Jim Taylor

00:00Welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio, the tastiest hour of talk in Music City. Now here's your host, Brandon Styll. Hello Music City and welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio. We are powered by Gordon Food Service. My name is Brandon Styll and I am your host. Going into the weekend, so excited, beautiful weather all week long, oh my gosh, so excited to share this episode with you. We are talking to a man named Jim Taylor today and Jim is the CEO of a company called Benchmark 60. He's out of Vancouver, Canada and he believes retention is the new cool and I tend to agree with him. That's what this episode is about today. If you're having staffing issues, any other kind of issues, we talk about what it's like right now in restaurants and how you can change the paradigm of what you're doing when it comes to your staffing.

01:07So this is a really exciting episode and we talked for about an hour and I just absolutely love it. You've been hearing me talk on the episode about a company called Justice Industries, Just Dot Glass. You've had to have heard them by now and I'm so excited to welcome in studio, before we get to Jim, we're going to be talking with Ellen Peterson. Ellen, how you doing? Hey, Brandon, I'm good. How are you? I am wonderful. Now, it's fun to have Ellen in studio because typically I see Ellen when I'm walking my dog because Ellen lives on the same street, her dog Casey and my dog Barkin, they play and it's a whole thing. Best friends. They're best friends. I'm envious of your husband's Jeep because he's got an old GP works on and your yard is beautiful and we get to, our kids go to the same school and this is so fun that we get to work together this way. It is. It's great. Thank you for having me. So Justice Industries, tell me about Justice Industries because I am so excited to tell people about Justice Industries. Well, thank you so much. We appreciate you telling people about Justice Industries.

02:07So we are actually a local nonprofit here in Nashville and we create small social enterprise businesses to employ people with barriers to employment. So everyone we hire has come out of homelessness. Maybe they're being previously incarcerated. They're struggling with addiction recovery. They're even just coming out of generational poverty. So they have a hard time finding and keeping a job. So we create small social enterprise businesses to specifically employ that group of people. Oh wow. So where do you find these people? Well actually we work in partnership with area social service enterprises and organizations. So Matthew 25, Room at the Inn, Project Connect, Tennessee Prison Outreach Ministries. We have about a dozen partners that we work with in and around the city that can help provide wraparound services for our team members that we don't necessarily provide. We become an employee pipeline for them. Okay, that's excellent. So they have people that want to get jobs. They want to get out of there, but they want to work, but they walk in anywhere and they say they have two felonies or this or this.

03:10People are like, I'm not going to take a chance on you. You guys are like, come on. We got this. We want to offer you a job and we want to gain plenty of money and get you back into society. Exactly. That's what we say. We are all about opportunity and sustainability because we are providing an opportunity for anyone who is ready to take it to make a change in their life. How did you get into this? Like, is that something you've always wanted to do? Are you just like? Well, I've always been in nonprofit work and I have a long sordid history of that. The founder of our organization, Justice Industries, is actually, he was a family and youth pastor at First Presbyterian Church, Mark DeVries, for years and years and years and I actually worked for him as a youth intern when I was in college and yeah, then somehow stumbled into working with him again. So it's been great. That's so amazing. Yeah. So Just Dot Glass is one of these companies that you guys have created to employ these people and tell me about Just Dot Glass.

04:12Okay. So Just Glass is our largest enterprise. It employs the most people. It provides the most hours worth of work and it's our busiest. So Nashville lacks a citywide glass recycling solution. People can take their glass to the convenience centers, but they don't allow commercial drop-offs. That's me. Yeah. Good for you. But they don't allow commercial drop-offs. So there's really not an option for curbside pickup for bars, restaurants, hotels, people that want to recycle their glass and achieve some sustainability goals really need a curbside pickup service. So that's kind of where we found a great niche and we have almost a thousand residential customers in the greater Nashville area and a growing list of bars, restaurants, hotels that we are now servicing. Can you give me a name of a few who you're currently picking up their glass for? Sure. We do all of the Country Music Hall of Fame event glass. We've done all the glass for the summer concert series at Ascend Amphitheater.

05:12We do Locust, Butcher and Bee, Cafe Rosé, a couple lots of little places in East Nashville. I love it. Those are big names. Yes. So I love that. So those chefs and the people that run those companies have identified that there is a massive need. I think there's a massive need. I think this is also something to me that's like a retention thing. So if you're somebody who's out there, who's running a business and you're losing employees or you're not green enough, Generation Z and millennials, what they're looking for is sustainability. They want to work in a place that cares about Mother Earth and by recycling is a huge thing. When you work in a restaurant, we started to do it using the compost company to compost food waste. And that's a main reason for greenhouse gases in my staff immediately. I had 10 people come to me like, I'm so proud to work here that we do this.

06:13I've wanted to do it, but I'm a server, I didn't know who to talk to, but it's so cool you're doing this. Same thing with glass, right? I mean, so if you're not doing that, it's huge. Right. Yeah. Because the glass would actually just end up in the landfill. Nashville tried to do this with Mayor Barry's Honky Tonk initiative many years ago, but it's just logistically challenging. So we have kind of a small fleet of vehicles and we do custom pricing for all the restaurants based on their volume of glass and the frequency of pickup needs. So we're really able to pivot a lot more easily than kind of a bigger company. Sure. Because it is. It's more personalized, it's local. Right. And we're employing local people and keeping glass out of the local landfills. So yeah, it's a really good, we say that we're good for the environment and good for the community. Where do you take the glass? You get all the glass, where does it go? We have a partner with a glass recycling company that's a national company, it's called Strategic Materials.

07:15Okay. And they have a plant actually in Ashland City. Oh, wow. So it's actually being processed here locally now. So they have some third party people that buy the glass that gets recycled for abrasives and things like that. But they are actually growing that plant to recycle more glass here in Middle Tennessee. It used to get shipped to their partner or their plant in Atlanta, as you can imagine. Great cost on glass or is quite expensive. So it's really great that we have a local option with what Strategic Materials is doing in Ashland City. So they're a great partner for us. Okay. So if I'm listening to this right now and I'm in, I'm like, wow, this sounds fantastic. I want to do that. How do I do that? Is it cumbersome? Is it hard? Do I have to buy a bunch of stuff? How do I sign up for JustGlass? It is not cumbersome at all. If you are a restaurant owner and you want to get a quote for service, the best thing to do would be to email me directly. That is Ellen at justiceindustries.org.

08:19E-L-L-E-N. Right. At justiceindustries.org. Correct. Good stuff. Because, like I said earlier, we do all custom pricing. So I really need to figure out how much glass you have, how much pickups you need, how many pickups you need per week, and that sort of stuff. So pricing is based on that. But we provide the 96-gallon roll-off bins that we use to collect the glass. So you don't have to have any startup costs or anything like that. We do it all for you. You email me. I send you a quote. If you like it, we get you on the schedule and we start right away. And you contribute to doing great things. Contribute to employing people. We all talk about how we want to help people. This is a really easy way. You know the other cool thing about this is glass takes up so much space in your actual dumpster. For us, composting the food and if we start composting the glass or recycling the glass, I can probably reduce a whole pickup that I would need from my dumpster service by supplementing.

09:21And then I'm helping out local companies. I'm helping out local people. Right. You're absolutely right. A lot of our commercial customers have said just that. That the cost is not that prohibitive because of the savings they're having versus filling up the dumpster full of glass. So yeah, it's a win for everybody. So I highly encourage everybody who's in the industry to give us a call. Shoot me an email. Let us take care of your glass. All right. That is Ellen at justiceindustries.org. And it is so fun to see you in the studio talking about Justice Industries and Just Glass. Thank you for coming in today. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. So thank you so much, Ellen, for coming in. And guys, I'm serious. If you want to do the right thing and you want to help out local and help some people out, Just Glass is a great company and Justice Industries is a local nonprofit. So honored to work with them. But hey, let's jump in right now with Jim Taylor.

