William Jameson

00:00Welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio, the tastiest hour of talk in Music City. Now here's your host, Brandon Styll. Hello Music City, welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio. My name is Brandon Styll and I am your host. Jen Ichikawa is in Vegas this past weekend, so she again misses out on this amazing, amazing episode with William Jameson from Culture Index. We are also joined by Stephen Smithing throughout the interview. He is the owner at the Green Hills Grill in Maribor. Now I'll tell you how this interview happened. We were doing a training, both of the general managers from both locations were together. We were doing a training and I said, I told William before he came, I said, I would love to sit down and do an interview with you because I'm such a fan of what he does, what Culture Index is and how it works and he said, yeah man, I'd love to sit down and talk.

01:13That is what this episode is. Try and listen to the entire thing because there's some really neat stuff that you didn't even know you could do. It's kind of, it's truly amazing and I hope that you can hear it and get it and understand it exactly what it is, but it was a really fun episode to do. Speaking of really fun, I had a really fun weekend. I got to actually get out and go out this weekend and see some people. Eric Cacciatore from the podcast Restaurant Unstoppable, who I'm on, you can hear me on his show today, right now also, if you go to Restaurant Unstoppable, you can hear an interview with me, but he was here for the weekend and we got to hang out and talk lots of restaurant stuff and podcast stuff and some really cool ideas coming up. Just want to say thanks to Eric and Jared for their time here in Nashville. They spent some time over with Sean at the Germantown Cafe, kind of doing their Chronicle and what they're doing over there is they're getting ready to open.

02:16Sounds like lots and lots of neat stuff happening at the Germantown Cafe. Very excited to welcome them back after the tornado took them out for almost two years. Also got to spend some time this weekend. Thank you to Chad and Gracie for the invite coming over to test out SSGuy, G-A-Guy, I guess that's how it's pronounced. Over at Eastside Bombay, they have a new concept coming up and it is Thai chicken and beer. I chose the Thai chicken and kombucha, but it was really, really, really good. The papaya salad was fantastic. Of course, the hospitality, Chad and Gracie were just amazing, but what a fun group people I saw while I was there. I'm going to name drop for a second because I want to give a shout out to some people. Michael Hanna from St. Vito's Fecascia Ria. I was telling his story to somebody the other day and just what a hard worker and how this pandemic has brought people together and the amazing things that they're doing.

03:18Super impressed with him. You can go check out St. Vito's Fecascia Ria every Sunday night over at Hathorn. I also got to run into Edgar Victoria, who's doing his very last taco dinner on Halloween night at Bastion. That stand is over. I know he's got some really cool stuff coming up and just great to see him out. Tyler Cobble, just you know, Tyler Cobble was a guy we had on the show and he saw a he saw a car wash and said, I'm going to turn that into five restaurants and I'm going to make it to where people can come in and they can make a small restaurant takeout only and they can. It's like a food truck, but we're going to give you a little brick and mortar for limited leases and he's giving people a shot. And I don't know, I was in the same room with these people and I was just like, man, I'm so lucky to get to know people like this and I'm so honored to be able to share their stories with you guys.

04:20This is such a fun thing that we do here on Nashville Restaurant Radio. Also got to go to Dino's Fest, got to meet Alex Wincoats in person. She is super cool. You know, again, you see her walking around her establishment, big smile, but she's she's making it happen and like she's having so much fun. You know, I mean, I just love when people have as much fun as all these people do, doing what they love. And that's what we do here in this industry. And that's a lot what this episode is about. This episode is about hiring people and putting them in positions to where they can do the things that they love. Sometimes people don't even realize what their what their aptitude is or what they enjoy doing the most. They just know they can make money doing this. But actually finding a position for somebody that they're best suited to do helps you get the best people in the right seats and it helps them enjoy their job so much more. I know I'm in a role that I love and my my index is exactly for what I need to be doing.

05:25And it makes a difference. It really is very, very helpful. This show is going to be brought to you today by while we're talking about amazing people, I want to talk about a couple of vendors. And these are people that come into your restaurant that I consider to be friends. I use them all. I vouch for them all. What chefs want is delivering some of the best seafood, the best steaks, the best produce, the best gourmet items, the best local opportunities to buy seven days a week. They're coming here seven days a week. They're splitting almost all the cases that they sell. They'll deliver anything. They have no minimum. So they'll just deliver whatever they want right to you seven days a week. They're absolutely amazing. Cytex, who says they love their linen guy? I mean, I absolutely do. Every time Brett comes in, he's just a great dude. I love talking to them. But you know what? They're hustling right now and they're delivering all my linens and they're they're making it happen. And I love working with them and I love our communication that we have.

06:27And I don't know how many people can say this, but like one of their favorite vendors is their their dish machine and chemical guy. But I can. Jason Ellis is a friend. And every time he's in the building, I learn something new and he just hustles. I love hearing testimonials from people that I've turned them on to. And they're like, dude, this guy is legit. I've never thought that I would feel this way about my dish machine and chemical guy. But here we are. You can go to NashvilleRestaurantRadio.com right now. You click the sponsors tab and you can find each one of those vendors on there. Click the tab and that tells you how to get hold. There's actually some special deals. If you're a Nashville restaurant radio listener, you'll click the tab, get them set up for your restaurant right now. This episode is going to be commercial free today. Just straight through. Enjoy it brought to you by those people. What chefs want, Cytex and SuperSource. My people, I love them to death.

