Why Your Restaurant Can’t Find Good Staff and How to Fix It

Hey there, restaurant pros. It’s David Scott Peters, and welcome to the Restaurant Prosperity Formula podcast.

For over two decades, I’ve been guiding restaurant owners to success with the proven principles of something I call the Restaurant Prosperity Formula. I originally created the formula based on the daily practices of the most successful restaurateurs I coached, and it’s now the foundation of what I teach restaurant owners like you so you can achieve success.

What do I mean by success? Success is a restaurant owner who dictates the terms of their life and their bank account instead of their restaurant dictating those things for them. Success as a restaurant owner means having freedom from the restaurant and the financial freedom they never thought possible.

How you define success is up to you, but I do know the way to achieving it is by using the Restaurant Prosperity Formula.

This season, I’m diving even deeper into the core elements of the formula: leadership, systems, training, accountability, and taking action. Along with my insights, you’ll hear from special guests, industry experts, and inspiring success stories from fellow restaurant owners who’ve turned their businesses around and found their definition of success.

In this episode, number 140, our guest is Dwight Crane, an expert in the talent management and solutions space. Dwight is the co-founder and managing partner of LServe, a company that offers a range of talent management solutions, including behavioral assessments, skill testing, recruiting, leadership development, custom surveys, and team development.

Listen in on our conversation to learn how important finding the right people in your restaurant at all levels is. It’s job one. Dwight’s insights and solutions will change how you look at finding and managing the right team members.

Let’s get started.

Dwight, I want to thank you so much for doing this with me today.

Yeah, I’m excited to be here.

So we met because many of the industry experts I bring on to our show are people my members have worked with. They rave about your services, what you’ve done for them, and who you are as a person, because that’s really important to me.

I just don’t bring people on to talk unless there’s a connection, because I find some of the best people I meet are those my members already know. You’re already in the industry doing great things, and that’s how we connected. Nick Churchill was the guy who connected us and uses you heavily. He’s talked about the great successes he’s had.

Do me a favor. Before we get into hiring people and a lot of the things you do and the challenges restaurant owners face, tell people a little bit about you and your background.

Yeah, I’d be glad to. I’ve been in the talent solutions space for the last 20 years. I kind of got into that space by mistake. Not by mistake, exactly, but I actually fell into it.

I was in a bad job situation, and one of the people I knew asked me to take an assessment. They said, “Hey, just come take this assessment, and let’s see what you’d be good at.”

I took the assessment, which happened to be one of the assessments used by a company I eventually went to work for. They said, “You know what? You’d actually be a great fit for this company managing clients.”

I said, “Okay, what do you do besides this assessment?” because I didn’t really know.

They explained it, and I got in there and thought, “Man, this sounds like a really interesting thing.”

So I started working in that organization, and what I realized was that I had the opportunity to make a real impact. I could help ensure that individuals were in the right positions for their skills and strengths while helping organizations improve profitability, productivity, and ultimately keep their people engaged and retained.

I loved working there.

In 2016, my business partner and I saw the market changing in the talent solutions space. We were seeing consolidation among organizations in that space, and it was becoming less client-centric.

Instead of crafting a solution that worked for an organization, companies were increasingly saying, “We’re going to give you this tool, and you’re going to make it work.”

So we said, “Okay, let’s see what we can do. Let’s start our own organization.”

Those became our two pillars. We’re going to provide world-class customer service, and we’re going to craft unique solutions for the organizations we work with that fit their unique situations, because every organization is unique, and what they require is unique as well.

That was in 2016, and we’ve been working with organizations ever since, doing exactly that.

Just making sure we go find the right talent that fits the job, all the wonderful things.

I can tell you that as we get deeper into our discussion, what you do is incredibly important and powerful. We’ll kind of go in and out of it, but, man, you put the wrong person in the wrong job, or you select the wrong person for the right job, whatever it may be, and it becomes this revolving door.

This is where, in the restaurant industry, we talk about hiring new managers who don’t make it.

From my side of things, I talk a lot about not having the right systems in place, not providing the right training, and not setting the right expectations. But, man, it starts way before that. It’s the person themselves.

Do me a favor. Let’s talk a little bit about some of the challenges you see.