10:21Super excited today to welcome in Jim Taylor and Jim is the CEO of a company called Benchmark 60. We met each other for the first time like five minutes ago, but we've been connecting on LinkedIn back and forth. I've been posting some different things about labor and people and you do the same thing and we kind of were like, hey, man, we think alike. Let's let's make a podcast. Let's do it. Yeah, there's definitely some synergy. That's for sure. And here we are. We're making a podcast together. We're making beautiful podcast. It's like, what are we talking about? Well, I mean, we could go down a bunch of different rabbit holes today. But I mean, people and retention and I mean, the restaurant business is obviously where we're going to start. So I think that's a great that's a great launching off point. People in retention and the restaurant business. And have you been in Nashville? Do you know anything about Nashville? You know what? I personally have never been to Nashville.

11:23It's on the list. I was supposed to come to Nashville in April of 2020. That was a bad month. Do the math. Yeah, it was a bad month. You would have it. You'd have a completely different impression of Nashville if you came in April of 2020 versus today. Broadway was just empty with nobody walking around. It was eerie. It was a whole thing. Yeah, there's like 200,000 people come every weekend to hang out on Broadway and do Nashville. It's something like crazy number like that. My wife, it's her go to spot with her girlfriends is Nashville. OK, well, there you go. Yeah, that is an absolute thing. So where are you from? Let's do a little bit of background on you so that before we get into this, this conversation, I am so damn excited to get into. Tell us about yourself. Give us like, I always ask people for their 90 second elevator speech, like give us like your kind of background, your history, your credentials. What do you got? Yeah, I'm well based in Vancouver, British Columbia. So in Western Canada, lifetime restaurant operator up until a couple of years ago.

12:28I did the whole corporate operations thing for a long time and I was part of the group of people that left the restaurant industry when, well, left operations when when the pandemic hit. I realized that I was burnt out, exhausted, wanted to find a different way to help, didn't know what that was at the time. And I did the, you know, never quit your job without a plan. I quit my job without a plan, just said we're going to figure out a way to help. But that was that was like the most unique time to do that, right? I mean, if God has ever sent a message that said, dude, do a life reset. This is it. You took that seriously, 100 percent, you know, changed everything all at once, quit my 20 year career, got married, moved, started a business, did did all of it all in a 90 day span. So what happened in the last 30 days, you've expanded on your family, right? Yeah, we we welcomed our first daughter to the to the world. First child two weeks ago. Congratulations, man. You don't even look that tired.

13:30You know what? She lets us sleep a little bit. I was up at five this morning. Well, it's not that bad. So I'm sorry. I'm going to do it. 2020, you changed your whole life, changed my whole life. 2020 wanted to find a way to help. Like I said, wasn't exactly sure what that was going to look like. I knew that the world of restaurant consulting is really a tricky one because, you know, our industry typically doesn't like consultants. No, you know, it's like oil and water, right? It's kind of if you tell someone you're a consultant and watch the operator turn and run away the other direction. But really wanted to find a way to use some of my experience to help. And I I found that I've been really lucky in a couple of scenarios in my operations career where I was involved in really unique projects or really different ways of looking at things. You know, one of them was in 2015 when the Western Canadian governments decided to dramatically change minimum wage. And there was this sort of race to fifteen dollars an hour that at the time was a 30 percent increase in wages in about 18 months.

14:32And it kind of flipped the industry upside down a little bit. There's no tip credit in Canada. There's no, you know, two dollar minimum wage. So it was we had to figure out how to operate the business at fifteen dollars an hour. You pay your servers fifteen dollars an hour, even if they make three hundred dollars a night, they make fifteen bucks an hour. Wow, everybody. So, you know, that really changed the way that the business that we approach the business and the parameters that we set for that, for working through that, I still use with, you know, every day today. You're not allowed to raise prices. You're not allowed to cut staff's hours. There has to be another way to manage labor costs that's productive, that's people centric, that takes good care of people, that retains your staff, that creates a good work environment, because up until 2015, all we've done in the markets I've worked in was when minimum wage went up, we just raised prices. Or we just cut staff. Or you look differently was was a good one. For me, what my brain goes to is technology.

15:35I mean, you know, you've got these so much there's so much technology out there, which I think is born out of a necessity when you go to fifteen dollars an hour for service staff and all of a sudden you look at it and you go, shit, what am I going to do? I can't afford to pay ten servers a night for five hours, fifteen without raising my prices or without doing you start looking at it and you go, well, maybe I can start going QR codes. People technology now has allowed us the opportunity to do stuff like that. I mean, what is your first go to when you when that happens? Well, the interesting thing, we did the iPad thing when I was still in the corporate restaurant world, right, we gave everybody a handheld thinking it would give them a bigger section. And in some cases it did, but it didn't always mean that it was it didn't always mean the service was as good, it didn't always mean that the sales were strong, it didn't always mean that labor costs went down. You know, it presented some interesting findings, but they weren't always what we thought they were going to be. You know, we were we did one of those things where we said, OK, let's leave some some fixed terminals in the restaurant because the manager still needs somewhere to go or let's leave a couple of fixed terminals because we want a safety net for the staff if they're not comfortable on the iPad.

16:45Well, for the first month, every staff member just lined up at the thing that they were used to and then use the handheld. So the technology didn't work right away the way we thought it was going to. So we had to, you know, we had to continue to look at other things. But it, you know, that we're seeing that stuff happen in markets now. It's just being, you know, brought on by. What's happening in terms of labor shortages, this wages are going crazy. And then you get this thing in California that's happening with this Fast Recovery Act. What's the Fast Recovery Act? I'm in Nashville, so as far as national stuff about this. Yeah, I mean, what I'm really looking at right now is restaurant tours are there's a labor shortage, right? So I need 15 people to wait tables tonight and I only have 25 total waiters and I've got to cover 14 shifts a week without burning everybody out. And I need people, but there's just not enough people in this. I'm paraphrasing what a general statement might be around the city from a manager of a restaurant who's tired, they're overwhelmed, they're burnt out and they're like, dude, I just can't find people that want to do the job.

17:56I made a post on LinkedIn a couple weeks ago and I said, if you're still managing the way you were in 2019, chances are you think you have a labor problem. Chances are you're short staffed. And I said, you need to not invest in Indeed or whatever. You need not invest in labor technology. What you need to invest in is a mirror because I believe that if you're still managing that way, that people are everything. And if you don't take care of people, you're not going to retain people. The mentality of 2019 or 2018, people were in the same boat. There was a shortage of labor. I asked Hugh Atchison on this show in April of 2020. I said, do you think after the pandemic, let's just say, you know, a third of the restaurants close, I said, do you think that the market is going to change from a, you know, employee market to an owner market where all of a sudden it's a, we need you to do this stuff because if a third of the restaurants close, there's so many workers that don't have jobs.

19:00So my mentality in April of 2020 was like, this is all going to change. It's going to change to an employer's market versus an employee's market. And boy was I wrong, but he said in that moment, rightfully, he was like, Hey, we're in the middle of a pandemic. Like, I don't really give a shit about what kind of a market it is. People are hurting. And I was like, yeah, you hit me right between the eyes in that moment. And, and it really changed everything for me. And I went, it's not about the market or the business. It's about people and genuinely caring. And I think that's the thing that we've lost in this industry is we look too much at numbers and we stop sitting down with people, looking them in the eye and saying, how are you doing? Are you okay? Cause you can't blanket look at an entire demographic of people and go, you're all workers. You all feel this way. This is how we're going to manage you. Everything is about individual people and how you can manage an individual every single day, in my opinion.

20:06I mean, as you can't just come in and go, you're a server. So therefore I know these five things about you. That doesn't, that doesn't play anymore. Yeah. Yeah. And we were, a few of us were having this conversation yesterday, a little bit about how we got to this point where it seems like, and you know, this is a bit of a broad stroke statement and a little bit harsh, but it seems like nobody cares about people in restaurants. Right. And, and there, I think there's probably a lot of people that feel that way. Uh, you know, definitely not everybody, but you know, I don't blame our industry for getting to this point right now. And it's, there's a tipping point happening right now. But if you think about, you know, going back to 2020, like you said, if you think about all the things that operators have had to deal with, close the restaurant, open the restaurant, you know, create a takeout program, buy a bunch of plexiglass, you know, hand sanitizer everywhere, close the restaurant again, you know, all of that stuff that, and all of the, the whole time, all these operators are thinking, this is costing me thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, my livelihood.

