blueprint experience really helped shape Columbine Hospitality because for a lot of you that have been listening to the show for a while, you know, I had my first company Solutions by Kristen for three years. And as we continue, as I continue to watch Jim and other people in the program build their business and start to scale their business, it quickly helped me realize, oh shit, I'm the bottleneck. I have taken this thing to the point of where I can. And if I want to grow it and I want to continue to add more value, and I saw the demand coming in, I didn't want to put myself in a position where I had to say no. And there were a couple of things I could have done. I could have jacked up my rates, I could have um gone on a wait list. But I didn't, I didn't want to do those things, you know, maybe down the road, but the blueprint really helped me understand this is how you can start to bring on teammates, this is how you can start to use AI to grow your business and to cut down on your admin time. And this is how you can add people to your team that are smarter than you and that are going to deliver, help you deliver an even greater experience. The program didn't just give me a business, it gave me a belief that what I built over 20 years in the industry was worth something beyond the four walls of a restaurant. And that feeling is absolutely magical. So Jim Taylor of Benchmark 60 built something super rare with the blueprint. Again, he started working with me and with a couple other people, and he was like, I think I've got a business here. I'm gonna turn this into a program. And that's you know, similar to what we've done with Columbine Hospitality. We identified some of the pain points across the 30 clients that we've worked with, and then we started to, you know, we wrote multi-unit mastery and turned it into a framework that we can start to scale and build. And so Jim really taught me how to do that through the blueprint. Um, the blueprint, though, is a real honest space for hospitality professionals to really explore what life beyond operations looks like and actually get support building it, which is huge. Um, over the past couple years, I have been so lucky to be able to coach some of the blueprint members through their own journeys and watch operators step into their expertise and build something of their own. It just never gets old. And I think when we work with people to help them build a vision for their business and step into their unique ability and watch them light up and build that confidence of, oh my God, this is what I did really, really well in the business, and here's the value that I want to deliver to people, that moment is really, really powerful. Um, taking over the blueprint for us isn't just a business decision. It's an opportunity to pay forward everything that the program has given to me and to keep building on what Jim started with the same level of integrity and intention that he brought to it from day one. Jim isn't going anywhere. We're lucky to have him continuing to support the program through marketing and joining us on calls. So he's gonna continue to contribute over the next couple of years as we grow this business and evolve it together. And his fingerprints are always gonna be on this thing. You know, he has the book, Bold Consulting, that he wrote that that talks about every single step of this process. And um, if you want that, please, you know, feel free to shoot me an email at ColumbineHospitality slash connect or call and bytenhospitality.com slash connect, and I'll send you a copy of that. You can find it on Amazon as well, but we're happy to give away some copies there. Um, what does stay the same is the mission, though. We're helping hospitality professionals, professionals build meaningful careers and businesses that are rooted in real experience and not just theory. You know, I I shy away, I have shied away from the word consultant over the last three years. And when people call me that, it makes me cringe because I didn't have a good sense of what a you know a consultant was when I was in operations. I thought, and I'd never worked with one before when I was in operations, but I thought a consultant was somebody who was gonna come in, tell you what's wrong with your business, um, maybe fix a couple things and then leave. And again, we really want to change the way that the industry sees consultants and the way that consultants show up for restaurants. We want people that are gonna partner with restaurants, that care about them, that want to powerfully serve them and that want to create systems together. And then again, this do with model, not a do-for-model, is what we talk about a lot. Create systems that are going to be sustainable in the business and help them grow and scale so that when that consultant or that coach is gone from um, you know, and that partnership comes to an end, those systems still remain. So let's talk about who this is for. So this is really for the former operator who's wondering what's next. And we have a ton of conversations with people that have been in, you know, similar to me, been in the industry for 20 years, 30 years, and they're done with day-to-day operations, they're done being chained to a business and they're wondering what's next for them. You know, it's it's hard. We we work with a lot of operators at Columbine Hospitality on succession, and they think that they want to get out of the business and then we start to kind of redesign their lifestyle. But once they actually step out and they have to figure out, oh my God, I have all this free time now. What am I going to do with it? And what's my purpose now? That's a really powerful moment. And so, you know, us working with entrepreneur or with uh operators to become entrepreneurs helps them find that purpose, fill that time, and build something that's really, really impactful and meaningful to them. So who is this person, right? Who is the former operator that's wondering what's next? Somebody who spent years, maybe decades building teams, solving problems, carrying the entire business on your back. Um, you know, it's somebody who is the most capable, resilient, battle-tested leader. Uh, most industries, industries will never produce, right? People in the restaurant industry are absolutely fearless. I mean, every single day is different for us, right? In front of guests, different guests, different staff, different menu items. I mean, no day is ever the same. And it forces you to be so resilient and adaptable. But now you're done, right? You're done with the grind, you're done with the hours, you're done carrying everybody's chaos, but you don't really know what to do with everything that you've built inside yourself. You've got it all mentally there. You've got this institutional knowledge. You maybe have a million systems that you've built that are sitting in a computer somewhere on Google Drive or in a cloud, and now you have not you have no idea what to do with it. You've thought about consulting. A lot of people that we talk to have already been consulting. They just haven't, they they don't understand that they've been doing it. They've had friends reach out and say, Can you help me with this part of my business? Um, they've asked for people, you know, they've uh people have reached out