07:28I think you're going to love this interview. Thanks for listening. Check it out. All right, super excited today to welcome in. William, is it Jameson or Jemison? Jameson, like the Irish whiskey. Like the Irish whiskey. William Jameson and Stephen Smithing to Nashville Restaurant Radio. How are you gentlemen doing today? Doing great. Doing wonderful. So I've been excited about this episode since we planned on you coming to town. And William, what is your exact title at? Call you an owner at Culture Index. What is your, what do you do there? Yeah. So I'm a, so I am independent licensee. Okay. And so my title is executive advisor. Executive advisor. William is the executive advisor at Culture Index. And this is a program. It's a, it's a product that we use here at both of our restaurants at Marable and Green Hills Grill. Stephen, you are the owner of Green Hills Grill at Marable. So I thought it would be very apropos to have you on the show because this is a fun one. This is one of those things that we do on a regular basis that absolutely blows me away.

08:31And we're in the middle of a training right now. And yesterday my head was blown up again. Like this is the most amazing thing in the world. So let me give a setup and then I'll ask you to do your 92nd elevator pitch. We, so Culture Index, you know, just, let's just start off with you doing the elevator pitch. What exactly is Culture Index? Yeah. So Culture Index. So what we do, so we work with CEOs and executives and our primary goal is helping our CEOs and executives drive top line growth, bottom line growth, and sustainable scalability. And the definition of sustainable scalability is the business to grow without the owner having to continue to work harder and harder and harder. And so... Stephen's smiling, by the way, at that comment. As I'm sure a lot of people would be right now. And so the way we go about that is we, we teach CEOs and executives how to use what we call behavioral analytics, which is just basically data on how people think, act, and behave naturally in order to get them in the right seats of the organization to increase productivity and reduce turnover.

09:43And then additionally, we train the management team on how to then, how to motivate, delegate, and communicate to those people to get the best out of each individual on their team. All right. So that right there sounds like, if I heard that as a sales pitch, there's a lot of words there that went together. You're like, what is all of that? Okay, that sounds cool. But to break it down to the layman, which I am, is you do it, it's not a personality test. It's a survey that you ask people that tells their aptitudes towards five different measurables. Yeah. And so it's seven different measurables. Seven different measurables. Sorry. And they're all work-related behaviors. So everything that we measure is going to be a work-related behavior, something that we're trying to drive or impacts the ability to do a job. So the big eye-opener for me, which is really amazing is we had people that you hire and they don't work out or they're dramatic or they're just, you put people in the wrong seats. Jim Collins has a book called Good to Great, which I recommend to every single person out there.

10:46And essentially what he says in the book is if you get the right people, if you hire the right people and put them in the right seats, your chances of success are tenfold over everybody else. That's how you go from, if you think you're good, you get the right people in the right seats, you'll get to great. And so what you do is you identify patterns like, so I create a position as a server or a bartender or an assistant manager or a bar manager or a general manager, and then I create exactly what I want out of that position. And then as people apply for that particular position, I can compare who they actually are versus what I need for that position. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Our job is to help you first understand what you need, right? So first is to identify what you need and then we help you rank people up against that, right? So you have a high predictability of is this person going to be successful, right? Or made this person challenged. So our goal is not only to get you the right people in those seats, but to also help you avoid those painful learning opportunities we've all had, which we wish we could have avoided.

11:56Steven, so understanding that right there, how has this worked out for you? Well, first of all, we try to test or send this survey to every person who we give an interview to as a precursor to giving them the interview. You send them this and then you have something to look at. Sharing this with the people usually gets some buy-in. If you let them read it, they'll read it and say, oh yeah, that's me. Or, oh, I didn't see that part, but there's always some unique part in there that I don't know as though they fully understood was them, but when they actually read it on paper, they're like, oh yeah. And then taking that and allowing us to look at it and see if the person has the aptitude, generally speaking, to do that job. I mean, service, a lot of people can do service jobs and a lot of people do it for different periods of time. Our goal obviously as a first name basis restaurant is to have people do this for an extended period of time. We're not really looking for a bunch of people to fill in for three months. Certainly I'm not looking for somebody to come in every 14th day and work one shift. We're looking for people who are going to come in here, know what we do for a living, know the guests, and Culture Index allows you to identify those people who may be more apt to stay around for a while.

13:08Exactly. So can you explain how Culture Index does that? Yeah. So what we do is there's a couple of things that we do. So first around for staying around for a while. So there's actually certain natural traits that actually are very high linked to loyalty. Yes. Right. So if you're a restaurant and you want somebody to stick around for a long period of time, if you hire people with those traits, they are much less likely to leave for the simple fact they don't like change. Right. So they find something, they find a job, they're treated well. The likelihood of them to change is greatly reduced. And then additionally, the other piece to that is by linking people to what they naturally do well and enjoy, right, and putting in positions that they naturally will excel at. They just like their job better. Yeah. And we all know if we like our job better, it's not work.