21:12There's this financial attachment to it. And the people side of our industry was kind of pushed to the side for a while. Right. And I think what's happening right now, and a lot of the conversations that I've been having recently and in lots of different circles is that the next new big expense that's that operators are starting to realize is about to hit them or is already hitting them is people. So there, you know, I agree with you that it's, it's definitely about the way that we treat people every day in the restaurant. It's about the, the approach that the restaurants have. And it's funny that you said the 2019, if you're still doing that, you need a mirror, you know, I've said the exact same thing that, you know, we need, if we're still managing restaurants, the way we were three, four, five, six, 10 years ago, you know, you're so far behind the eight ball and, uh, um, you know, I actually believe that our industry doesn't have a labor shortage. It has a retention shortage. I do too. I think, I mean, I, I think there is a labor shortage because large companies have now seen that a bunch of restaurants have closed, there's real estate available.

22:17I went to the RLC in Phoenix and just talked about this with, uh, with Travis Talbot and the comment that guy said was, you know, the dead wood on the bottom of the forest has been burned off, AKA the mom and pops that aren't pros. And now that dead wood is gone. And now that's, that's allowing the us big guys. Now we can spread our wings. We can, our branches are allowed to grow now because now we can just be professionals. Yeah. And I think the beginning of the pandemic, the biggest conversations that I had in the reason why I started this podcast was because people, like all of the locally owned, locally owned and operated restaurants that I talked to, the owners were more concerned with them providing for their, their staff. They were more concerned with the people that there's a lot of restaurants out there that did the right thing in 2019. I think that we talk about having to close your restaurant, put plexiglass up, do all these things. Those were tough things as a business person, but as people, I mean, most restaurants, I think that there's, there's two types of restaurants.

23:22There's the independently owned and operated restaurant. Then there's your big corporate chains, big corporate chains that are on look at numbers all day long and everything is there's a metric and there's a system for everything. But if you're a locally owned and operated restaurant, you have one restaurant, you're the chef and the owner, the people that work in that restaurant are so much more than a number. Those are the, that's, that's your family. And then when we had to close and you have to tell your family, I can't do this anymore, you have, I have to let you go because otherwise I'm going to lose everything. That was painful. And then on top of that, no, now you have to buy plexiglass and now you have to all the hoops you got to go through. I think people like the locally owned and operated community was going through that with a massive heartbreak because the pain of having to let those people go was, was nightmarish and then them losing their restaurant. Like, I think that the industry has just taken a huge turn in the direction of like, I mean, what are we going to do to support mom and pops? I mean, that's the thing. It's one of the things I think that we need to be doing.

24:25I think that would help. And I think that, I don't know, I let's get into what you do. Let's get into what benchmark 60. So if I call you, I've got two restaurants and I say, I want to talk to benchmark 60, what do you do? How can you help me? What's the first thing you want to know from me? Let's pretend like we're doing a consultation and you're asking me. I have two restaurants right now. So what do you want to know? What do you want to know? How can benchmark 60 help me? Well, the first two things I would ask you, one is that, um, I would ask you about retention and just where you're at in terms of people, because a huge part of what we do is based around, um, innovative retention strategies for restaurant tours and I don't mean create a, you know, here's a new benefit that goes on your paycheck or, you know, we're going to do a pizza party. I don't mean those types of retention strategies. People love pizza parties, man. They do, but everybody does. We need more of those. Um, so that would be the first thing I would ask a little bit about what's happening in terms of retention, turnover, that type of thing in your restaurant. The other thing is that I would, I would ask you, how many times have you raised your prices in the last year?

25:29And do you feel like you're at a cap or are you, you know, are you at the point where you're like, I can't wear the threshold, I can't raise my prices anymore. Because the two, the two core strategies that benchmark 60 uses, and we're fairly specific in the work that we do. It's very, you know, it has to align with a company's attitude about trying to do things differently. One is we help them understand how to, how to look at a whole, take a holistic look at the data that exists in their business so that they can actually improve overall business productivity and negate rising costs by doing that. So there are ways to negate inflation, wage increases, those types of things by actually leveraging how productive the business is the same way that the manufacturing industry, the agricultural industry, you know, other, other industries in the world look at that Six Sigma, the Toyota model, lean business management, those types of, um, strategies, we can apply that to a restaurant. So we help them understand how to do that. The other thing is that. So let's stop there. I don't, so when I hear that, I think operate better, right?

26:36So if I do two and a half million dollars a year in sales and I'm purchasing, you know, a million dollars or $750,000 a year from my food vendor, or I'm buying from four different food to vendors, because I think I'm getting a better deal when I beat them all up and I'm really paying more is part of your strategy, teaching them how to purchase better so that they can save a bunch of money and that money they put back into the business. And then they can, I mean, cause sometimes people don't realize where they're hemorrhaging money. And so if you, if I'm able to help you make 8% more or 5% more, then you can turn and put that back into your employees. And I don't even know I had that money. So, I mean, for me, I feel like educating people on some of the things they can do to become more profitable, but then they have to in turn, take that capital and reinvest it back into their built into their business. And in the form of retention, how do I, and some of it's leadership education to me, I would think you've got to educate leaders.

27:40I changed my leadership compensation model instead of bonusing people based upon sales and profitability and food cost and bar cost and labor. You know, I've changed it to a retention model. If you have this many employees and if we have less churn, I'm going to give you more money because I mean, I think you identified that $2,000 is what it costs to hire an hourly employee. And like every time you have a manager who has an ego one day comes in because his, you know, wife doesn't love him and he comes into work and he goes, you're late and I'm angry and I'm going to take out my anger on you and you're always late, you're fired. You know, it's amazing how often I'm in a meeting and somebody says, oh, that person's a cancer. And I go, really? Why are they a cancer? Well, they come in and all they do is complain. I go, so complaining is one thing, but are you listening to what they're saying? Oh man, it's always, you know, managers are never on the floor and the host never seats me. And it's like, well, you're in the office a lot. Do you listen to the, do you think there's some validity to what they're saying?

28:44Do you think that maybe a sit down, a one-on-one conversation with that person to go, tell me what's going on. Tell me what your complaints are. Let me see where I can fix what I can fix. Leaning in and putting your arm around somebody and saying, I value you and I value what you bring to the table. And you have some, the way in which you're communicating your frustrations to the entire staff, let's communicate that with me because I'm going to, if they feel they can trust that their, that their complaints or whatever their, their problems are going to be heard and maybe acted upon, maybe that stops complaining. Maybe people start coming with solutions and maybe you start listening and investing money into leadership and teaching leadership to understand that. I think is a huge issue. I think that's a huge solution to your labor problem. For sure. And, and most of that, that productivity concept that we work on is based on the labor model of the restaurant. So that we look at data points like average wage, customer spend, staff hours, you know, cover count, those, those pieces of information that all relate directly to revenue and labor costs.

29:54And, and the interesting thing about it is that we just try to help them better understand how they can leverage the relationship between customer count and the number of staff working. And if we can improve that ratio by 5%, let's say, and there's lots of different ways to do that, which we can get into, but if we can improve that by 5%, a restaurant that does $3 million a year in revenue, a 5% improvement in productivity, overall business productivity, typically depending on their wage and pricing structure gives them somewhere in the range of a hundred thousand dollars a year in annual opportunity to reinvest back into the business. So there's that way that we help them in terms of managing labor costs a little bit, but it's more about how to get more out of your business, to reinvest into leadership training, into, you know, compensation structure, into benefits, packages, into, you know, all these different things. We just, one project, we just helped a group do that. I thought, I still think is one of the coolest ones that I've seen is repurposing those, they have eight locations, so that money added up pretty quick and they repurposed those funds in order to provide at home cleaning and laundry service for every employee that works for them.