I can tell you, as a restaurant coach, there are two different challenges when it comes to hiring. I’ve got my line employees, my hourly staff. Then I’ve got my supervisors through high-end managers, my general managers, and they pose slightly different issues.

For my line employees, it’s, “Man, where can I find good people?”

And if I hear another restaurant owner tell me that this generation is full of idiots, I’m like, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

You selected them, hired them, trained them, and manage them daily. I don’t think people are idiots. I think we create idiots by not having the right definition of who we’re looking for, not clearly defining what the job actually is, not training them on that job, and not properly supervising them.

Then you step up into the management roles, and you hear, “I can’t find a single manager who wants to work,” and so on and so forth.

Well, again, the same thing applies, but on a larger scale, because they’re controlling your dollars, and everything has to be dialed in even more.

Can you talk about some of the challenges you see your clients facing when it comes to hiring people?

Yeah, well, I think you hit some of them on the head already.

One of the biggest challenges we see is that hiring managers think they’re the best interviewers in the world. They interview someone, fall in love with them because they’re great in front of them, or for whatever reason, and hire them without really understanding who they are.

Then they end up learning about that person once they get them on the job. By then, it’s too late.

With line employees and customer service people, obviously customer service is critical. It takes a certain type of person to provide good customer service. Not everybody provides good customer service.

You hear about horror stories. I saw a post on Instagram a couple of weeks ago about a server who basically lost it with a customer because they didn’t give them a tip.

While I understand that’s frustrating for that person, just think about the money they lost based on the business that customer represented, as well as other customers who might have been affected.

As far as the challenges go, first, hiring managers think they’re the best interviewers. Second, you’re hiring out of desperation.

You think, “I’ve got a hole here, or I’ve got three or four holes, and I just need a body.”

Unfortunately, when you take that approach, you may wind up with a body, and that’s it. It fills the hole, but it doesn’t necessarily help you achieve the high productivity you’re trying to get from that individual.

With leaders, it’s a different story, like you said.

A lot of times, what happens is the manager is a former server who gets promoted. We see the Peter Principle: you get promoted to the level of your incompetence.

I think that’s what happens a lot in the restaurant industry. Someone gets promoted, but they don’t receive formal training. The owner or general manager doesn’t have time to provide that training because they’re working in the business, too.

So the training never gets done, and they’re just flying by the seat of their pants when trying to lead these people.

That creates problems, too.

I saw another story about a manager who had a cook filling in for the day. The cook was an individual with special needs, and a dishwasher was actually trying to learn the chef position.

The dishwasher made a mistake, the customer complained, and the manager brought the person out to the table and fired them on the spot.

Now, I realize that’s a one-in-a-lifetime kind of situation, but things like that happen all the time.

It’s important to understand whether someone has the traits it takes to be a leader, because they may not.

You need to know that upfront. If this isn’t the right person to be a leader, you need to know before you wind up with a lawsuit, a customer complaint involving harassment, or any number of other problems.

By understanding who they are upfront, you can avoid a lot of those things.

Now, what happened? I’m sorry, go ahead.

I was just going to expand on that because it brings to mind two different scenarios for me. One is finding line employees, and the other is finding managers.

On the line employee side, I remember when I was working for Famous Sam’s. I was a director of operations at the time for a 30-unit restaurant sports bar chain. We were opening eight stores, and we were going gangbusters.

I’m in Bullhead City, Arizona. We’ve got our franchisee trained up and staffed up. We’ve done the cleaning party to get ready to open. We’re rocking and rolling, and we’re in the first few days of operation.

I’ll start by saying that the kitchen isn’t my strength, but here I am in the back prepping. We were so busy that we couldn’t get a delivery in time because we were in Bullhead City, Arizona.

So I’m at a grocery store in the morning buying all the rolls and different products just so we could operate the next day for this franchisee.

I remember we lost a cook, and we were getting slammed.

I made the perfect, quintessential restaurant owner mistake. We were in such a jam that a dude walked in wanting to apply for a cook position, and I hired him on the spot because I needed a body.

I can tell you without a doubt that person didn’t make it. He got fired.

Every time we’ve hired because we had a vacancy and needed someone so badly, we’ve taken the person who can fog a mirror, show they have a pulse, and prove they’re alive. Within six months, we’re saying, “Damn, I need to fire this person. They’re so bad.”

I did it again.

But we do it over and over again.

