Cultivating The Right Ownership Mindset with Alison Anne (Ep 238)
Building a successful restaurant requires more than just good food. It also demands a strong team driven by the right ownership mindset. In this episode, Jaime Oikle talks with Alison Anne about cultivating and maintaining a thriving restaurant culture. Alison emphasizes the importance of genuine connections with your staff and what it takes to move beyond the main character syndrome to understand their needs and motivations. She also advocates for building intentional relationships in the fast-paced restaurant environment, addressing fears around time off, and seeing the guest experience through their eyes. Take your restaurant to the next level one genuine connection at a time.
Find out more at https://www.restaurantrevolution.me/
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Cultivating The Right Ownership Mindset with Alison Anne
Coming up on this episode of Running Restaurants, I get with Allison Anne of Restaurant Revolution. We talked about restaurant management and leadership, and specifically how to connect and collaborate with your team to help get them to care as much about the restaurant’s success as you do.
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I have a great guest for you, Allison Anne of Restaurant Revolution. Allison is an industry coach, consultant, and speaker at various shows, which we're going to touch on. She's been on our show before with our friend and colleague, Darren Denington of Service with Style. This is her first solo appearance. I'm excited to get you one-on-one, Allison, to talk about restaurant leadership and training and what's going on in New York. You are going to be there. Let's start there. Let's start with a welcome and tell me about New York.
Thank you. It's great to be here. I'm excited for this conversation. We will be in New York from March 23rd through the 25th for the New York Restaurant Show. Darren and I are not only going to be up there together as a team to put on our Restaurant Management 201 workshop, but we also are going to be on the floor. I'm going to be starting out my day on that Sunday, speaking on, "How do I get everyone to care as much as I do? Why can't they care like I do and do it the way I want them to do it?"
Transforming The Restaurant Industry from Within
That's a good question. I want to dig into that in a second, but give me a little bit more background. You speak at industry shows, you help folks all over the country with this sort of stuff. I saw on your website that you started in restaurants and bartending. You've been in it for a long time. Tell me a little bit more there.
I like to say that I'm a stereotype of the industry. I was seventeen, and I was going to be an actor when I grew up. What I knew about acting was that we get jobs in the restaurant industry. It was a little family-owned spot in my hometown. I started as a hostess/busser, depending on which night of the week it was. That's how I fell into the industry.
The more I was in it, the more I was in it. I kept coming back to jobs in the industry because of the quick pay, the fun, and the flexible schedule. More and more, it took over my life, and my acting career took a back seat. After about ten years of that, I finally was like, "Let me go all in on this career that seems to be working for me and that I enjoy." I started managing. That's when I started to notice some of the cracks in how we were treating our people and how our people were treating themselves. That's how it started.
It's been five and a half years now of leadership development training and coach training to be able to support bringing what's next in leadership, development, and training to the restaurant industry because it is a little stuck in a lot of old ways and old leadership.
Building An Ownership Mentality within Your Team
I was going to ask you how long you've been doing that. Five and a half years of training, you've probably had a lot of case studies & examples and met a lot of folks and seen stuff done in different ways. Let's go right to that talk. You don't have to go through the whole talk, but give me that overview. How do I get people to care as much as I do? It's a good topic. We talk about it from an engagement standpoint. How do you get folks to care? How do you get them to want to have an ownership mentality? What are some of the highlights?
This is a topic that is super easy and super hard at the same time. I think we, as humans, fall into this main character syndrome. We think, "This is the way that I see things. This is the way that I perceive things and the way that I want things to go. That's the best way." Everyone else is thinking in a similar way. It’s totally fair and understandable, but everybody does it. You have an entire staff full of people who all think that their way is the best way and that this is how people should be going about things.
The heart of the talk is that the easiest way to find out how to get your people to care about things is to have conversations with them along the lines of, "What would make you care about this? What would make you show up in a different way? What would make you give more of your all to this business, to what we're trying to build here?" That starts with strong relationships with your people, which is so hard sometimes in the restaurant industry. We're constantly on the go. There's constantly a to-do list. We're hopping from things to things. It's like, "I'll talk to my staff members if I have time, but I've got to get all this worked out first."
The easiest way to find out how the people around you care about things is to have conversations with them.
The science says that you have to start with relationships with your people, then they do want to show up for you. They do go that extra mile. Having specific, meticulous conversations with them about what value is there for them in showing up for you and showing up for the business, you can start to build things together in a way that maybe means that owners and operators don't have to be running their heads off. It is because they have a whole staff who are there to say, "Boss, what can I do? How can I help?"