31:05They send someone to every single employee's house to clean their house and do their laundry as a means to help improve their overall life and their wellbeing. And so that they always come to work with a clean shirt, right? They, they took that money instead of paying everybody $2 more an hour. They just said, here's how we're going to invest in our people. And I mean, talk about a killer, well, retention, but also a killer recruiting strategy, right? These, their staff are out for, you know, Friday night with their friends and they're like, well, I don't have to do my laundry anymore because my company takes care of it. My employer does it. So, you know, really cool way to sort of reinvest. That's an interesting concept. So basically you're looking at, you sit down with restaurants and you listen to their pain points and most of the time it turns out to be labor because that's a problem right now, hiring people and whatever retaining them. So then you identify areas within their restaurant or if they can, we have this system in place that can help you make more money based upon productivity of each individual person and then you can take that excess money.

32:08Is that the hardest part of it is convincing them that they need to take the excess money because I think that the big thing I hear is that restaurant owners are greedy and well, if I make an extra, you know, if I can work everybody an extra day and I make an extra two cents a dish, then I'm, I'm going to take my family to the Alps this year and I'm going to enjoy that month off that I take in July. And so fuck you. Here we are still working. We've all, I just saved a bunch of money. How come you're not investing that back into the business? Do you come to restaurants that are healthy, that are making a bunch of money that just have a staffing problem and you can come, do you get to come in and go spend your money this way, spend your money towards your people? Do they listen? Well, and that's part of, that's, that's an interesting question because someone asked me the other day what the typical type of restaurant is that we work with, you know, that what's that the app, the customer avatar or the, the perfect client or whatever it might be. Right. And it really, they said, you know, is it full service? Is it multi-unit? Is it quick serve?

33:09Is it fine dining? It's actually an attitude, right? Because the customer or the client or the restaurant operator or the owner that ends up working with benchmark 60 has to have the right, they, they have to have the right attitude. They have to want to do things differently. They have to want to move, you know, help move the industry forward. They have to want to take better care of their people. They have to sort of realize and agree with the fact that the way we've always done, it just doesn't work anymore. We have a sign on the wall in the office that says the end of we've always done it this way because it's, you know, it just doesn't work the same way anymore. Pricing is different. Inflation is, you know, depending on the market you're in, I mean, it's going to absolutely nuts right now, right? The cost of goods is oils, triple the cost. It was before all these different things. So the same model just doesn't work the same way anymore. Plus you compound that with the fact that people want things that are different than they did before, you know, my first bartending job, I worked the open to close shift on Saturdays in a bar.

34:10I started at nine AM. I worked till three in the morning. I just was there cause I thought I was going to make some cash. You couldn't, I mean, that doesn't exist now, right? The, the employee expectation is it exists here in Nashville. I'm going to step down from my soapbox for just a moment. So we can hear a word from our sponsors. We are supported by Robbins insurance, an independent insurance agency known for providing customized insurance policies, sound guidance, and attentive service. Robbins is also known for delivering exceptional coverage to Nashville's restaurants and bars, whether it's a fryer fire that sets off the sprinkler system and leaves your restaurant sopping wet on a busy Saturday night, or it's a once in a decade tornado that cuts off your electricity and subsequently spoils all the food in your walk-in. Robbins has seen it all. And they know how to create policies that'll get your business back on its feet as quickly as possible in the event a disaster strikes. Look, when it comes to ensuring your restaurant, bar, brewery, bakery, grocery store, hotel, or whatever, you need someone who knows the industry, who understands your business.

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38:23Unlike traditional restaurant POS hardware, you don't have to be locked in to one way of doing things that starts and ends with a server taking manual orders and swiping credit cards. You can hand off more of that control to your guests. Free up your staff's time to focus on great customer service and creating customer loyalty. You can even continue to use the more traditional server-focused ordering and payment processes for guests who prefer tableside interactions. Guys, to have that option is everything right now. Go to nashvillerestaurantradio.com, click the sponsors tab, and you will find a $500 gift under the GoTab tab. Do a 30 minute demo and I will give you a free hat, or I will give you a free t-shirt from Nashville Restaurant Radio. Just DM us on Instagram and let us know you set that up. Go check them out right now. Well, in some places. Downtown Broadway. I mean, people come to work at four o'clock and they work, they leave at five o'clock in the morning and they work their ass off and they make a grand a night with these bars downtown.

39:24I mean, it's a, it's a, and people are knocking on the door to work there. I mean, it, it just, it is a ringer. It puts you in there. You work your ass off. Cocaine is a huge issue. I said it's a huge issue, but ever, you know, how do you do a 12 hour shift where you are making, you know, I think that their number is something like you got to make like six drinks a minute. If you're up on the up bars in these busy places, you have to average like six drinks a minute. And it's like, damn, like, and then you got to ring them in and you got, I mean, it's just, it's just a matter of, we don't give a shit about anything. It's a metric and it's like, you've got to hit it. And it's like, and if you want to stay at this bar, you got to maintain that every day. And it's just, but how do you turn down a thousand dollars a night? Yeah. I mean, so on that, on that note about how hard people have to work, um, that, so this concept around, around productivity in a restaurant, I mean, it's all good and well and fine if the business wants to make more money, right? But if there's a turnover issue and I, you know, we get this comment quite often, I don't have a labor cost problem because I don't have enough people that will fill my schedule.

40:31You know, I, I'm not worried about the number that's coming out of my, my bank account for payroll as much as I used to be because it's less, my revenue is up because my pricing is up, but I, my labor cost is down or looks really good on paper because I don't have enough people to fill the schedule. So what ends up happening? And if we look at this from a, from a, again, a holistic data driven, you know, perspective, what's happening is this is compounding in so many restaurants that it's actually causing more people to leave because they have to work so hard, they're having to work harder than they ever have just to help the business, you know, maintain. Like you said, you've got 15, you need 15 waiters. You only have 25 on the schedule. How do you write a seven day a week to service a day schedule? So we use a metric that, and again, you were talking about too many metrics, but this one is really people centric and it's really about helping to improve retention. So that concept around how productive the business is, there's a way to measure that just like, you know, lots of other things, there's a threshold and every business has a threshold where everything can be really good and optimal at a certain level, but if you go past that threshold, it ends up becoming a workload issue, right?

41:49And so we spend a lot of time with restaurants on helping them understand what that threshold is and how to actually measure how hard their employees have to work so that they can see burnout coming before it happens. So they can go to their staff and, you know, we were helping a group the other day actually craft some messaging around a company policy procedure, so on and so forth, that is in place to protect our employees' wellbeing based on understanding how hard they have to work. Right? So we can actually stay ahead of burnout, ahead of wellbeing challenges, ahead of, you know, customer service issues because sections were too big and that kind of thing by actually looking at that data and saying, Hey, you're actually over that threshold where your team is having to work far too hard to achieve the results that you're achieving. So what is that? How do you gauge that? Because if I want to gauge food costs and I look at ending inventory plus purchases minus sale, I'm just top of my head, I know what the algorithm is, but like, what is it?

42:52How do you measure that? What is it? Is it amount of hours versus how much you pay versus sales divided by number of people that what's the math problem that you figure that out? Yeah. Yeah. So in the back of house, which is straight, essentially an output, it's a manufacturing position, right? At the end of the day, we, the most simple way to think about it is just how many dollars of food is being produced per hour that the staff work, not by one person, by the team. And what we can help them, the operator understand is if let's say your kitchen produces a hundred dollars an hour of food on average over the course of a whole week, okay. And their labor cost target for the kitchen team is whatever it might be. We can help them understand the connection between how hard the team is having to work, meaning dollars of food being produced and what the profit level of the labor cost associated with that is if they go from a hundred to a hundred and five, we can help them understand what that will do to their profitability. But if it goes to 110, it might look really good profit wise, but we can actually connect that workload number or that output number to turnover because there's a certain level where we can say, okay, your team is having to work too hard.

44:06They're working, they're all working over time. They're, you know, here are the things that are happening, but rather than looking at 10 metrics, you look at one and right away we can say, okay, hey, team, do not do whatever you have to do to not go over a hundred or a hundred and five. And every restaurant is going to be different, right? I mean, there's a process that we go through. So one restaurant might be $80. One might be 200, but being able to actually have a policy, a strategy and a metric in place that prevents the team from having to work too hard to accomplish the result is incredibly powerful when you go and tell your team that. How do you know what is too hard? Because I, I can work 15 hour days. So we have a metric. We work with a company called culture index and culture index. I don't know if you're familiar with it's like a disc profile type thing, but before you get hired, we ask you to fill out a culture index and on that culture index, it tells me what your energy units are. One of the things that it measures is your EU and what that is, is how long you can work mentally before you need a break. And it's amazing because it varies from 21 to 79, 36 is the average, right?