14:09And we're much more likely to keep coming back to it time and time again. So that's a really, well, it makes it a lot easier to create culture when you have people who actually want to do the job and want to be here for a while. I mean, culture takes a while to build. It doesn't happen overnight. You can't snap your fingers. You have to get people who want to participate in this over time and then do that. The part about it that always gets me, I just get completely blown away when you start going into all of the individual traits of people and to think about hiring somebody with none of this. But it's almost as if you do this, let's go, I want to go over some of the seven measurables that you do. And then I'll kind of correlate what I was just starting to say. There's an A, there's a B, a C, a D, and then there's E, U, L and I. It means nothing to anybody. Let's go over the A qualities. A qualities is going to be autonomy. So what, what, if I have somebody who's a low A versus a high A, what are the two major differences between those people?

15:12Yeah. So somebody who's a high A, you're going to expect them to want to act independently, right? So they want to act on their own and they want to make decisions primarily on their own. So I would say those are, those would be the two most obvious things that you're going to see somebody with a high A. Somebody with a low A is more going to want to follow direction. And they're more going to think team first a little bit more than me first. Perfect. So if I'm hiring a manager and I want somebody, if I'm hiring a general manager and I want somebody who's going to be able to think independently and make decisions that I can trust to do the right thing in their decision making, who's comfortable, who wants to make those decisions, I'm going to probably want somebody with a higher A. In general, there's so many factors that go along. But if I'm looking for a server or a bartender or somebody that I really need to come in and follow rules and be part of a team and want to be part of a team, I'm looking at a lower A. Absolutely correct. Okay.

16:13So that's very oversimplifying it. The next one is B. B is, what does B stand for? So B stands for social ability. Okay. So a person with a higher B trait, these are people who get energized about being around people. These are people who like to talk, like to communicate and are naturally positive people. Okay. So social, they want to talk, they care about, people think they are really energetic, more extroverts. More extroverts. That's a great way to think about it. Okay. So if I'm a low B, what am I doing? So if I'm a low B, I don't, I don't have a need, want or desire for social acceptance. So I'm usually a person who likes to kind of think of my own. I'd rather do a long work versus doing what I would call group work. Okay. Often these are your, often your, often back of the house, prep cooks, example. That's a great, a great analogy.

17:17So if you're looking for a great prep cook and you get somebody with a really high A and a really high B, they're going to, they're going to want to do their own thing, but they're also, they're going to want to make the decisions and maybe potentially change recipes if they want something different and they want to talk about it with everybody. And they would like, I need you to follow the recipe, do the thing I've told you to do and just knock out these 10 recipes in this eight hours. You want somebody probably with a lower A and a lower B, they enjoy doing that work. Absolutely right. So if you're interviewing people just off the front end, you can start seeing these, just these two categories. You could, somebody can fake that in an interview, right? If in an interview, somebody come in and say, no, I love people. No doubt about it. So everybody has the ability to do what we call behavioral modification, right? So we can all kind of act and be somebody that we're not the, the trick to is we can't do that for long periods of time. We can do that for 30 minutes. We can do that for 60 minutes. You know, I call it, we can do it for that first date, but I can't do that for 365 days a year.

18:26So that's why a lot of people that you potentially would hire and they get to work and after a week you're like, this isn't the person I interviewed. That's exactly right. Yeah. So Steven in your experience starting with this, how has it helped you? Well, I like to say that carrots and cream don't change much in how they behave. We know predictably how those ingredients are going to behave as we use them and prepare them. When guests walk in the business or when you have a group of 15 people, there are a lot of different ways that group of 15 people can behave. So the person out front needs to be prepared and desirous of understanding and wanting that change. And then they have to manage it and actually run within service people. I love it. Exactly. Not that cream and carrots is an easier job because it really is not at all. There's a whole lot of variables that go into that, uh, that are, there's a craft and an art to make that fantastic, but it's a different variable than the people in the restaurant moving around and saying things that you might not expect. There, there's a, but there's a million, it's a very well way to put it.

19:27I love that. Stump the waiter is more common than, you know, stomp the chef. Yeah. Um, so if you're looking at, so let's, let's, let's keep going. So that's A and B. And the next is, so the next is the C trait, which we call patients. Okay. So people with higher patients. So these are people who are typically, typically more single task focused, um, and they're where I've been called more steady or methodical. So for example, if you want to hire a dishwasher, right. And you want them to stick, you're more likely to who's going to want to hire somebody with seat to the right. Cause they'll enjoy doing that repetitive tasks over and over again. Yeah. And so a lower C means. Yeah. So lower C obviously is then a lack of patients. Um, so these are people who have a natural sense of urgency and they like variety. They like a little pressure. They like to multitask. So maybe think of a bartender at a busy restaurant who can jump around and handle multiple guests all at the same time. So if you hire a high C to be a bartender, they're going to go from one person, they're going to spend all the time on that one person.