Wouldn't that be great? That would be great. I wrote down some notes. One of the things that I jotted down that I wanted to follow up on is, and I think the answer could be both, but are these conversations more one-on-one, more in a group setting, or a combination of such? What happens? How do you get that engagement?
I think it's both. In addition to working with a lot of restaurants and hearing how a lot of people do it, I also go to other people's talks at other conferences. I've heard so many brilliant ways that you can go about things. You can do a daily 30-second touch, where you make sure that every single day, you're spending 30 seconds talking to everyone who's at work, to make sure that they know, "I care about this business. I care about you too."
Ideally, you're going to care about me and this business back. Having that small touch one-on-one. I think if you are not having a pre-shift meeting, that's a huge loss. I'm sure that when you talked to Darren, you talked about management meetings. It's both sides of the coin. Having that, even if it's 15 or 20 minutes of sitting down with the entire shift and talking about, "Here's what's important about moving forward. Here's what we're focusing on," giving them an opportunity to ask questions, to have that format.
Have all-staff meetings a couple of times a year, where people get to bring their ideas or you get to collaborate with your people. It makes all of the difference to have them feel like, "I'm heard in this business. They care about what I think. We are all building this together. We're in it together." When people feel like they're in it together and they're cared about on that one-on-one platform, they start to show up in different ways.
You know what I like that I saw? I have a friend that I went to high school with, and he's got a restaurant up in the North Shore of Boston. I'm on his Facebook feed, and I saw that he closed down the restaurant one night to take the staff out to celebrate the holiday season and the end of the year. They didn't do it right around the holidays because they're so busy, but now, in January, it's quieter, and he took them out and celebrate. Whether they did a meeting where they talked about the business or not, or they had fun, the point is they got together outside, they bonded, they strengthened.
It's so easy to skip those things or those moments. It's so easy on a daily basis to keep moving without a pause. Let's say you have a staff of 20, 25, or 30 or more in some places. To skip talking to half of them for sure is very easy. You can zip right past that. You have to schedule it. You have to make sure it happens. Do you hint at those points, like how to get it into your daily and weekly schedule?
It has to be intentional because if you think, “In my spare time, I'll make sure that that happens.” It's not going to happen. We all know that. You made the point in your intro about this being about building profitable businesses. I want to point to that. Another big obstacle to putting things like this in place is we get scared. I know that in the restaurant industry, we don't like to talk about being scared. We don't like to bring that word up and get vulnerable about that.
At the end of the day, that's what's behind “I can't close the restaurant. I am afraid, if we close the restaurant, if we do not make this revenue, our profit margins get even thinner, and we're going to fail. We're going to collapse.” There's this fear that we have to stay open all the time and always be bringing in revenue in order to succeed. I am of the opinion that if we stop, if we slow down, if we do take those breaks from time to time, that makes everyone in the staff more effective when they're there, everyone from GM all the way down to the dishwasher, in a way that brings more revenue in when you are open so that you're not strung out, you're not super burned out, and you're not being as effective in a revenue-making sense when you are open.
Not only do you have to be intentional about setting that time aside, but you have to believe that having that time set aside in order to build community with your staff, to give them time off to play and hang out and to have those conversations that you need to have about what's coming next in the business and what your employees need in order to come along with you to that vision, to what you're building the business to be, that's going to help you be more profitable in the long run. You have to put that voice aside that says, “We can't possibly close the restaurant for a day. That's our $2,500 lunch. When will we make that money up?”
Encouraging Ownership Thinking in Your Team
It's true. You hit on a lot of good points there. Something I want to ask you, if you've seen folks use something similar, we've talked about it on some of our shows in the past, this idea of the walk-around. It could be a new staff member, or it could be anybody at any point in your restaurant. Bring them out to the parking lot. Let's walk in and observe the parking lot. Let's observe the front door, the host station, the dust on the windowsill, the light that's out, the broken chair, and give them the mentality of if you were the owner, what would you do about these things? What would you want to do? That person, every time they see something, corrects it, not just goes, “That's someone else's job.” That ownership mentality can be very effective. Have you seen other ways to tweak that idea of getting people ingrained into “I want to think like an owner?”
The tweak that I like is to think like an owner who is thinking like a guest. The owner isn't the only one who walks around the business and says, “That chair is broken.” It's important to me that this business be thriving. You have guests who walk in and say, “It was a nice meal, but the carpet was dingy.” You're like, “Nice meal. When we walked in, three people walked by me, and no one said hello until the host came back from where they were seating someone else.”