45:13And 36 means you can work for six hours of good. I'm engaged work before I need to take 10 minutes just to kind of, okay, I got to let all this stuff in my brain go away before I can get back to work. So that's it at 36. So if I hire somebody that's a 21, I know that every four hours they need to take a break and if I push them on an eight hour shift by our six and seven, they're not working at their best, but if I got a guy who's a 72, that dude can work 12 hours or a girl, I mean, I'm not saying that employee, they can work 12 hours and they like that, they enjoy that. So how do you, like, I can look at every single personal team and I can say, I only want to hire fifties. You know, if you're in here, I want to be a server and they can come, people come into an interview and tell you whatever you want to hear, but I can look at it and go, well, you're, you have a, you can work a really long time. You're my guy for Thanksgiving. When we open at 11 and we go home, we do a thousand people that one day, you're going to be my lead guy cause you can handle it.

46:21Is there a metric in that 100 or 105 that allows for, Hey, these people are better cause they want to work really hard. They can do it that long, but these three people can't, isn't that like an individual management skill that you need to hone in on that these guys might need a break or let's not schedule people for this long, but I got a server at one of my restaurants that works 14 shifts a week. If we are open, he's there. Like he works every single shift and on the day that we're closed on Thanksgiving, one of my restaurants, he goes to the other restaurant and works. That's it. That's, and I don't, I don't push him to do that. I don't want him to do that. That's who he is. He's like, dude, I want to work every single shift. We're open. He makes every ounce of fruit tea. He, the guy has his entire routine, a section full of people every day that love him. Yeah, I I'm, I'm not going to, is there a metric for that? Like, I don't know that that's just people that's knowing your people and saying, go Ron and his name is Ron. He's amazing.

47:21Everybody knows Ron, but Ron does that. He's there. If he's the restaurants open, he's in the building. Yeah. And that's cool. And, and you know, you're going to, I think, get lucky and have people like that sometimes. Right. The reality is that, you know, we can, we can capitalize and capitalize might be take advantage of is the, you know, maybe not the right way to say it, but it's, we're lucky when we've got people like that in our operation, right? Because they're going to do whatever they have to do, whatever they can do to make the place, um, you know, run the way we want it to, but very easy. Yeah, totally. I'll tell you that the scary thing though, is that when, you know, when you think about that one person sells more every day than everybody else, or one person works is more comfortable working harder or longer than everybody else. What about the people that aren't, you know, what about the, what about the average, what about the, the person, the average person who's applying in a restaurant environment now in most markets is new to the industry, right? So I'll share, there's a case study that we did with a company, um, last in the spring that was incredibly eye-opening for, for us and I think for them as well.

48:29So we had this, this restaurant group in the Midwest, in the U S that has 12 restaurant locations, all of them are, are, you know, strong volume, anywhere from six to 10 million a year in revenue, good restaurants, cool little company. Um, and their revenue was up year on year, double digits. And they knew that that was because they had more customers coming in than pre pandemic against 2019. And they'd also adjusted their prices for inflation quite a bit, right? So the revenue numbers were looking really, really strong, 10, 15% increases. They couldn't hit their labor cost percentage target in any location, front of house or back of house, same management team, same building, same staffing levels, all those things. They just, for some reason, they couldn't hit their targets. Was their target based upon a percentage of sales? Percentage of revenue. And they, they were starting to look at, is this a management issue? Like, are our managers actually not doing a good enough job? They can't manage that cost. So we did a case study on overall business productivity and workload, employee workload with them, where we actually went through and looked at, broke down all 12 businesses, 2019 versus 2021 and said, okay, what's happening in your restaurants?

49:39If you look at this from through a different lens and found that every single location, both front of house and back of house across 12 stores was somewhere between 15 and 30% less productive as a whole than they were in 2019. So when we started to connect that to people, what we found was that the average employee in 2019 in that restaurant had worked there for almost two years across the whole company. They had really good retention from a restaurant, you know, industry perspective, but in 2021, it was like four and a half months was their average tenure shipment of an employee. So on average, they still had some people that had been there five, seven, eight years, but the average employee was four and a half months, meaning that everybody was brand new. Didn't have as much experience training exposure to how the business operated. And they just couldn't handle as much yet. So if they were expecting the same type of labor cost result out of those people, they were going to actually have to run short staffed on purpose in order to achieve it. So what we helped them understand was that let's limit the workload.

50:41Let's look at how productive the business is, which then can tell us what the labor cost will be based on how the business operates. And over the next 30, 60, 90, 120 days, we can work our way back to what things were pre-pandemic for that team as their, as their employees become more experienced, more well-trained or confident and those types of things. But it was, it actually was kind of a way to pull back on the throttle a little bit and help them understand, you know, from a 30,000 foot view, what was happening with their business and why. Um, and so they actually, you know, they were worried that that was going to hurt their profitability through, uh, through the spring time and, you know, that part of the year, but it actually just leveled off. It didn't hurt their profitability, but now we were speaking the other day because their business is now in a position where it's, it's actually back to 2019 productivity levels based on their new pricing and revenue, they're far more profitable than they ever were before. So really retention is the thing. I mean, cause I've got one of my restaurants, um, I've almost turned over the entire front of the house staff and the back of the house staff, honestly, um, because we've made a bunch of intentional changes and we went one of them, we went to a tip pool because we do a bunch of events and we went to tip pool at both of them because we really just want people focusing on the guest and coming in and I wanted to create some equitable ability between everybody so that we, we came in, we just focused on service and I wanted to eliminate the $9 lunch.

52:12When I say the $9 lunch is the servers get up, they got iron their clothes or whatever, they got to get dressed, they got to drive into work, they got to come in, they got to cut lemons, they got to do opening side work, whatever, you know, you're there, you get there at 10 o'clock, you open at 11, you got to go through lineup, you got to learn the specials, you got to do the whole thing. And then if it's slow, if there's not the business, then when we first came back from the pandemic, there just wasn't the economy there and so maybe you get the two little old women that have a soup and salad and they split it and they get hot tea and you go back and forth bringing them more lemons, right? And you're a double that day and it just isn't busy and the manager was like, hey, man, you're cut, you can go ahead and get out of here, you're a double, we're cutting doubles and you're like, well, shit, now it's 12, 15, we're not going to get busy, but now I'm leaving and I made $6 plus the $2.13 an hour. Well, that average out tonight is really busy tonight, but it's like, and that's my time and energy for $9, but now with the tip pool, everybody, I think our average server makes like $27 an hour.

53:14Amazing. And, but, well, I mean, yes and no, but the, here's my problem is that people come in and they go, they work an event and they have a party that, you know, they didn't sell the food. We have an event coordinator that sold the whole package. They come in, the room is already set up, they get a menu and they go, hey, welcome to the restaurant. This is your menu options. We're going to come by and take your orders. And it's a good event. The people are excited and it's a wedding rehearsal dinner and they spent five grand and they leave a, you know, $1,500 on top as a tip. And they're like, dude, we made $4,000. It's like, well, no, we're splitting that with everybody. They go, this is bullshit. I deserve that. And it's like, well, we work on a tip pool and everybody who ran your food up to that table, who helped pre-bus that table, all the people in the restaurant that are making this happen. And I lose people because there there's this entitlement of it's all about me and I, I'm not making enough money. I'm like, well, you work three shifts a week. You work 12 hours a week.