and said, What can we can I hire you to help me with my cost of goods or to help me with leadership development or to help me negotiate this lease? Um so a lot of people just they haven't thought about coaching or consulting in that way before. They haven't thought about how they've been teaching other people, but they don't know where to start or whether anyone would actually pay them for the knowledge that they have. Again, that's a it's a it's an important mindset shift that we help people make. So the blueprint, you know, if you're you're any of those things that I just kind of mentioned, the blueprint was built specifically for you. It is the roadmap that you haven't had yet. And it gives you a community of people who understand exactly where you've been and exactly where you're trying to go. For the current operator who knows that someone needs this, you know, think about the people in your world who have left the industry or are thinking about leaving. I'm sure you've had a lot of those conversations, especially since the pandemic. Uh, the GM who gave everything for 15 years and is quietly burning out. The chef who has more knowledge than most culinary schools but has no idea how to monetize it. The operator who sold their restaurant and doesn't know what identity looks like without it. This episode is worth sharing with every single one of those people if you know one of them and or have had conversations recently with somebody who's like, I think I'm over the industry. I want to do something next. The blueprint is exactly the next chapter that they've been looking for. So, what does the blueprint actually do, right? We've talked a lot about high levels, some great impact, but it but what does it do? It it gives hospitality professionals like you a structured path to turn their operating experience into a consulting or coaching business of their own, of your own. It combines real business building support with a community of people who get the industry at a cellular level. It's not just theory. It's not a generic business coaching repackaged with a hospitality label. It was built by someone who came from this world and shaped by the people who have gone through it. What it gives you is clarity on what you're neatly positioned to offer, a framework for building your business, and the support to actually do it. So there's two different paths now inside Columbine Hospitality, which is super, super cool. Working with independent multi-unit operators who are ready to scale, and working with former operators who are ready to build something new. It's the same commitment to people first growth, but it's different starting points. So if you are a former operator who has quietly been wondering what's next, or if you know someone who is, we want to have a conversation with you. Not a sales call, a real conversation about where you're at, what you've built, and whether the blueprint is the right next step for you. We had a conversation yesterday with somebody who's going to join the program. And the big challenge for them was I still have a full-time job. I don't know if I'm ready to step away from the full-time job completely and start this, you know, just day one from scratch and put all my energy into it, treat it like a full-time job. I don't know if I need to go find a part-time job and build this company part-time on the side, or I don't know if I can keep my full-time job and then spend a couple hours a week dedicated to building the business. And so those are the things that we kind of want to talk about first. Do you have the bandwidth to start this? Is now the right time? And what does that mean for you financially? Because building a business takes time. I think I think three years is typically the time frame that a lot of people throw out there to build a really strong, thriving business. It takes time and dedication and work, and you've got to make sure that you are in the right headspace and in the right place financially to make that leap because being an entrepreneur is all about taking risks. So if you want to have a conversation, please reach out to us at ColumbineHospitality.com/slash contact, and we'll figure out a time to work together. Let's talk about why this matters to the industry. The restaurant industry creates some of the most capable leaders in the world and then has no infrastructure to honor that experience when people are ready to move on. Operators leave this industry every single day, carrying 20 years of hard-won knowledge, and no one ever tells them that that knowledge is an asset that they can build a business on. Right. I've seen so many people come out of the restaurant industry and think, wow, my next move is gonna be to go into beverage sales, or maybe I'll become a real estate agent, or maybe I'll become a consultant. And some of those industries have support and blueprints of exactly here's how you go be successful, right? If you're gonna go join another company, but if you're gonna go out and do it on your own as a coach or consultant, there's not a lot of programs out there for that. So the blueprint really changes that narrative. This is also, again, really, really personal. I mean, every operator who builds a successful coaching or consulting career on the back of their restaurant experience becomes a resource for the next generation of restaurant leaders. And that's what we're doing, right? We are here to strengthen the industry, to give leaders the confidence and the support and the foundation and the space that they need to be vulnerable and talk about their challenges openly to start to move momentum forward. That's what this is all about is sustainability and longevity for the industry that we all love. That's how the industry gets better, not just from the inside, but from the people who've lived it and came back to give it back. This is the work that Columbine Hospitality has always been about. And it just got bigger, which is exciting and very and scary. And now that I'm saying it out loud for the first time, it's scary, but we're excited to put a team behind this program and grow our company and make a bigger impact. If you spent years in the industry and you're ready to build something of your own, you don't have to figure it out all alone. The blueprint exists for exactly this moment. Jim built something worth carrying forward. Columbine Hospitality is honored to do that. If this episode resonated with you, share it with somebody. Send it to the operator in your life who needs to hear it. Again, reach out to us at ColumbineHospitality.com slash contact to learn more about the blueprint. Let's have a conversation. Let's see if this is the right fit for you right now. It may not be. Maybe we have a conversation. You say, you know what, I'm going to do this three years down the road, I'm going to do this five years down the road, or I'm going to do this 10 years down the road. Amazing. You can start building your business now with the tools and resources that we have. Take your time with it and know that that support is always available for you when it's the right time to jump in and play full out. Have a great shift today. Think about the future and what it's going to look like for you when you get out of operations. Love to have a conversation and we'll talk to you very soon.