Talk about that a little bit, what you see in that scenario. Then I want to take us down the management side.

Yeah. When you talk about that, you really have to talk about the cost of hiring the wrong person.

Think about what that cost the restaurant. In your situation, you hired that individual.

The Department of Labor says that a bad hire can cost up to 30% of an individual’s first-year salary. That probably is a lowball number, especially in the restaurant industry, because you have to think about how many people that person impacts.

When you hire someone just to fill a spot, you may have to spend more time training them. You may have to provide remediation training, which takes up your trainer’s time.

Then, if they make mistakes, you have to calculate the cost of customers not coming back and losing repeat business.

When you add all those costs up, it’s huge when you hire someone just to have a body.

But do you see that happening all the time? Before somebody starts working with you, are they literally just doing that?

What triggered that for me was when you mentioned desperation hiring. There’s a lot of that going on today, especially because there’s, in theory, a labor shortage.

We’re seeing unemployment go up, but the hospitality industry is a completely different beast. There’s always a shortage because we’re always expanding. There’s always stress on the industry. We need people, and not everybody wants to take an entry-level position. Not everybody wants to work in hospitality.

Although I’d tell you that everybody should work in the hospitality industry for a little while to learn what it’s like.

Do you see that happen often? When we’re talking about seven to ten grand on a new hire just for a line employee, is this as common as I’m saying it is?

Oh yeah, it is. At least seven to ten grand.

You’re exactly right. People get desperate. They think, “I’ve got to have somebody,” but they’re not thinking about the costs behind it.

They put someone in that spot, but by doing that, they’re actually putting themselves in a hole because eventually, down the road, they’re probably going to have to fill that spot again.

They’re constantly on a hamster wheel, filling those spots when they’re hiring just to get a body.

So they never really get ahead. That’s the problem.

Yeah, the crazy part is that if you reduce that by ten people, that’s $100,000 to your bottom line. It’s that simple.

But let’s go to the management side again, because when you said “desperation hire,” it triggered me. I’ve been in this industry for so long.

I can tell you that when I was a young manager and needed managers, one of the things I always learned, and still believe today, is that I’d rather hire for a supervisory or manager-level position from within.

These people already know me. They know the company. They match our core values. They understand our policies. There’s a nice relationship there, and I know they’re people I’d love to bring into our management structure.

The problem is that the way I was brought into management is the same way I used to bring people into management.

You take your best employee in a position and talk them into it. You browbeat the hell out of them until they finally say, “Don’t you want to be a manager?”

“No, I don’t want to be a manager.”

“No, you’d be great. I really need you. You’ve got great skill sets.”

They’re usually very much like ourselves, which means we’re missing skill sets.

If we put a whole management team together of people like me, there are going to be a lot of missing skills.

But we keep pushing them until they finally say, “Okay.”

Then we take our best employee and make them our worst, because they should never have been a manager.

We talk them into the role, and they go from being our best employee to our worst employee. Then they quit or get fired within six months to a year.

The cost is huge, especially when it comes to the culture of the business. Forget about the money. The cost is even greater when it’s a manager than when it’s a line employee.

The fact of the matter is, it’s devastating.

Then we keep saying nobody can do this job, but it started with me talking somebody into it.

Now I’ve got a whole process where I allow people to self-identify, but there’s more to it.

Can you talk about the real cost of mis-hiring a manager, whether they’re an internal or external candidate? It doesn’t matter. The impact is incredible, isn’t it?

Oh yeah, it is very, very high.

You said a key word there, and it’s culture. One wrong leader can really drain your culture and create a negative environment.

Once you have a negative culture, people aren’t going to want to come to work there. You’re going to have a hard time hiring other people because the word will get out. People will say it’s a bad place to work, whether through Glassdoor, other sites, or just word of mouth.

You’ll also lose your existing employees. You may lose your best employee because you promoted them into a role where they became your worst employee.

The cost is huge. You’re putting yourself at risk of losing hundreds of thousands of dollars by putting the wrong person into a leadership position.

Things like conflict management are huge when you’re a leader. You have to be able to manage conflict, and not everyone can do that well.

It’s important to know these things and know whether an individual can handle them.

Maybe it’s work pace. Perhaps the person works as slowly as a snail, but you’re running a very fast-paced restaurant. That person may not work out, and you won’t know that unless you assess it.