20:34And then they're going to go to the next person almost methodically versus, and then there may be a well with tickets coming up. They're like, nope, these three people sat at the bar first. I'm going to take care of them. And then I will get to that and then I will come back to this. But if you're a low C, you're able to see the three build the park, get their order while making the other drinks at the same time. Exactly right. You have to use your multitask. And then you also have a stronger natural sense of urgency. So you might realize that this, this guest is going to be a really big ticket. Maybe I need to prioritize this. Right? Yeah. Um, where C to the right is going to take a sequentially, which could end up costing you some money. So we've gone through ABC and D is the final major characterizer. What is D? So D is what we call conformity. Okay. So people with high conformity, what you're going to see is these person are more accurate. They care a little bit more about quality and they're more likely to follow the rules that you set in place. Um, so the, the higher D conformity you're going to find these people, um, are better at executing the plan.

21:41You think of a high a coming up with the plan and think of a high D is executing the plan. Okay. Uh, and then low D. So low D, these are people who are more what I would call generalist. Um, these are people who are a little bit, uh, more of a creative thinker. And at times you're going to find they're going to be a little bit more sloppy when they're disinterested. Okay. So creative thinkers. So if I have a guy who wants to wait tables, who's also a musician and I write songs in my off time, you can probably guess this person's a low D. Is that like a creative person? Is that in my way generalizing? Uh, I would say there's, I would say that there's a pretty high correlation to that statement or probably reality. Absolutely. Okay. But you don't know that until you actually have the person fill out the culture index and they look at it. Okay. In defense of the low D people though, while people in ways that you wouldn't even know how to do if you're high. Well, and they have a amazing ability for forgiveness and they don't, they don't dwell on things. I mean, they can kind of, kind of rolls off their shoulders, right? Absolutely. They bounce back much better.

22:44When you serve people for a living, you need that. Yeah. I mean, the guests are always right. You're always here to entertain them. So that's interesting because if you're low D and you let things kind of, Hey, look, I'm kind of creative. You said sloppy or messy, but you can bounce back from this table stiffed me, Hey, I'm going to bounce right back. It's okay. We got the next table. Let's keep going. And then you have the high D who's very, who conforms, will do everything to do a little better attention to detail wants to do things right. Like, so in the middle there, what if you're right in the middle? If you're not a high D or a low D, you're just right as I'm just, I'm right there in the middle. Does that mean you have kind of the best of both worlds? Yeah. Somebody, somebody right in the middle is what I'm going to have some, I'm going to call it selective detail, right? So I have the ability to be detail oriented when it's important. But things that aren't important, I can still kind of let go and not sweat the small stuff. Okay. So that would be the group, the better. That's where mine is. I know I got mine. My idea is right in the middle. So I'm like, that's the best one, right? That's where the best people are. Steven's a low D.

23:47You're, what are you? You're kind of on the line too, aren't you? Are you an architect? Yes. Sorry. I'm an enterprise here. You're an enterprise. There is a name for all of these, all the different traits that people have that you can learn. This is so much fun. So the most, the other two, there's a, there's one called energy units. As you go through and they do this test, one of the, that gives you an energy unit measure. So mine is 43. What does that mean? Yeah. So energy unit is what we call mental stamina. So what it does is it measures the ability for somebody to continue to do work without getting tired. Okay. Additionally, it measures the ability for people to do things that are not natural without getting completely worn out because they have a bigger battery to start with. And so obviously in the restaurant industry, you're going to find a lot of long hours. So in general having a high EU is going to predict somebody who can take those longer shifts, who can be steady the second half of their shift versus being worn out and you see outside smoking. I'm going to go on the walk and take a break and we go eat chips from the Hobart and go in the back.

25:01So that's so interesting because if you work downtown or you're on Broadway and you're, you come to work at seven o'clock at night and you get off at four o'clock in the morning, that energy unit is a major factor in who you're hiring. If you hire somebody with an 11 EU chance of that person's probably not going to work out for you. No, they're not going to mentally be able to handle that type of those types of hours and shifts long-term. How often in an interview does somebody identify that? You're not going to know it. You're going to have no clue, right? Because for an interview it's 30 to 60 minutes. So if you don't have the data, there's no way you're going to see that. And nobody ever says, Oh, I really don't like to work for a long period of time. But you, so this is one of those things I always find this just like, holy cow, this is mind blowing. I can ask me to take this, this survey before I interview them. And I can know whether or not they want to be on a team, whether or not they want to be the boss. I can know whether or not they're friendly and that they're outgoing and extroverted or whether or not they want to be alone and they're introverted.

26:02I can know whether or not they're, they want to work really fast and they're multitasking or whether or not they want to be kind of methodical and they want to take their time with their work. I can also know what level of detail they're going to do. I'm going to conform to this is the process I'm going to do it. Or Hey, I'm okay with change. I can move around a little bit. That's okay. And then I can work all night long and no worries. I got it. I can work a 12 hour shift like nothing. I can make that happen. Those are really cool traits to know. And then there's two more that are really fascinating as well. Logic. This is the one that gets me probably the most in trouble with my wife, right? Because you can measure logic. And when I say logic, that's the L line. And it's a, it's a measuring that from one to 10. And basically tell me if I'm right, what you're measuring here is the percentage of time you, and this is what I look at it, right? So I am a 10, right?