It goes back to that main character syndrome. If we're only thinking, “How would I take ownership of this?” We're only focusing on the things that are important to us, which can leave blind spots. As we're training our people, and it is training our people, we have to train them to think like owner-operators. We have to train our people to pause for a second and think like the guest.
Restaurant teams must be trained to think like owner-operators. They must also know how to pause and think like the guest.
It's important as you're doing those sorts of walkthroughs where you're looking for ways that you can improve, you want to do it both from a business standpoint and an ownership standpoint, but also from “What do we think is important to our guests?” What's great about that is your people are the ones who are on the floor with your guests, typically far more often than a manager ever is. They are hearing the feedback. They're getting even that subconscious idea of what people are thinking. Somebody might not straight-up say, “This carpet is awfully dingy,” but your staff can sense those sorts of things.
If you train them to be on the lookout for what guests might want to improve, and then apply the ownership mindset, “How can we improve this? How can I improve this?” You also show them what’s in it for them if they were to improve it. People who have a better time leave bigger tips, and they come back again. It's such an interconnected ecosystem that we don't train our people to know that it's going to be way better for you and all of us if you take that ownership mindset, make those changes, or make those suggestions to us.
Understanding Customer Lifetime Value
I was going to go in a slightly different direction next, but something you said, I want to ask you about, you hinted at customer lifetime value. If I'm a 17 or 21-year-old server in a restaurant, I'm probably not thinking about that business term, customer lifetime value. I'm thinking, “They're here, they're spending money. I'm hoping to get a nice tip because I have a date later this weekend.” As the owner, you care about that experience, but that same person can visit your restaurant a hundred times in the course of their journey with you. Do you guys talk about that customer lifetime value with staff in the training? Do you hone that in? It's a big component.
We do. We don't use that phrase, but I love it as a phrase. You honestly hit on a summary of my whole career. It was 15, maybe 17 years of showing up because this is awfully fun, having some accidental success with things like building regular clientele and having people want to come back on a more regular basis. It wasn't anything that I was trained in or that anybody sat down and explained to me the long-term value.
As we talk about how you train your people and the guest experience that you want your guests to have, we look at what is the entire flow of that guest experience from the second they hit the parking lot until they walk again out to the parking lot to leave. What is the experience that you want them to have so that they want to come back, so that they want to stay for that extra round, or they want to stay for dessert so that you are building not only the, I love Darren's phrase, sell to enhance the experience?
Everybody wins. The restaurant gets more revenue. The guests are having a better time, and that's why they're willing to spend more money. They are getting more value from their experience, and that's going to make them want to come back. It's all about having the value that they experience to exceed the number on the check that they pay at the end. If you can decide what you want that guest experience to look like, that's step one. Step two is training your people to consistently give that experience over time. It does require a lot more than just, "Here's a menu test, and here's how the POS works, and good luck. We're short-staffed. We need a warm body on the floor. Training is done. Good luck."
If you can decide what you want your guest experience to look like, that’s step one for your restaurant. Step two is training your people to consistently give that exact experience all the time.
That happens all too frequently. I like the phrase you talked about, this value equation when you go out to dinner, and everyone's feeling it. I say in my show a lot, we eat out a lot. Busy family, multiple kids running around. We do eat out a lot. I'm telling you, 8 to 9 times out of 10 lately, I'm feeling like, I get the bill, and I'm like, “That amount for that?” The value equation is not there.
You have a nice dinner, or the food was good, the service was extra attentive, and you're like, “Good. I don’t mind.” I prefer that second experience where I don’t mind paying versus the first one where I'm like, “That?” Your customer is feeling that now. The economy is probably not going to change. Inflation is going to keep going. You have to deliver value. It enhances the experience as you talked about.
I'm willing to get an extra round of beers if you come at the right time or you talk with the right tempo of it. Let's say there are four of us, four beers times $6 or $7, that's what you're leaving on the table. That's not pure profit, but almost pure profit. If you do it right, I feel good about it, you feel good about it, everybody wins. Those things are a big part of successfully running a restaurant.
Transforming Leadership Through the Restaurant Management 201 Workshop
Let's go to the 201 Workshop for a minute. You are in New York. You're live. You've done it in combination with the restaurant events people for a couple of years now in their various locations, New York, California, Florida, etc. You present a half-day workshop almost. You get into it.