You have to consider the impact on existing employees, hiring new employees, and customers.

If you have the wrong leader in place, they may not train the staff properly, and that affects the customers.

When you think about the overall impact, the financial cost can be very high.

Let me ask you something, and you might not have an answer to this. What’s got a greater cost or is a greater predictor of failure when it comes to the revolving door of employees, whether they’re line employees or managers?

Is it more about the people I’m hiring, or is it more about the systems and support I’m providing them?

Which one is a better predictor, or gives me a better chance of keeping somebody and helping them become a good member of my team?

Does it start with the person or with me and what I’ve got in place?

I think the answer is that it depends. That’s probably not what you’re looking for, but you can bring the right person into a system that’s not working, and they won’t be the right person anymore because they’ll get there and say, “I don’t want to work here.”

Then they’ll leave.

So it really has to start with the systems. You have to have systems in place to facilitate success.

One thing we see with Gen Z is that people want to feel valued. If you’re not doing what it takes to make someone feel valued when they come on board, they’re not going to stay.

They also have to feel like they’re part of something bigger. If you can’t communicate that to them and don’t have systems in place to facilitate it, you’re going to struggle.

And it’s not just that. You need all your systems in place.

Hiring the right person won’t help if they aren’t going to stay anyway.

That’s really what I was assuming, because I always talk about how we don’t hire idiots; we create idiots.

If we don’t give people the right systems, tools, support, supervision, and accountability, they’re not going to thrive because they’re guessing. They’re always trying to read your mind.

Odds are, there’s somebody on the management team who’s a bully, doesn’t belong there, can’t communicate, makes people feel small, and keeps pushing people out the door.

I appreciate the answer, and that’s kind of what I was thinking. I just didn’t want to assume because I’m the systems guy. That’s what I promote all the time: having training systems and systems for doing everything in your business.

That’s why the chains tend to kick our ass. They have a system, a process, and a way of doing everything. It’s not about telling people to read your freaking mind.

With that said, I can have the right systems in place and still select the wrong person.

One of the hard predictors is how somebody performs in an interview. If I’m not using a structured interview, which everybody should be doing in my world, I’m missing out.

Ask the same questions, in the same order, with the same process. Don’t deviate from it. It keeps us out of hot water, but it also allows us to evaluate candidates on an apples-to-apples basis.

I could bring someone in and look at them, but interviewers don’t always remember or know that this is the best this person will ever be.

The interview is when they’re at their peak performance. They’re the most upbeat, the most positive, and the most polished they’ll ever be.

That’s not how they’re going to be every single day.

They can learn to answer questions, and if you’re a bad interviewer, you’re giving them the answers and they’re just regurgitating them back to you.

There are all these challenges.

How the hell do I avoid making the wrong selection, Dwight?

I think one of the things to consider is that we’re in the selection business. We help companies understand who the right person is.

Using some sort of assessment, whether it’s a basic skills assessment or a behavioral assessment, can make a huge impact because it can give you information about an individual that you wouldn’t otherwise have.

For example, we see a lot of highly social people go into interviews, and hiring managers fall in love with them because they’re delightful in the interview. They’re joking around and making a great impression.

But when they get on the job, they’re still that social person, yet they may not have all the other skills needed to succeed in the role.

Some people have traits that hiring managers fall in love with during an interview simply because they sell themselves well.

It’s important to conduct some sort of assessment upfront to understand what’s going on and make the right hire.

Let me put this into the context of my experience.

I can tell you that when I was building my last company, I had to replace myself as a salesperson. We’re not talking about a restaurant here, but the principle still applies.

I kept bringing people in. One was a friend who was a restaurant owner. I love him to death, and we’re still close personal friends today.

I thought he’d be fantastic. He got training, but it didn’t work out.

The realization was that the job didn’t align with his personality traits or strengths. It would have required him to work outside his comfort zone, and if he didn’t follow the system and do the right things, it would be a challenging job.

I put a good friend in a bad position because I wanted somebody I could trust, somebody who knew restaurants. So I brought him in.

Eventually, I learned that I needed to hire differently.

This was 10 to 15 years ago, when job boards and many of the tools we have today were still in their infancy.

What I did was put a personality profile in front of the application to determine whether the next candidate had the personality traits associated with success in our industry and the role.