54:14You make $34 an hour when you work, but you only work three shifts a week. Well, I can go here and make that. And this guy's offered me $2 less. And I almost feel like we cannibalize each other. And there's just a general culture of if I don't, it's almost like a ADD, like a short attention span that, oh yeah, if I don't get what I want today, then I'll just go to the next place because they'll hire me. And there isn't a standard there. It's just that everybody's short staffed and that they know that. And it's like, I want to create a restaurant where people want to retire from that restaurant. Like my servers at that, that particular restaurant make $34 an hour. And that's almost that's if you work 40 hours a week, that's 60 grand a year. My servers are making 60 grand a year, but I don't, I want to work. I want to make $50 an hour and that I can do that downtown or I can do that over here. But I also offer full insurance and I offer paid time off. I have full insurance, medical, I have 401k. I offer every single thing I get. I have maternity leave.

55:14I have paternity leave. Every single hourly employee that works over 32 hours gets paid time off. And it's like, I don't want to work. That means I have to work here longer than six months to earn that. Like, yeah. But right now I feel like there's just this crazy moment where people are just like, yeah, fuck you. The manager looked at me wrong the other day or they asked me to do something. I have to clean and I'm only making, but it's like there's a bigger picture there. And I don't know if it's an education that we as an entire industry have to figure out. I don't know where I'm going with this, but I know that it's frustrating because as a good employer, as somebody who wants to employ people, I think this industry in itself chews people up and spits them out. And we, I don't know if we need to like have like a industry wide day, where it's like every single manager in the industry needs to get together. We need to say, treat your people better. Retain. I want to, I have this goal of ending spreadsheeting amongst chefs, like buying from five to find one really good company and really dive in, sign a three year deal with them and partner with them.

56:26You'll make a bunch more money if you do that. Same thing with the industry. I want to celebrate John's worked on the line here for 15 years. He's taken his family to Florida every year. He's done this and he's got, you know, he's going to retire because we've built his 401k up. He's got, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollars in the bank. We've paid him a really good wage and we throw these retirement parties. I want to have, you don't hear that. That doesn't happen in restaurants. It doesn't happen. How do we get to that point to where people look at restaurants as though it's not just, oh, it's just a job I'm doing while I'm waiting to get my real job or whatever. There's a mentality in this industry that, oh, well, if I don't like, I'll just go to the next place and I can do that. I can just hop back to back to back to back. How do we stop that? How do we fix that? How do we, like that's, I think that's the main problem everybody's having because it's rampant and it's not just, it's, I think, you know, it's a retention problem.

57:27It's not a staffing problem because people come, I get, I'm fully staffed at both my restaurants. I mean, knock on wood. I'm really honored to be fully staffed both restaurants. That doesn't mean I don't have churn. The people come in and come out and I try to avoid that. We try and do everything, but some people just have this in their blood. You look at their, I think if we stop hiring people that had 14 jobs in the last five years, maybe, I mean, I don't know. What do you think? Am I going to catch a ton of shit for saying what I just said? No, I don't think so. I mean, it's what you were just talking about is, you know, the whole that people don't retire from restaurants. I mean, it's that's predominantly a North America problem. You know, you go to restaurants in Europe and there it is very well, much more well embraced that you can be a professional waiter and have a very good career and lifestyle and all that kind of, it's just different, right? I mean, it's the tip culture and the wage structure. If you ask me, I mean, we could go. Actually, somebody called me a wage lobbyist not long ago because I was saying that, you know, you can pay people from experience.

58:28We had to pay everybody just over $15 an hour, right? So you can pay people $15 an hour, $20 an hour, whatever. There is a way to make it work in restaurants, which is probably an unpopular opinion, especially in some markets where operators are used to paying $2.13 an hour for front house staff, but it is possible and it does help. But you're right. Right now, there's this weird scenario where instead of us interviewing potential candidates, they're interviewing us. True. I was talking to an operator the other day where he had seven interviews lined up. One of them showed up. He offered the person a job and the guy said, cool, thanks for that. I've got three other interviews. I'm going to go see what they offer me. So when I interview people now as a director of operations, when I sit down with them, I'll tell you what, I'll tell you what my interview is. And I very rarely interview hourly because I have journal managers and I have management teams that do that and they like to give them the autonomy to do that. But if I'm in the building or if I have any time like, hey, will you do the final interview? I sit down and I go, hi, my name is Brandon. I'm the director of operations.

59:28It's so nice to meet you. You've gone through other interviews. You know all about, you know, we know all about you. You got to me. I think it's equally important that you want to work here. So I'm going to flip the script today and you're going to interview me. I want you to interview me and I want you to ask me about anything that you want. And they always go, well, I wasn't ready to do that. And you go, it's okay. What do you want to know about this restaurant? What do you want to know about me? What do you want to know about the vibe, the culture, anything about it? What is the most important thing to you when it comes to employee? And I'm like emotional tranquility. They're like, what? I go free and freedom from emotional stress. I want you to, I want this to be an oasis. When you come to work, I want you to feel like I get to go to work today. Whatever bullshit I'm dealing with outside of this building, I get to come in here and I don't feel that. I get to just focus on the guest and enjoy my job. We give you the autonomy. One of our core values is remember me.

01:00:30And I want you to be memorable for all of your tables, for whoever you are. Be memorable for the right reasons. But I also want you to remember the guest. I want you to use their name. We encourage you to be yourself and really make it an experience. One of our restaurants is in the house. It's a 7,500 square foot mansion built in 1942 and it has tons of charm and personality and like utilize the people coming here for an experience. Do that. Like you get to be here. I don't have a script. You don't say welcome to Maribor. Would you like a Coke or a glass of Kendall Jackson Chardonnay? Would you like to try our chef's feature tonight? Which is a fresh catch halibut with a like you don't have to do that. Whatever you want to do. And they're always looking at me and they're like, wow, that was a lot, man. Like that was a big answer. And I go, what else you got? What do you got? You're obviously somebody that we would like to hire. But it's equally important to me that you match our culture. That you want to work here. If you don't want to work here.

01:01:31And that it all comes back to me to like the one minute manager thing. So okay, so we've agreed that you want to work here. That sounds like a culture you want to be in. This is our social contract to each other. And now let's agree on what the expectations are. That you're going to show up on time. You're going to show up in uniform. That you're going to be enthusiastic and that you're not going to be a dick. And that, you know, all these things that we all want to do. And then we just thank you when it happens. When you do those things, we have to come by and say, thank you for doing that, man. That's awesome. You're doing a great job. And then if they don't do that, you come by and you say, hey, we, you know, sit them down one-on-one and kind of go, we, based upon our conversation, you said you're going to come and do this, but you've been late the last three days. And not just you're late, I'm writing you up, but seek to understand. So you're late. Tell me, is everything okay with you? First off, like, no, I'm a single mom. And my ex-husband's really been hard on me and it's been tough. And I'm trying to get the kids ready for school. But I have to be here at nine thirty and it's really, really hard. And I go, well, why don't we just change your end time to nine forty five and let's assign different side work so that that's like, I'm willing to make that concession.

01:02:37That's that's what emotional tranquility is in our building. And like, that's what you want to do. But I don't I think that so many times we just like, well, I don't have time for that. You have a job, I'm paying you to do a job. You come in, you do the job, I'm paying you to do. This isn't a daycare. This is you. I'm babysitting. Like, if you look at your job as a babysitter, then that's what you do. And we talk about the young workforce, you know, these kids coming in, they've never worked in the industry before. I had a manager not six months ago and he goes, I don't know what to do with our essays. We have server assistance, right? An essay and he's like, I can't get him to do anything. And I'm like, you fucking kids and this and this. And I go, dude, this is a 15 year old kid. This is their first job he's ever had. He's coming into you saying, I don't know what to do with you. Think about when you were 15 years old, when you were 15 years old, when you walked into your brand new workplace, you were scared to death. The manager looked like he was 50 feet tall and you were just like, don't yell at me. Like, that's my favorite moment.

01:03:39I go, what an amazing opportunity that we have to take a 15 year old kid and show them what a good boss looks like. Sit them down and say, all right, tonight, let me teach you the fundamentals of a restaurant. Full hands in, full hands out, hot food, hot, cold food, cold. That's what I want you to focus on tonight. Let's make sure the food that gets to the people is hot or cold based upon what it needs to be. And then if you leave this kitchen, make sure you got something in your hands. If you come back in, make sure you got something in your hands and have fun. And let's do this thing. And this is service. Find somebody to serve, find somebody to go. And if you find yourself, you don't have anything to do, go find a server and say, hey, Johnny, can I help you with anything? And just start walking around asking people to find them to help. And then somebody is going to be like, I like that kid. They keep asking what to do. But if you sit somebody down and you clearly explain that that's what our expectation is tonight, and then you walk behind them and you go, hey, I just saw you walking with full hands. Great job, man. You're doing a great job tonight.

