Lineup Topic

00:00Hello Music City and welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio. My name is Brandon Styll, and today we are going to be doing a lineup topic. This is something that I've been talking about for a while. I did one around Valentine's Day. Just some things that I'm seeing as I'm going along. Something that hopefully will spark something in you. You don't have to use this, but hopefully this brings something to light that maybe you can use in your everyday life. This lineup topic today is brought to you by GigPro. So GigPro is amazing on both sides. If you own a restaurant, go to GigPro.com and sign up and hire people for individual shifts if you need them. Right now we all need this, and if you are somebody, we just had a chef in here the other day who's an executive chef at a restaurant, and she said, I love GigPro. I do it all the time. If I'm working and I have a night off, sometimes I'll just do GigPro just because I want to go work somewhere and see how they do it. She goes, I do GigPro all the time, and I get in there and start working like, hey, you're pretty good. She's like, well, I'm an executive chef, and I just thought that was the greatest story. So go to go.gigpro.com forward slash n-r-r-b-i-z, and you will get your first gig for free if you're a restaurant owner. So go check them out. They're amazing. So we just got back from the restaurant leadership conference in Phoenix, Arizona, and it was great. Learned a lot, and I've got a whole lineup topic based around that episode, which kind of ties into what I'm going to be doing here in the future.

01:28But today I want to talk about attitude, and today I want to talk about something that I saw on the social medias. So I follow a bunch of different, like I'm sure all of you do, a bunch of different bartending sites, servers, bartender, whatever. Server memes and French cries and walk in, you know, whatever they are. But I saw one today that said, person ordered a margarita and they wanted the salt on the side. I hate people. And there was about 75 comments and I don't know how many likes, but I immediately thought like, if you hate serving people, maybe this is the wrong profession, or maybe your attitude needs to be checked. Because here's what I think. I think that you, my favorite quote of all time is, whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right. Right? So that's a Henry Ford quote, and he actually says, whether you think you can do a thing or you can't, or you think you can't do a thing, you're right. And I think that every single day, when you get out of bed, the way that you're, the way that you feel, the way that your outlook is, your perspective really starts off everything. And I'll tell you, Mondays, I've said this many times on the show, I love Mondays. Monday's my busiest day. I have a leadership meeting that starts at nine and it goes to 1030. Then 11 o'clock I've got a meeting with my general managers at Mayor Bolden. At one, I've got a meeting with the general manager at Green Hills Grow. We do Green Hills Grow manager meeting at two, Mayor Bolden at three, and then I've got a four o'clock meeting.

03:04So my entire day is just full of meetings. But during those meetings, I get to plan my entire week and we set all these awesome goals and we have these rocks that we want to accomplish. And I love it. I love Mondays. Mondays is that day, like I have the rest of the week to accomplish so many things. And I think that if you go into a Monday and you think, oh my God, I hate Mondays, or the whole week ahead of me, then that's the way that you feel. And that's what you do. And that exudes into everything that you do. And if somebody comes to the bar and they order a margarine with the salt on the side, and if that bothers you, it shouldn't. You know, when I used to wait tables and people would come to my table and they would say, I'll have a Diet Coke. I would ask them, would you like a lime to go with your Diet Coke? And people would say, other servers were like, dude, don't do that. Next time they come in, they're going to ask for a lime. And I'm like, I hope that they do. A lime with a Diet Coke is fucking fantastic. And you know what? People are afraid to ask for a lime because they don't want to offend you. Guys, we're in the service industry. This is what we do. We serve people.

04:10And if you can't be unique in what you do or being outside of the norm for somebody bothers you, then you know what? Again, this is just not the right industry. We have to come to work every single day, striving to be memorable and striving to make every guest want to come back there. Because you know what? At home, when they make a margarita, they just put the salt on the side. And if it becomes too much of a pain to go out and tip you, because that's what you're doing. You're doing, you're tipping people to ensure proper service. People are coming to your bar. They're coming to your restaurant to get an experience that they can't have at their house. We need to step off our high horse. I mean, I'm serious. I think that there are some people out there that execute this to a T. And every time that I go somewhere and I need something that's out of the ordinary and I get attitude, it bothers me. It bothers me because that's what we're here for. We are here to serve people. So everything is about what you make of it. When you start a shift, how you go into this shift, how you prepare and what your mindset is going in that I'm going to make every single guest happier than when they leave. And I've said this before too, when a guest walks into the building, you have no idea where they come from. You don't know if they just came from a funeral. You don't know if they just won the lottery. You don't know if they just got divorced, if they just got proposed, they just got married. You have no idea.

05:36If they're just hungry. I'll tell you two examples recently where I had people that walked in the door and there was six top of women that came in. They all arrived at the same time and I said, oh, six of you. And they said, yes. They said, are you all here? And they said, we're all here. And I go, excellent. That's fantastic. Let me take you back. And we were joking and I was talking with them and it came back to table and they all had these pink, they were drinking cosmopolitans and they were just having a blast. And I checked in on them and said, please make some more noise, have a good time, do the whole thing. And they were leaving. And I said, y'all have been lovely. Thank you for coming in. See you tomorrow. And they said, no, they have to go home. And the one girl said, I buried my husband this morning and we just needed to get away. And they were asking for random stuff and they wanted, you know, an ice on the side. They wanted this and that, but you know what? We just jumped in because that's what we do. And on that day, that woman didn't need anybody's attitude. She needed to feel special. She needed to get away and feel that. And you have no idea when people walk in the door, you have no clue where they've been or what they do, but your attitude and the way that you approach them can uniquely change their entire day.

06:50I had a woman and her dad, it was her dad. I found out it was her dad sitting at a table and I walked by and she was done with her meal and he'd only taken like two bites. And I, and he was an older gentleman in his probably eighties. And I said, sir, how was everything? He goes, that was okay. And I said, I'm sorry. And you know, catch anything else. And she cut me off. She goes, he just got done with a round of chemotherapy and he just, nothing just sounds good to him. And I said, well, sir, I'm so sorry about that. I, I want to find something that you might like. I said, listen, I have an entire kitchen back there of a million different ingredients. Is there anything, do you want like a strawberry or do you want like a bowl of ice cream? Like, what do you want? And he looked up at me with a smile on his face and he said, I would like a bowl of vanilla ice cream. And I said, you got it. And I grabbed the plate away from him and I went over and I just walked over the ice cream. I scooped a piece of ice cream, walked it back out there. And, and he said, thank you. And I walked away and it came back, maybe five minutes later and said, how was the ice cream? And he looked up at me and the man was crying. He had literally had tears coming out of his mouth. And he goes, everywhere that I go, people think I'm just this old guy who's causing problems and nobody wants to wait on me.

08:09And that was the nicest thing anybody's ever done for me. And I mean, I just, I think I started crying in the moment because it was like, dude, that, that's what we do. We want you to leave here happy. That's it. That's it. And I just, I want to do this lineup topic today because when we go into tourists and all these people that come in, like having a good attitude and I know if you're downtown, it's different. I know I get it, but in the burbs where I'm at, like, it just means everything to people. So you have a choice, you have a choice every day, the way you treat people and what you do. And I just today wanted to come on and say, make that choice, make it positive. You know, I saw a, there's just all kinds of fun stuff online, but just listen, be kind to people. That's what we do. This is service. The one differentiator that you have that makes you either amazing or not is service and what you can provide to make it a memorable experience for each individual person. So I hope that you have a wonderful week. We're going to do this again next week is another lineup topic. If you want to post some comments on it, I'd love to hear it. I'll make a post on Instagram and tell me what you think.

09:30Hope you guys have a wonderful weekend. Love you guys. Bye.