27:03So I am a 10 on the logic scale, which means a hundred percent of the time I'm using logic to make decisions. If I'm an eight, that means that 80% of the time using logic to make decisions and 20% of time I'm using emotion. Is that correct? Yeah. The higher that logic trait, the more I remove emotion when I make decisions. Absolutely. And when you're deciding which toothpicks to pick up, sometimes it's important to have the super high logic, but when you're managing people, you gotta, you gotta fill it in sometimes. Yeah. That's a, that's a thing. Never doubt about it. The other really interesting thing about the logic trait is when you, when you look at it and you look about hiring staff. So the, the advantage to low logic can be that those associates, because they're more emotional, they can actually build connections with their customers easier. Okay. So that's one of the advantages to it. Of course, the disadvantage to it is because they're more emotional and you may have to manage them, right? There's going to be a lot more drama that's going to come in into the organization. And so you have to decide, right?

28:08Does that trade or trade off work in this position or does that trade off not work in this position? So really anything that's like an extreme number, so super high A, super low A, high B, low B, high L, low L. So really what you really would like to do is to kind of be in the middle there. So what you want is kind of balance for the most part to not have too strong of a trader. It doesn't really matter, does it? Well, what I would tell you, honestly, I'm going to really say it's a little bit more job specific, right? Because there's some positions that need extremes, right? And then there's some positions that don't need extremes, right? So I'm always going to look at it at the job level and decide what I need. Do I need more flexibility or, you know, if I'm hiring a daredevil for a stunt scene, maybe I need a little bit more extreme. Yeah, that makes complete sense. The last one is ingenuity. There's an I. Absolutely. Tell me about the I. So I measures original thought and cleverness.

29:12So what you're going to find is people with high I's, they can think outside of normal business reality and come up with completely new ideas that may allow your business to spin in new directions. Some place where a high I might be really handy is whoever's the chef coming up right with your menu, right? A high I will allow that person, that person can put things together that the average person wouldn't think about. I was thinking more lines of marketing. Like if you're hiring someone for marketing whose I is a one, they're probably going to go, Hey, you should do a happy hour and order cheap drinks. You're like, Wow, what an original idea that is, right? Yeah, they're not going with original ideas. They're just going to kind of do, they're going to follow. Yeah. A low I is going to basically kind of do what we've done before and slightly try to improve it, right? Where a high I might come up with that new original brilliant idea that nobody else would have thought of before. Wow. Okay. So now I think we've described the seven types of people, seven traits, seven traits, and all of those, there's way more than seven types of people. How many different, so I'm an architect, you're an enterprise or Steven is a rainmaker.

30:29How many of those are there? Yeah. So we have 19, what we call 19 typified patterns or 19 groups that most people kind of fall into and look a lot alike. So here's some, here's some questions that I want to do as a follow-up. What is the cost of a bad hire? So if I hire, if I'm hiring a server and I'm at a downtown spot or if I'm at a really busy restaurant and I need somebody for 10 hours at a time and I hire somebody with 11 on their EU who doesn't like people and once, you know, that that's just the wrong fit, but they faked it. But they faked an interview. What's the cost there? Yeah, it's a great question. So when you look at some data that some independent organizations have pulled together, so if you look at the cost of their salary, right, and you add about 20% for benefits and multiply by three, that's about the financial cost to your business. So let's just hire you. Let's just say you hire a manager, right? And you're paying them 50 K a year. So that's about 60 K with benefits times three. So that manager, if you get it wrong and they're with you for about six months, the bottom line impact to your organization was probably about $180,000.

31:44And that's from going through Indeed or wherever you went to find this person interviewing them three times, putting them through training, the negative impact of having somebody who's negatively impacting your team. Right? So maybe that manager ran off three servers in the meantime and a sous chef and you didn't, you didn't realize they also pissed off 15 tables cause they were rude to your guests and they're never coming back to your building again. So in all of these factors that are normal things that happen, you're like, Oh, we don't need any of that. But hiring the person who's more suited for the job on the front end. Have you ever done that, Steven? He's laughing over here. This helps do that less often. Yeah, absolutely. And you're right. So many of those costs that you think about it, there's the few ones that you can measure, but it's all those ones you can't measure the impact to your customer, right? That customer who never returned or the employee who they ran off.

32:45Those are the things that are harder to make, but have really true negative impacts to your bottom line when you get it wrong. Okay. So we've really been talking right now about hiring people and when people come into your job, you're interviewing people to get the right person in the right seat. Now everybody who's listening to this right now, who works in a restaurant, owns a restaurant, manages a restaurant already has a full team. We already have. Well, not at this point, we wish we had, we all wish we had full teams. We're getting a little closer, but that first part of this interview was centered around, Hey, you can get so much more information before you even hire somebody. Both of my general managers were in the meetings yesterday and both at the end of the day were like, Oh my gosh, I'm never, I'm using this for every single thing in the entire world. There's three factors of people who are currently working for you that I was blown away from yesterday. And I want to talk about those three different people. There are people who work for you, who are engaged. They're coming in, they have buy-in, they love your culture. They're driving your culture.

