Every budget conversation in hospitality should start with one question: is every single line item in this budget Guest-focused? Not customer-focused. Not revenue-focused. Not cost-focused. Guest-focused. Does every goal for the front of house and the back of house connect back to the Guest Experience? Does every pre-shift meeting, every line check, every vendor conversation, […]
Teamwork has become a marketing term or art. It sells books, training programs, workshops, and consulting engagements. It appears in company values statements and pre-shift speeches. It is invoked whenever a leader wants to inspire collective effort without doing the harder work of building the conditions that actually produce it. Most of what gets called […]
After four decades of hiring, developing, and coaching thousands of cast members, I have learned to look for specific behaviors that separate the remarkable ones from the merely competent. Not credentials. Not experience. Behaviors. Here is what A Players actually do. They go beyond service to produce hospitality. The steps of service are not enough […]
The operators who build sustainable success are not doing more. They are focused on different things than the operators who are struggling. Six specifically. They focus on the Guest Experience above everything else. Most of the work that fills a shift has nothing to do with the Guest. Reports, policy mandates, cleaning schedules, process management, […]
A colleague asked this question in a forum years ago. The answer has not changed. Yes. Restaurant marketing is broken. Not because the tools do not work. Because the thinking behind how most operators use them is wrong at the foundation. Here is what is actually broken: The assumption that retail strategies work for hospitality. […]
QFO: “Since most loyalty programs involve some sort of comp (discount) what do you propose instead as the incentive?” Answer: Whatever the Guest actually wants — except your margin. The assumption embedded in the question is that the incentive has to be financial. That Guests are loyal because of what they save. That the relationship […]
You do not. That is the entire answer. And it is the answer most operators have never accepted because it removes the comfortable illusion that the right training program, the right incentive structure, the right motivational speech will produce a cast that cares about the work. It will not. You cannot make people care about […]
Most operators who lose Guests do not lose them dramatically. There is no scene. No complaint. No scathing review. The Guest simply stops coming back — and the operator never finds out why because the Guest never told them. Here is what they experienced on the way out. The server who wrote nothing down. The […]
Most interview questions reveal what a candidate wants you to know. One question reveals what they would rather you did not. Tell me about the worst mistake you ever made — and what it cost your employer. That is it. One question. Four things it tells you immediately. The magnitude of the mistake reveals the […]
The costliest item in most restaurant operations does not appear on the P&L. It is not food waste, not labor variance, not rent. It is the empty chair. Not the chair that was empty because the restaurant was not full. The chair that was empty because the operation did not produce a Guest experience compelling […]
Someone told an operator I was working with that 75% of food and beverage businesses lose money or break even indefinitely — and that F&B is a loss leader by nature. I nearly lost my mind. This is not a market reality. It is a belief system. And it is a belief system that produces […]
Most operators think of fun as a cultural nicety — something that happens when the work goes well, a byproduct of a good shift rather than a design requirement for a productive operation. They have the sequence backwards. Fun creates enjoyment. The cast member who finds genuine enjoyment in the work is not performing enthusiasm. […]
There is a service recovery script making the rounds in hospitality training circles that sounds like empathy and produces the opposite of it. “I can see how angry this makes you.” When was the last time you were genuinely upset with a service failure and the person responsible for fixing it responded by narrating your […]
The impulse is understandable. You see something being done and you know you could do it better. More carefully. More consistently. With more attention to detail and more genuine care for the outcome. And you probably could. The market will not care. Better is a comparison. It requires the Guest to evaluate your version against […]
QFO: “I’d like my business to provide great customer service, but staffers don’t seem to grasp the concept. Can it be taught?” Danny Meyer offered this answer: “The most important thing you can do is make the distinction between customer service and guest hospitality. Customer service entails getting the right food to the right person […]
The restaurant helix has always been running underneath your operation. Most operators have never been told it exists. That single unnamed fact explains why 90% of the industry keeps solving the same problems, in the same cycles, with the same tools, and keeps getting the same results. Why do restaurants fail? Why do cast members […]
The operator inside a drifting brand does not own the menu, the pricing, the recipes, or the marketing. He owns exactly one lever — hospitality — and it is the only lever that decides whether Guests come back. The Sentence That Ends the Argument Great food cannot overcome bad hospitality. Great hospitality can overcome bad […]
The corporate consulting industry produces an endless stream of “influence without authority” playbooks aimed at professionals who need to move things through systems they do not own. Read one of them and the same five moves show up in some version — start with their world, co-create instead of sell, use proof instead of passion, […]
Issue: A recent Supermarket News piece by Richard Mitchell and a LinkedIn response to it both ask the same question about full-service meat counters in grocery stores: is the counter worth the investment? Both pieces cite the Power of Meat 2026 report — 67% of shoppers use the counter once a month or less, 12% […]
Most restaurant marketing mistakes are not the ones you think. The worst one is invisible to the operator making it, because the operator is watching McDonald’s do exactly the same thing and assuming it’s a template they can copy. You saw the WcDonald’s anime campaign. Or the Fortnite tie-in. Or the Fan Truth Road Trip […]