01:04:40That kid will bust their ass for you and they will not stop. And then you get to say, that kid goes home and they tell their parents, say, how was your day at work? And they go, it was awesome. I learned a lot. Tonight was really fun. And they go, what? I have so many times I have those kids' parents come eat in my restaurant. And they go, little Johnny came home last night and they told me that you really helped him and they really like working for you. Man, it makes me want to cry. It's that emotional fun moment where you go, this is what we do, damn it. This is hospitality. It's not just, it's both sides. We love our community. We love the people that come in and we love the people we work with. We've got to every day show up that way. And I think that you can look at metrics all day long about this extra hour, this extra hour. But if we don't really identify in our culture and write core values and be intentional with how we treat people and how we lead people, then yeah, you're constantly going to have a problem with staffing all day because that's the industry.

01:05:45And if you throw your hands in the air and say, well, that's the industry, then you're not going to make it and you're going to be frustrated. And you're going to start drinking every night because you don't know how to get. I'm so frustrated. Like, stop. It's okay. Genuinely care about these people and really make it a family. And the restaurants that do that, those are the people I was talking about in 2020 that were heartbroken for their staff. Because when you feel that way about your people and you spend that time and energy in developing them and you care about them, when you have to tell them we have to close the restaurant, you don't have a job, it breaks your heart. We need more of that, in my opinion. I completely agree with you. My approach when I was still in management was always that nobody ever quits, ever. And there was only a couple of scenarios where I would be able to sort of sleep at night if they did, right? One was they moved away. Two was they were going to school and couldn't work. Three was they got their dream job. I mean, that was really it. But other than that, the goal was always that no one ever quits.

01:06:47And I think moving into what my business does now and what we're trying to accomplish at Benchmark 60 is essentially that type of stuff. It's just also being able to provide operators with an information-driven way to make decisions around how they try to retain people. – I love that. There's the term walking out, right? So I've never heard this term more in any other industry than this industry. Well, Johnny walked out of his last job or, oh, we had two servers walk out today. This guy, the fry cook, walked out in the middle of the ship. How many times have you heard somebody say somebody walked out in the middle of a shift? That's how people quit restaurants. Sometimes there's a two-week's notice and you got the dream job or they're doing this and you have a celebration and everybody takes them out for beers. I used to love the tradition of pying somebody on their last day. Have you ever had that? – Yeah, I've been pied. – Yeah, I mean, your last day, your beloved. And then towards the end of the shift, everybody gets a coffee filter.

01:07:48They fill it with whipped cream. And you get pied on your last night. Then everybody cleans up together. It's like a fun tradition. I was at the Y. I love my mind mints, right? So every time you leave the Y, they have the little basket out front with a little piece of paper and there's like a quote on each one. And I post them on LinkedIn with my little thoughts behind them. I'm going to tell you a thought that I had about walking out culture. There's, and I have it on my door. It's right here on the door. It says, Integrity is built by defeating the temptation to be dishonest. Humility grows when we refuse to be prideful. And endurance develops every time you reject the temptation to give up. And that endurance piece is a big, I did a whole week worth of lineups in a manager meeting based upon that last one. Endurance develops every time you resist the temptation to give up. What that means is you get outside your comfort zone and you push yourself individually. If I'm a 20 on that scale and I get tired for four hours, can you push yourself to five hours?

01:08:50Personally, if I'm, I'm not telling you you need to do that, but if I'm looking into a mirror, how do I develop? How do I get that number up to a 35? What do I need to do? If I know I'm hiking, can I do a five mile trail? Do I kind of do a 10 mile hike? I don't know, you can work your way up to it, right? So endurance, you have to develop it. And in the middle of a shift, it gets crazy. There's, there's never, I love this industry because there's never a day that I come to work that I go, I know exactly how today's going to go. For sure. There's never a day that that happens. We can draw out the game plan, but every day shit happens. And it's, I love living on the edge of chaos. That's me, I enjoy the edge of chaos. And I'm going to tell you all about that right after these final words from our sponsors. I think one of the most overlooked things that you can do on a P&L, which is your profit and loss statement, is dish machine and chemicals. It's just one of those things you don't focus on until it's too late.

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01:11:59Just send me a message on Instagram. Check out Maintain IQ. But so many people, what we do is we go through trauma. The middle of a shift, you get four tables set at the same time and this guy's angry at you and you get cussed out by this or whatever it is. I don't want to discount those things that happen during a shift. But if we don't look at those things, if we don't endure, we have to endure throughout the middle of a shift, in my opinion. You've got to get through it because we're all slammed at this moment. That's the part of this job that's really tough. But if we don't circle back at the end of the night and say, hey, you were really stressed in the middle of that shift today, let's talk about it. Let's identify what that is. And if you don't circle back and figure out a way to work through that trauma, then that trauma builds. Then the next shift, you come in and you've got this little thing on your shoulder. And if it happens again and you're not able to exercise it, that's why we go drink.

01:13:01That's why after the shift, people start pounding alcohol. That's why we start smoking pot. That's why. And we don't deal with the issues. I think at the end of a shift, part of a manager's job is not to go sit in the office and start pounding paperwork. Part of the job is to walk around each person and go, hey, how'd that shift go for you tonight? You did $1,300 in sales tonight. How was it? Are you OK? Because that was a lot. Why aren't we normalizing having post-mortem conversation at the end of a shift to say, I want you to leave here feeling like you're understood? That that moment was tough. Like in the middle of battle, it's going to be difficult. But that's where that endurance grows. This isn't a job where you say, you need to build your endurance and fuck you, just get it done. At the end of the day, you go, OK, that was intense. We all made it through that. But now let's go back and let's process the emotions that we all felt. How are we doing? And you've got to do that. I think when you do that, people leave there and they go, that was a really difficult shift. Hey, look, I made a lot of money.

01:14:03But I felt seen at the end of the day because my manager understands me and they care about me. And I can leave that night. I don't need to go pound alcohol because I don't know how to process these emotions. And I think that's another side of this whole mental health issue and alcoholism and drug abuse. Why are we not doing that? Because now we're looking at labor and you go, I can't pay in service to stand around and talk about their feelings. Why not? You can't afford not to. Two thousand dollars every time that guy leaves. Like, why are we going to protect our people? Why don't we look at that number more realistically? Why don't we look at that two thousand dollar number more realistically? We look at it as, oh, well, I paid to train them and they didn't make it. So I'm dealing with the headache later. Like, no, like, that's not true. It's two G's, man. It's a lot of money. That's a lot of money. Go through ten people. Gosh, I would love to. I think you should just put a list on every manager's door of fifteen things you can do with twenty grand or one hundred thousand.

01:15:08Be like, look, if we had one hundred thousand, we can take the entire team to Disneyland one day and whenever you guys want, bring your whole families. Well, what if that was a thing, right? We're going to close one day a year and we're taking the entire crew and your families to Disneyland because we're taking them on a day trip somewhere. We're all going to have this huge. And what if it cost you thirty thousand dollars? Like, that's a lot of money. Well, you're wasting that every single couple months because you're not paying attention to your people. Sorry, I get on a soapbox sometimes because I hear people complain and I'm like, why are you in it? Why are you spending the energy to complain about things that are within your control? So I'm an alcoholic, right? So I'm sober almost. This next month will be three years. And I hear the serenity prayer of, grant me the serenity to accept the things you cannot change, the courage to change the things you can in the ways you know the difference. Like, it's the best life advice you can possibly give.