That made a huge difference. The person I hired is still at my old company, still doing the job successfully.

I started promoting that approach to my members, too, especially when it came to management.

Talk about why that’s so important. Why is it important to know what’s inside somebody’s head before you even decide to interview them, so you’re not wasting time trying to figure out whether they’re a potential fit?

Every job has unique characteristics required to perform it well.

It may require high manageability, high sociability if they’re working on the front lines with customers, or high decisiveness if they’re a leader.

Whatever those traits are, each job has a unique set of requirements.

If you understand the candidate’s unique set of traits and match them with the traits required for the job, you’re putting people in a position where they’re set up for success.

But if you’re putting someone in a position where their traits don’t match the job, you’re setting them up for failure.

Eventually, those traits will show themselves, and it’s not just the employer who gets frustrated. Sometimes the employee gets so frustrated because they don’t fit the role that they end up leaving.

I’ll give you an example.

We worked with a fast-casual restaurant a couple of years back that was having a really hard time with turnover.

We went in and evaluated the situation. We conducted a job analysis survey to understand their needs because we’re never going to implement something without understanding the organization and its unique situation.

We then created an assessment they could use in the hiring process.

They used it for about a year and ended up saving about $100,000. Turnover went down about 33% because they were hiring the right people who fit the organization.

Food costs went down because they were hiring people with better attention to detail. Those employees were paying attention to the things they needed to monitor to keep waste down.

Service times went down, too, because they had people who were more conscientious about performing their jobs.

All those things affect the business, not just turnover.

When service times go down, you can increase business because people get served faster, receive better customer service, and have a better experience.

All those things go together when you understand the traits required for success and how those traits fit your organization’s needs.

Over the years, what I’ve learned about assessments is that there are two different levels. There’s the assessment for line employees, and there’s a management assessment that’s probably more detailed and in-depth because we’re looking for a very different person.

On the line employee side, I’ve seen one of two approaches.

Often, you go to a restaurant and say, “Let’s get your best employees in each position to take this evaluation.” Then you can see what your best people look like and find other people like them.

For those who don’t feel they have great staff, there are benchmarks in the industry for what a good server, bartender, cook, and so on might look like.

How does it work? When someone applies for a job and fills out this personality assessment, how do I know whether they match?

What does that process look like?

Great question.

We actually build a benchmark in one of two ways.

The first is by assessing your top-performing people. If you have a couple of cooks, or three cooks, who are really good and you’d hire them again in a heartbeat, we’ll have them take the assessment.

We’ll identify their unique set of traits and build a benchmark around that. Then, when you’re hiring, we can match candidates against what we already know success looks like.

The second approach is to conduct what we call a job analysis survey.

We’ll go in and ask specific questions about the job. Based on the answers, we’ll build a benchmark around the role.

Depending on which approach the customer wants to use, we can do either one. Both result in the same outcome: building what we call a high-performance benchmark.

Once we’ve done that, we can assess people against the benchmark to understand how well they fit the requirements for high performance.

I want to be very clear. The main goal of setting up a benchmark is to narrow down the pool of candidates.

If I had 100 people apply for a line cook job, God bless, I couldn’t interview all 100.

But based on the assessment and the benchmark, perhaps 20 of those people are worth talking to.

That doesn’t mean those 20 are perfect for the job or should automatically be hired. They may have the wrong core values. They may have appearance issues or lack certain skills.

But out of 100 people, the assessment tells me I only need to look at 20.

Now I can set up interviews and figure out whether they match the personality I’m looking for, meet the appearance standards, have the skills needed for the job, and, more importantly, fit the culture.

Am I misspeaking, or is that really where the benefit comes from? You have a pool of candidates, and the assessment narrows it so you save time and focus on those who potentially have the greatest chance of success if hired. It doesn’t mean you should hire them.

Yeah, you hit the nail on the head.

Even when we’re working with clients, we never say, “Take this assessment, and if they do well, hire them.” There are other factors that go into the decision-making process.

We talk about the three-legged stool.

One leg is the assessment results. Another is the interview, background check, and all the other relevant information. The last leg is their work history.

All three legs have to be there. If you take one leg out of a three-legged stool, it falls over.

It’s the same principle here. The assessment helps you identify the candidate pool, but it also gives you another piece of information to make a more informed, objective hiring decision.