33:52They're engaged in what you're doing. Then you have the people who are unengaged, who are just kind of there. Hey, look, this is my job. You know, the day before they may tell somebody, Oh, I got to go to work tomorrow. I'll be done at four. Then I can go do the thing I want to do. Right. Those people who are just there, they're unengaged, but they're there. And then there's the people who are actively unengaged and those people are, not only are they not engaged, but they're actively like in the side station on indeed looking up or they're on Fowl & Bow right now looking up new jobs. They're updating their profile with pictures like, Hey, look, I work in a restaurant. I want to work in your restaurant, not this terrible restaurant. So how do you bring people? Let's talk about the percentage. What percentage of people typically that work somewhere are engaged? So somewhere around the 20 to 30% range are what we would call engaged employees. Wow. Okay. So that's a super low number. Yes. How many people, what's the percentage would you say are unengaged?

34:59You've got about 50% at any given time of your employees that are typically unengaged employees, right? Meaning they're here, they're doing the job, but they're doing the job because they have to not necessarily because they want to do. So by deduction, I'm going to say 50 plus 30, 50 plus 20 to 30 puts me at 80. So 20 to 30% of my people are actively unengaged right now. Absolutely. Well, when you think about it, about one third of every American changes their job once a year, right? So if you just kind of think of that work, that actively unengaged group, right? Represents about one third of the public. And in our business that happens more often, right? Certainly a higher rate. Everybody's thinking there's something great out there. The grass is greener, you know, I'm going to get the lottery ticket tomorrow. I don't have to worry about all this. I'm going to write a hit song, which some people do by the way. Yeah. I don't begrudge anybody good fortune, but paying your bills tomorrow is part of what we help do. A hundred percent. So if I have people engaged, unengaged, actively unengaged, how does culture index allow, can people move from unengaged to engaged and can people move from actively unengaged to engaged?

36:15Yeah, absolutely. They can. So, so your existing staff can move up really. There's two ways to do that. Right? So, so number one is, let's just look and identify, do I, do I have this person in the right spot? Right? Cause if I have them doing a job that they're not a good fit for, they're probably in one of those two bottom categories. Okay. So sometimes it's just as simple as I got this person in the wrong spot. Let's kind of adjust what they do every day. And all of a sudden I've turned an unengaged employee up into an engaged employee. And then number two, the number, the other main reason that people leave companies is because managers don't know how to manage people. Right? And so if I take a manager and I teach them how to motivate each of their individuals uniquely, because we all need to be motivated and communicated to in a different way. If I can train them to do that, I'll bring my employees up from unengaged up to an engaged. Right? And the more I move up, guess what happens with productivity?

37:17Oh, exponential growth. That's awesome. I think it's also nice because once you give everybody the culture index survey, which again takes like seven to 10 minutes to do, it's not like they have to go home and study it. It's a, you can do it from your phone. Absolutely. It's really easy to do. You can identify the people who are actively unengaged are typically people who you have in the wrong seat. No doubt about it. Yeah. They're either, they're in the wrong seat, right? Or we've got a manager who has no clue how to manage that person. Right. And you can tell, you can look over your management team and go, Oh, I've got a man. Sometimes your manager's in the wrong seat. Absolutely. No doubt about it. No doubt about it. And with it, so we, we've got two tools and we talked about the hiring tool, which is what we call survey trades. The second part of the tools called job behaviors, right? And that job behaviors is how I think I need to act to be successful in my current position. So by measuring the two and seeing where the two are not aligned, that's where I can tell where my employee's stress is coming from. Right.

38:23So if I know where the stress is coming from, I can kind of put a plan into place to eliminate that stress. So I'll rephrase that. So if I'm a, and I'll ask before I rephrase, I'll ask this question. What if I'm listening to this and I'm going, man, culture next sounds cool, but I got, I run a juice shop and I got a bunch of 18 year olds. They've, they probably don't have really there. They're still developing, right? But all right. So the average, so the most people's natural behaviors become inherent by the age of 12. Okay. So they're 95% solidified by the age of 12. So it doesn't change much after that. So, you know, if you're hiring people 18 or older, it's set, they are who they are. We might get a little bit wiser as we get older and more educated. Yep. But we don't change who we naturally are and how we naturally want to behave in that. I think the cool part of that is we have server assistants here that are all younger, the 15, 16 year old range.

39:24I take a great amount of pride as a leader sitting down and talking with them. Cause I realized this is their first job. I get people in here that's their very first job and they're bussing tables and you know, kind of doing the thing. But like I take a great amount of pride that I want to be like a leader that starts them off in their career. They go, wow, I had this manager that one time who really cared about me and then you model that so that they kind of know what they like going for that. Hey, look, working is good. Working is fun. If you have a great leader, this can only solidify that, you know, these young people, what's going to motivate them. You can come in and really start them off because they're moldable. They're at clay at that point when it comes to their work habits, you can do a lot with it. Yeah, no doubt about it. You can do that. And the other really, really neat thing about culture index companies that are taking advantage of it is right. You can identify the people who have future leadership potential at the point of hire, right? So I can bring this person at whatever introductory level position I need.