We do. It's three and a half hours. It is ten mastermind topics. We say that these are the ten areas. If you have these ten areas handled, your restaurant will be humming. It will operate almost on its own, but it requires putting lots of different systems in place, exactly the kinds of things that we've been talking about, where you have strong training systems. You have strong guest experience systems that start with strong management systems. We dive both deep and wide, and it's a lot of information.
We cover everything that we think you need to know and be thinking about to be a successful restaurateur and to be a successful general manager or management team, which is exciting. We've been doing this for years, and we update the content occasionally as we get new information, as there are shifts in customer and guest trends and things like that.
The heart of what we are teaching doesn’t change. You're not going to suddenly create a new way to have a manager meeting that's going to revolutionize everything. It's a lot of the same content. We've been able to hone in on some details for what we're presenting in the room. We think that every second counts, everything down to when you are on break, going to the bathroom, we have decided and orchestrated what that seven and a half minutes is going to look like.
Part of why we do that is because we want you to be thinking about your business that way, that you can think about and orchestrate every moment of the guest experience and every moment of your employees’ experiences. It takes change over time. It takes slow and steady wins in the race. It takes intentionally creating a vision and working towards that vision, noticing when you get off track, and then coming back to the vision and coming back to your to-do list, moving things forward rather than getting wrapped up in whatever the drama of the day is or whatever emergency fire you have to put out. It's a fine balance. We are very proud of what we've put together, not only to train people but also to model, “This is how it can look and can work for you and your team.”
It sounds awesome. A couple of things. You mentioned Darren. I interviewed Darren for episode 235. We talked about the show in addition to a lot of restaurant leadership and management stuff. Check that out. Check out the workshop. Think about this. The reason I like what you guys are doing in combination with the show is that, as an owner, have made a decision to go attend the New York Restaurant Show, for example. Now you’re there already. You’re walking the floor, you're seeing a lot of stuff, but this is a chance to learn too.
You can see the talks on the floor as well, but now you guys are in-depth. You're in a workshop environment, and you're getting into it for three and a half hours. I know Darren, and perhaps yourself, also do training in-person, where you travel and do that. That's hard. That's a big investment. Folks are already there, take advantage of being at the show, jump into the workshop, learn this high-level stuff, and bring it home to your team. It’s great. We'll talk about it at the end, but hit them now, where can they go and find out information about that?
That's going to be RestaurantManagement201.com. It’s super easy. That’s going to take you to a landing page that tells you everything about the workshop. It will give you a link to sign up for the show and the workshop. We have a coupon code, RM201. Anyone who buys a ticket to the workshop, they're going to get the entire show for free, a $55 value, totally free. It is hundreds of booths, I think 40 hours of education. I find it entertaining to be on the floor and to learn all of this.
You were saying the great thing about the workshop is you can see the other talks. I'm giving one. I adore my talk. I think it's very important, but it's disparate education. You're picking up a little piece on marketing here and a little piece of leadership there. With the workshop, what you get is, here is a step-by-step on how to use all of this information that you're learning, in what order, what's the priority, and how to put it together, so that you're making a difference with it, rather than getting back to the restaurant and being like, "We got a no-call, no-show bartender. I got to hop back there." My notebook goes in a drawer, and I never think about it again. Everything goes back to the status quo.
Loneliness And Post-Covid Change in the Restaurant Industry
A lot of great speakers there. I know a number of folks. It’s going to be a great show to go to. One of the things we talked about pre-call here, and you hinted at it. It could be a whole episode by itself. It’s this idea of folks feeling apart from themselves and lonely. COVID may have changed that. In the restaurant industry, it's very different. Let’s touch on that for a couple of minutes, and then we’ll go towards wrapping up. I know it’s not a pet peeve, maybe not the right word, but an area of interest for you.
It is. Part of the reason that I got into the coaching and leadership development side of work with the restaurant industry is because I’m a people person, and restaurant people tend to be people-people. It’s interesting to me. I stay on top of neuroscience and social science and what’s developing in those worlds in order to help people have better experiences in their lives. I think a lot of people when they hear the phrase loneliness epidemic, might think it’s a TikTok buzzword or that this happened because of COVID.
The advisory that the US Surgeon General put out about the loneliness epidemic came from speaking on the state of US health. He started doing this research in 2014. This is not something new. It’s not something because of COVID. There is science and data behind the fact that we, as a society, are becoming less connected to each other. I thought this was fascinating and awful. One of the quotes from the advisory is that the mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to fifteen cigarettes a day.