Do you find that there’s a benchmark for how much more successful a hire is likely to be when you use an assessment, conduct an interview, and do all the things that make up those three legs of the stool?

Assuming the restaurant has the training, systems, and proper supervision in place, what are the odds that this person will be the right hire?

Do I have a 50-50 shot? A 60-40 shot? A 90-10 shot?

In our experience, you’re probably looking at 85-15.

That’s huge.

Yeah, because if you’re doing all that work and making an objective, informed hiring decision, you have a much higher chance of success.

Obviously, things happen. Someone might have to move out of town because their aunt died, or something else might come up.

But for the most part, you have a much higher chance of success with that person than you would without those three legs in place.

So now let’s flip back to management. Management is a completely different beast.

Quite honestly, the assessment process is just as important whether the candidate is internal or external.

As I’ve learned, having a great employee doesn’t mean they should ever be a manager.

It doesn’t matter that we love them. It doesn’t matter that we see the things we need on the surface. They could have huge weaknesses in conflict resolution, thinking on their feet, customer service, or whatever else the job requires.

There could be major gaps in what they can do, and we bring them into the role anyway.

Again, we take a great person and lose them, which damages us even further. We had this stellar employee who was a great ambassador for the company and loved working for us. Now they’ve become someone who hates their job, hates showing up, and thinks everyone is an idiot.

We just put them in the wrong role.

Talk about how much more important that assessment process is for managers. If I’m not mistaken, it’s even more detailed.

Yes, exactly.

The assessment process works the same way with existing staff and managers.

You can use the information not only to hire the right person but also to coach them once they’re on board.

With managers, I think it’s even more important.

Things like conflict management, thinking on their feet, and decisiveness are critical. Many more factors go into identifying a good leader than go into identifying someone who works on the front lines.

The assessment process follows the same general approach, but the management assessment is much more in-depth. You get much more information about the individual and their challenges, along with a report that helps you coach them.

Sometimes you may think someone isn’t a perfect fit, but you love them and believe you can coach them up.

Having this information helps you do that and develop them as a leader.

My understanding of personality profiles is that I’ve done eight million of them, from DISC to all the latest and greatest assessments.

No matter which assessment it is, I know exactly who I am.

In a DISC assessment, I’m a high I and a high D. That’s who I am.

You don’t want me doing analytical stuff, even though I do it. You don’t want me sitting at a desk all day. It’s just not who I am.

With that said, you bring up a great point, and I’m going to ask you about it.

Do you have clients who have their whole team take assessments?

When you understand an individual’s personality, you can manage them better because you can push the exact buttons they need, rather than managing everyone the same way and frustrating some people while making others feel great.

Instead, you can customize your message to each individual and get the most out of your people.

Do you have people who do that?

Yeah, we do, actually. A lot of our clients do that, especially in team development.

It helps you understand how to manage each person, but it also helps you understand the strengths each person brings to the team and how to leverage those strengths to make the team more effective.

It also helps team members understand one another.

They start to say, “Oh, that’s why he does that. That’s why it happens that way.”

They understand the why behind the what.

I think that’s the critical part: understanding the why. Once you understand the why, you can manage what you need to do with that knowledge to get to the outcome you’re looking for.

I think a great example is working with me.

If you knew my personality traits, which I’ve already told you are a high D and high I in the DISC assessment, you’d quickly learn that you better come to me with information, facts, and a solution.

There are millions of assessments out there. They all approach the same basic idea in their own way, some with more detail and some with less. DISC is probably one of the simplest and least detailed.

With that said, if you worked under me and knew my personality, you’d learn quickly that I want you to get to the point.

Be direct. Give me the facts and a solution. Don’t hum and haw around, because I’ll go nuts. I’ll be saying, “Give me the information.”

If you take too long, I’ll just fix it myself because I can’t take it anymore. I’ll take control.

I need you to be concise and direct. I don’t want the long story.

Understanding that can help even young managers advance their careers because they’re learning not just how to manage people, but how to communicate in the way those people want to be communicated with.

Am I off base on that?

No, you’re exactly right.

In fact, I was laughing when you described your personality because my business partner is a little bit like that. She’s very high D and high I, so she does a lot of the same things you do.