01:16:09If there's something that you can't control, then you can't control it. You're going to things that's going to happen. I'm not going to worry about that, but the things you can control freaking do it. Have the courage to sit down and say, hey, tonight got a little squirrely. Tonight was a little crazy. Can we raise your hand as a manager and be vulnerable and say, you know, I learned a lot tonight in that moment where I turned around and snapped at you at the bar. And I said, just run the damn drink. Like when I, that was the wrong thing for me to do. As a manager, can we follow up with employees and say, hey, look, I kind of lost my cool there. And I learned, as I reflected, I learned in that moment that I didn't do the right thing. And I want to apologize to you. You didn't deserve that. Yeah. Yeah. How powerful would that be if we started normalizing that? The growth that you would feel as a manager to be able to go tell an employee that. An employee going, I was really in my own head the whole night because you snapped at me in that two second moment. And you've probably forgot about it. That server hasn't forgot about it.

01:17:09The server is dwelling on it. And that nighttime they're going out with their friends and they're bitching about you. And that moment that you did and your server going, look, we made another, we made this much money tonight. They don't care. No. Why are we focused on that? Yeah, there's, you know, I always used to encourage our team to ask, how are we doing in that post shift? Yeah. You know, how are we doing? How did we do tonight? How are we doing, you know, you and I together as manager and employee, you know, because it, we always found that how, you know, asking, obviously asking how are you doing is valuable and important, but asking how are we doing, you know, are you and I good? Even if there wasn't that run the, you know, run the fucking drink thing. You still get the, the, the genuine answer of someone being like, yeah, we're really good. You know, tonight the team, it was crazy, but we're okay. You know, and it helps. I always found it helped to kind of get a little bit of good dialogue, but yeah, it's powerful. I mean, our industry needs to the term that we use all the time is, you know, we, we need to do a better job of protecting our people.

01:18:12Yeah. It's a great from true business from the stress, from the alcohol and drugs, from themselves, from, you know, all these things. So there's so much, there's so much. And then you got to, then you got food costs and you got, Hey, look, well, our lamb chops didn't come in today. So we have to 86 this item. And how do you do all that? I mean, there's, it's, it's almost like, what do you prioritize first? Is it, it's a chicken or the egg kind of a thing. It's got to be people got to be because they're the number one thing that's making, that's going to make that in every restaurant that I talk with, unless you're downtown and you're Luke Bryan and you've got, you know, a four story building on Broadway that that's pretty unique. That's your differentiator right there. Right. But for most restaurants and suburbs that are in communities, the differentiator is your people. It's your culture. It's the, it's the feeling people get when they come in. It's all about the experience. Any, every restaurant has a couple of the same.

01:19:13They all have a building. They've all got food. You're going to leave full, but what's, what's the differentiator there? Oh, we bring out desserts with sparklers like, oh, okay. But like that doesn't bring people back necessarily. What makes everybody come back? It's how your people make it happen. And you know what? Teaching that culture over and over and over again to new people and then not, you know, it's that inspect what you expect thing. You tell people what you do and then you don't follow through with it. They're going to leave. Yeah. And I think it's a leadership problem. I think it's a leadership and I think it's a cultural problem and we've got to focus on it. We as leaders have to be empathetic. We've got to listen. We've got to genuinely care. Numbers are important, but you're not going to hit any number if you don't have people. Could not agree more. I think retention is the new cool. Retention is the new cool. Put your arm around somebody. Seek to understand.

01:20:14I love insatiable curiosity is one of those things that I love in somebody. If somebody says, I'm insatiably curious. I'm like, you're hired. I don't care what you are. I just love that. Yeah. I want wonder and awe all the time. Like I just let's constantly be learning. What can we do? And it's hard to match my level of enthusiasm. I know I can be a lot for people in the restaurant and I have to recognize that too, because I'm in there and I'm like, guys, here we go. And they're like, holy shit. And I'm six foot six, two sixty, right? So I'm also not like a small guy. So I have all these, you know, I'm sure I scare people all the time and just this, who is this guy? He's full of just things he does all the time. And it's like, yeah, I do. And that's a look. I have to look in the mirror sometimes too, you know? We all do. All right. Sorry. I get excited sometimes over here. I don't know where we start. I don't know how we fix it. I know that I'm talking into a podcast and I'm putting out there for the world to hear, but I'm a big fan of looking in the mirror.

01:21:15I'm a big fan of if you're out there and you hear any of this stuff and you're like, well, I know a guy that needs to do that, right? Everybody hears this and they think of other people that need to do it. And I think the first thing we need to do is get a mirror, look in that mirror and ask yourself, what can I do to be a better leader? What can I do to care about my team more? What can I do to think in a different way than everybody else? I'm the higher staff. What can I do to not just go to Facebook and be like, hey, Joe's grill is hiring today. Like everybody does that. How am I differentiating? What can I do to differentiate myself from everybody else? How can I change the industry now? What can you do or what can they do if every single person looks in the mirror and says, how can I be a better leader? And then Google that shit. Go listen to more podcasts. Go listen to Eric Cacciatore. Go listen to Jensen Cummings. Go listen to these guys because they're talking about good shit.

01:22:16And Jensen Cummings has a show called, what is his? Best served, best served. Yeah, best served is amazing. He talks a ton about this stuff. And then Eric Cacciatore restaurant unstoppable. Those are great other hospitality podcasts that I just love. Josh Copel has full comp out of L.A. There's some really good stuff you're going to hear from people that are outside of your city. Go check them out too. But this brings us to our final thought. Jim Taylor, the Gordon Food Service final thought. You get to say whatever you want to say as long as you want to say it. This is your time to step up on the soapbox and just the floor is yours. Take us out. Well, I mean, the final thought, I mean, we've had some really good conversation and I mean, your stance on everything leadership is so bang on. And I think, you know, it doesn't matter if it's attitude driven and about how we spend time with people. It doesn't matter if it's data driven, if it's if it's based on information and about decision making, if the if the industry isn't focused on being people centric and really wanting people to love working in restaurants, then we're, you know, we're in for a rough a rough go here.

01:23:26But, you know, I really believe that there's opportunity to just take better care of our people and really make sure that this is, you know, a better career experience for the next generation of restaurateur. I love it. Jim Taylor, thank you so much for taking time today. I know you're a busy man. Congratulations on the birth of your daughter. Thank you. I know that you're this is your first child ever. It is. Yeah. Man, your life's going to change. I'm so I'm so excited for you, man. This is going to be the best thing you'll ever do. And I love to catch up to you again. I'll be following every go follow. How can we follow you? Benchmark 60. Find you on LinkedIn. He puts a bunch of great stuff out there on LinkedIn. Yeah. Find me on LinkedIn. Benchmark 60. You know, we have a page there as well. We actually also have our our podcast turning the table. It's on. We'll have to have you on there next. It's on anywhere anywhere you find your podcast Apple, Spotify, those places. So and we strive.

01:24:27We stream live every Thursday at noon Eastern, too. So cool. I'm not a very good podcast guest. I don't have a lot of opinions and I'm really just. Yeah, right. I just sit back. I'm not I'm not engaging. So you don't want me on the show. We'll get you on there. Thanks again. Jim Taylor. Have a wonderful day, sir. You too. All right. Big thank you to the new father, Jim Taylor, for taking the time to speak with us today. That was a lot of fun. And hopefully there's something you can take out of that. Love to know your opinion. Please go to the Instagram or on Facebook or DM me. Send me an email. Brandon at Nashville restaurant radio dot com. Find me at Brandon underscore NRR on Instagram. Follow us at Nashville restaurant radio. You can watch this video at YouTube. We have a channel. Please go subscribe. Subscribe to this wherever you listen and you will get the notification as soon as brand new episodes come out. And I have five more episodes coming out in the next two weeks. So Monday we're going to be talking with Randy Rayburn. He celebrates the 35th anniversary of the Midtown Cafe.

01:25:31We've got a head brewmaster. His name is Chad Mueller. He's over at Tenfold Brewery. I'm excited to talk to him. We're going to talk to Julia and Hunter. They are the owners of Flora and Fauna. We've got another episode coming out with Memo and Katie Murillo. They are that's coming out the same day. We're doing a two for today. So those that episodes come out today as well. We just have lots of stuff happening. Lots of lots of interviews. And I am loving getting these things out here for you. Although that interview, I felt like I talked way too much. What are your thoughts? Thank you guys for listening. I hope that you guys are being safe. Love you guys.