40:27They may not have the experience, but I know this person has a leadership trait that I can start grooming them, right? To be that future leader and to be that, you know, to be the future GM or to be the future bartender manager or whatever, whatever leadership opportunities you have within the organization. I just find all of this completely, absolutely fascinating. And it's such, I just don't know how people like, I think about this, we've had this here for years now. We've done this for multiple years here at our restaurants, four years, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yep. And it's been such an amazing help and who we hire and how we hire. I don't know. I just look at this and I go, I don't know how you do it without it is make mistakes, I guess. Yeah. Look, I, just like everybody else, I used to be on the other side of the table. I used to be a vice president of sales and I can tell you how many times I got it wrong because I used to guess. And why guess when the data is there that you don't have to guess.

41:30Does this, does the culture index, is this legal? I mean, like we're talking about, am I getting any information in here that I'm not allowed to have? No, look, our product doesn't measure anything that would be discriminatory. Right? So all the words actually are gender neutral. So whether you're a male or a female, none of the words would impact the results. And any other protected classes, race, religion, ethnicity, all those things, we don't measure. It's going to come out the same way regardless. And so what you find actually is the organizations that work with us, they actually end up with a much more diverse culture. Afterwards, because we take the whole bias out of our hiring managers hands, and we just look at data and facts and ability to do the work and take out all those things that we wish our hiring managers didn't have, but they probably do. That's a, that's a huge thing in today's world. I mean, just finding somebody, finding out who they are, if they're the right fit for the position, filling that position, man, woman, veteran status, marriage, none of that.

42:45You won't be able to tell any of that. Absolutely. That's fantastic. Using it for four years, I can speak to that, that you don't see anything. In fact, it's a pure, that's not like a pure number, but it's a pure idea. Or you could, everybody looks different. It's not like you see two people look exactly the same. There are people that have, you know, we put them in the same 19, one of 19, you know, names or classes, but they all look different on paper and it's different than what they look like in real life. If you don't look up and see, if you look at this, if you put all your people on there, you would never be able to pick out, you know, male, female, nothing. Yeah. But besides their name, I mean, you blacked out the names, you wouldn't know. Yeah. That's awesome. I love it. Um, it was like, I was going to talk about real quick, I was setting up a question and I, we got off on lots of tangents here. Cause I there's so many things I want to cover in the next 10 minutes. Um, there's two ones. There's, there's the, who you are, right? There's your, um, what's the, what's it called? Come on. Survey traits, survey traits.

43:51And then there's the job traits. This is one of my favorite areas and this is for reviews, but also when new people come in and interview with me, I can sit down, I can find out why they're unhappy in their job. Right? So the survey traits tell me who they are as of age 12 going on. This is they want to be a leader. They want to be on a team. They're fast. They're slow. They're accurate. They're not. I can find out all of these things on the front end and then I can know. So if they naturally want to be a leader, but they on their team currently have to be part of a team, while they may have a high a, their job trait may be a low B. And while they may be super friendly and outgoing, they may be a high B, but in their current job, they're not allowed to be customer facing. Somebody's put them in the back of a place, their boxing t-shirts to go into a box that goes away and they have to be quiet and they can't talk or they're doing this. And you can see when there's a complete difference between their job traits and their survey traits, you can know when somebody's unhappy in their job.

44:55And you can, so that's a new employee. I can know that why you're unhappy from your previous job, but then I can also have my employees retake it and I can have them retake just the jobs or you kind of have them. This is how you feel at your current job. Are you happy? And I can know that pretty easily. Yeah, absolutely. Look the power of being able to talk to somebody in an interview and being able to say, I know why you're not happy because we can see the difference between who they are and how they have to behave in the current job. It's a, I see that this is not a fit for you. I know the reason why, guess what? That's not going to be this way here because I know that that was an issue there and we're going to, what we're trying to hire you for, that isn't going to get to affect you the way that it did at another organization. Or the light bulb moment for that person. Hey, you didn't like your previous job because you had to do this. It's going to be the same thing here. Have you thought about doing this?

45:58Absolutely. This would be a better shot for you and this position isn't the right one for you. Have you thought about being at the front door? Have you thought about being in the kitchen? Have you thought about being out front? Whatever it might be, you can really tailor, make something a job for the person to be in the right spot. Yeah, absolutely. And you can, even in a bar, you can have two bartenders. One's job is to make drinks as fast as you can for as many tickets as you can. They keep popping up. You know, it's like Tetris, you're knocking it out. But you've got another bartender whose job is to be out there engaging the guests and to be bringing people back and giving them a little tidbit about Nashville and, you know, entertaining them. And they are different jobs. So you can see the difference between those two people. Which one will be happier doing the service well and which one will be happier out there talking to people. And when you get those people backward, we all know it doesn't work. They don't like each other. They don't like, there's some dysfunction going on. Just allows you easily to separate those two into doing what's essentially the same technical or descriptive job. So this is all stuff that we've been working on, we've been doing for a long time.