There is science and data on why we as a society are becoming less connected to each other.
People are dying sooner because they’re lonely. We, as the restaurant industry, have this amazing opportunity. It sounds awful, but we can capitalize on this. It’s like selling to enhance the experience. It’s a win-win. People are getting the community that they crave. They’re getting the social connection that not only they crave but is extending their life. We have more people coming in our doors. We have more guests coming in, having this wonderful experience.
The thing that we have to overcome in the industry is that we are part of this society that is experiencing disconnection from each other, especially in a world where we don’t get to say, "Let’s return to the office Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and we’ll be there 9:00 to 5:00 together. We can all connect and collaborate and build this together." Somebody has got to be on-site at midnight to close things out after everything has closed up and your servers have gone home.
That person is not coming back in at 9:00 in the morning to do a little collaboration exercise, hopefully. We have an opportunity in the industry to look at, first of all, how this loneliness epidemic is affecting me. How am I the one who feels like, "I’m all alone in this. I have to shoulder these burdens all by myself. It’s me." How do we intentionally create time to be with our staff, to collaborate together, to make sure that we’re getting the support that we need with an eye toward providing community experiences and opportunities for the people who live around us, the people who come in so that we get to create an opportunity for people to live better, longer, and happier lives? In doing so, we support the bottom line of the restaurant.
Good stuff there. Maybe we’ll invite you back and dig into that as a whole topic area, but a question around the same topic, have you found, or did that same research talk about this guy here playing any role in that process? We’re also being audio, I held up a phone. The mobile device and how we all go into doom-scrolling and get lost in these little worlds. Any stuff there?
Absolutely. Two of the main causes of this epidemic are COVID and the way that it separated us and changed how society functions, and also the internet. As much as we feel like, "I have 2,000 friends on Facebook. I can see what all my friends are up to all the time," it’s a trick. It’s an absolute trap. That is not how our brains and our bodies create connections. It’s being with people.
It circles right back to the talk that I’m giving on the floor. It is so crucial that we have actual in-person, one-on-one, and small-group connections with actual people in real life. Not only does the internet steal our time and make us zone out and not make the most of our time. When I say we, I mean I. I did that last night, scrolled for an hour, and then went, "Shoot. I didn’t do that today," but it also makes us feel like we are connecting when we are not. It’s a huge obstacle to overcoming this loneliness epidemic.
Building Stronger Restaurant Teams Through Genuine Connection
There’s Netflix, and this streaming, and that streaming, and binging. There are so many opportunities to consume media outside of connecting with the real world. Good stuff there. Glad we got to connect. We talked about the show and your talk. In closing, any parting thoughts or wisdom? Once again, send them links and how to find them.
RestaurantManagement201.com, for both the restaurant management workshop and the New York show itself. It’ll send you over to the show’s page as well, where you can get more information. Darren and I will be there on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. We’re super excited about it. Please come stop by, say hello, and take the workshop. You can find me personally at RestaurantRevolution.me. In parting words, I want to bring home that I talk sometimes to restaurant owners and managers, and they want tips, they want advice, they want little actions they can take that will make things better. They get frustrated sometimes when I say, "Are you talking to your people? How are your relationships?"
It’s very high-level, the work that I do, rather than, "Here are my six tips and tricks for making your restaurant better." You can Google "six tips and tricks to make your restaurant better." The actual leadership development, mindset shift, or behavioral shift work that it takes to build a stronger team comes from taking your nose out of to-do lists, taking your nose out of tips and tricks, and genuinely connecting with people. I think that’s the hard work. I appreciate all of the restaurant owners who are doing it.
Building a stronger team comes from taking your nose out of to-do lists and genuinely connecting with people.
Excellent stuff, Alison. I appreciate that. I appreciate you joining us. Alison Anne of Restaurant Revolution. Be sure to check her out at the New York Restaurant Show this upcoming March 23rd to 25th. You can register for the workshop at RestaurantManagement201.com. You can find show information at NewYorkRestaurantShow.com. Alison can also be found at RestaurantRevolution.me.
For more great restaurant marketing, service, people, and tech tips, stay tuned to us here at RunningRestaurants.com. In the meantime, please do us a favor, share this episode, like it wherever you are watching or consuming it, subscribe, review us, and rate us. All that stuff helps get the word out, and we do appreciate it. Thank you so much, Alison. We’ll see you folks next time.
Thanks, Jaime.