We’ve worked together for 20 years, and we’ve learned not only through working together but also through our assessments how we need to communicate with each other.

That’s huge. If you know how to communicate with someone, you can manage them much better.

And that’s the downward flow, too.

For anybody listening to this, if you’re a restaurant manager and you know your owner’s assessment results, you can do nothing but make them happy instead of frustrated.

Sometimes it’s not what you do, but how you communicate what you’re doing that makes people think you’re not getting things done.

These assessments and personality traits really matter.

Major corporations invest a ton of money in these kinds of tools because they know they’re critical to growth.

Do me a favor. Talk about what you and your company do.

We’ve danced around assessments and what they really mean. We’ve discussed the benefits and the cost of hiring someone incorrectly or putting them in the wrong role.

What is it that you do?

LServe is actually a full-service talent solutions organization.

You might be thinking, “Okay, what in the heck does that mean?”

We help organizations with pretty much every people-related situation they face.

We don’t do payroll, and we don’t do recruiting, but we help organizations maximize the productivity of their people.

We help organizations ensure they’re hiring the right people and, in turn, increasing retention.

We do that in a multitude of ways. We have a whole toolbox of tools we bring to each situation. Based on our evaluation of the organization’s needs, we pull out the tools that best fit.

We can help with selection, leadership development, and skill development.

If an organization wants to develop its employees’ skills, we also have a learning management system that we help organizations use through our company.

Really, anything people-related that has to do with retention and productivity is something we can help with.

How would somebody go about finding you, learning about what you do, or listening to us today and thinking, “I want to talk to Dwight”?

How do they contact you? How do they find you?

The best way is probably by email.

My email is Dwight.Crane@eleserve.com. That’s D-W-I-G-H-T, dot, Crane, C-R-A-I-N, at E-L-E-S-E-R-V-E dot com.

That’s usually the best way to reach me.

You can also go to our website and look around. There’s an email address there where you can reach out as well.

Even if you just want to talk about the situation you’re in and discuss what tools might be available, there’s no cost for talking.

We’d love to help you if we can.

I hope you get a lot of phone calls.

Again, the only reason I’m bringing you on here is that I have members who are using your services and having great success. Your core values align with ours and with what we want for our members.

My hat is off to you for that.

You got brought to me. I didn’t find you, and you didn’t find me. You were recommended by operators who are actually in the business getting things done.

Nick is a top operator, so what he says carries a lot of weight with me.

Yeah.

I appreciate you doing this with me.

I don’t know if there’s something you wish I’d asked you that you’d like to share, or if you want to close out with a favorite book or quote you want people to think about.

It’s up to you. A question, a book, a quote. The floor is yours.

Actually, I’ll share a quote. I’ve always loved it ever since the first time I saw it because I think it drives what our business does and what I try to base my life on.

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

If you’re not taking the risk, you’ll never know whether you could get there or not.

That’s huge. You’ve got to take action.

My dad had a phrase: “Ideas are cheap, and some people who put them into action are priceless.”

That’s really it. If you don’t take the shot, you’re never going to know.

At this point, I’d turn this into a call to action to contact you.

If you’re sitting there wondering, “Could I really reduce my turnover? Could I increase employee retention? Could I increase productivity? Could this really be worth it?” the only way to find out is to take the shot and visit your website or email you.

I appreciate you doing this with me today.

I hope you get a lot of calls, emails, and inquiries because what you’re providing our industry is invaluable.

I look forward to hearing some of the success stories.

Thanks, Dwight.

I will definitely share them. Thank you.

Hey, that was an awesome episode.

I want to thank you for taking the time to take action on building a better, more prosperous restaurant.

Before you go, I want to leave you with three thoughts.

By combining leadership and taking action with systems and training, and by holding yourself accountable, you’re on your way to creating prosperity for yourself and your restaurant.

I also have something I need from you. Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you happen to listen to podcasts.

By leaving us a review, you help other restaurant pros seeking this information find it.

I read the reviews, and hearing how this information has benefited you does wonders for me.

Finally, if you find any of these discussions helpful, share them. The more restaurant pros who have access to them, the better we become as an industry.

For more restaurant resources or to get in contact with me, connect with me at DavidScottPeters.com.

Be passionate about what you’re doing. Be persistent, but more importantly, become better and help everyone around you become better, and your restaurant is going to kick some ass.