47:01I've asked you some rhetorical questions for me because I knew the answers on the front end. But for my listeners out there, if they want to learn more about Culture Index, how would they, can they email you? Is there a website? How can they get a hold of you? Yeah, if they wanted to get a hold of me. So my cell phone is always the best way. So my cell phone is 847-417-4056. Or you can email me at wjamison, like the whiskey at cultureindex.com. Wjamison at cultureindex.com. And tell me that phone number one more time. 847-417-4056. So how does the process work if I'm a restaurant owner out there and I'm right now hiring, that's why I want to do this episode so bad and share what you do, because it's so vital right now that the people that you have coming in to get the right people is so important. If I'm calling you and I go, hey, William, hi, my name is John Schmon and I run this restaurant. How do I get started?

48:07What do you do? What's, what does it look like? Yeah. So the way that I first like to start people out, I like to offer some, something for free first, right? So what I allow anybody who's interested in learning a little bit more is I allow you to set up a free demo account and you literally survey 10 to 15 people, including yourself. And then we actually set up a follow-up call for about an hour and a half and we could just go over the results. Okay. So worst case scenario is you get some really good free information about you and some of your key people. And I like doing it that way because instead of talking about this theoretically, it's just much easier if you can see it and I can show you the information so it makes sense to you. And I can speak a little to the expense. I mean, this is definitely a capital expenditure. This is not a free where you're offering it to people for free at the beginning. In the end, this is not a free program. When you're investing in your business and you're a good business person and you understand that this expense pays dividends at the other, other side.

49:12I mean, I bought new chairs for the restaurant and what I pay will is 10% of what those new chairs cost for my restaurant. So that there's big numbers and then there's really big numbers and it's well worth it to have the knowledge to be able to manage people. If you could say, I'll give you a course and charge you this much a year to have all the knowledge you want on how to manage each of your people. I think you'd say, Oh, that's where that's worth something. I mean, you're paying managers 50,000 a year plus or around that number and you go, Oh, this is so much less than that annually, but I don't, I don't even know. It is, it is so much less than that annually, but then you can send them to resume reading class. I mean, this is, this is effective resume reading class. It really is. This is, this is a digital, this is a piece of paper that shows you their resume. So you're not a sponsor of mine. You're not a sponsor. You, we are, we are customers, but I'm, this is really a testimonial from myself and Steven talking to you about how much this has affected our business and how we hire and how we train, how we motivate people, how we pull people from that unengaged end to the engaged. And you know, we've been, we've been relatively effective as of recently, and I'm really excited once my general managers get coming through this course and we get everybody on the same page, I'm anticipating massive results.

50:32Absolutely. Look, if you, if you do this and you, you follow it consistently, like anything in life, you got to do it consistently. If you do this, you follow this program consistently, you're going to see those results. You're going to see, you're going to see a better culture. You're going to see more engaged employees. They're producing more for you. They're happier and your turnover goes down. Your customer experience goes up and you do all those things. All of a sudden you start seeing that, that top line and that bottom line growing at a faster rate than you would at before. And as leadership, once that happens, you're also typically working less hours or you're working hours on the right stuff versus being stuck in the business. Cause you have trust that the people who are working in your business are doing the things that you need them to do. Instead of constantly wondering if you have the right people in the right seat, you can be confident that they are. So you can focus working on the business. Absolutely. I love it. William and Stephen, Stephen, do you have any final thoughts?

51:34I think once you already have people that are trained, you never want to throw them away. This allows you to manage them more effectively and understand where their strengths and weaknesses are and how it relates to your business. William, one of the things I do with all of my guests is I give them the final word. So I'll let you take us out. Jerry's final thought style, whatever you want to say, as long as you want to say it speaking to the Nashville restaurant world. So speaking of Nashville restaurant world. So, you know, obviously all of you have had a tough go the last year and a half, right? It's been, it's, it's been a tough go. And, you know, what I would say is, look, I would love to help each of you, whoever wants to help. I would love to help you make this next 18 months a quicker recovery than what, than what the last 18 months have been. And, and then I also want to say, you know, I really appreciate Brandon and Stephen love you guys as, as, as customers. And it's been a fun four years and we'll keep making a fun four to four to 10 more years, right? Hopefully longer than that.

52:40Yes. And I will say that my favorite phone calls that I make throughout the month are the ones where I call you and I go, I'm stuck on this person. And you go, Oh, well that's because they like this, that's this. And I go, ah, that's it. And it's almost immediate how quick you give me the best advice. Stephen and William, thank you so much for joining us today on Nashville restaurant radio. We'll talk to you soon. Absolutely. Thank you. All right. Wow. What a, what a fantastic episode. Thank you guys for your patience on that one. Um, I had done this full editing cause our sound was so off and it took me an hour and a half and it, my computer crashed and the whole thing went away and I couldn't get it back. So I did it again. So better late than never. We are going to be, we got some new episodes coming up. Next week with Jenny Chikawa. So excited to have her back on the show. So excited you are listening with us here today. We hope that you guys are being safe. Go get your vaccination, get your booster. Love you guys. Bye bye.