Recruiting & Team Building in the Restaurant Industry with Roger Beaudoin (Ep 236)
Running a successful restaurant starts with team building, and Jaime Oikle dives deep into this crucial topic with Roger Beaudoin in this episode. They discuss practical strategies for identifying top talent, empowering employees, and fostering a strong workplace culture that drives results. Roger shares his proven methods for recruiting, training, and retaining top-tier staff while creating a motivated and engaged team. If you're ready to build a restaurant dream team and elevate your leadership skills, this conversation is packed with actionable insights you won’t want to miss!
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Recruiting & Team Building In The Restaurant Industry With Roger Beaudoin
How To Identify And Develop A, B, And C Players
You talk about having good people and trust. Your numbers are off the charts in terms of retention. You can only do that with the systems that you have in place and the culture and so forth. I love it when you talk about A, B, and C players. If folks haven't heard this before, listen and dial in on how to find people, train people, and bring them up. This is a hot topic. A, B, and C's, what do you get?
Unfortunately, you can still drive down any street in the USA and see the “Now hiring” signs everywhere. What do you get? If you get anyone at all, you get someone else's C player. Someone that didn't work out in the last three jobs they had. They bounced around all over the place. They're not delivering great experiences to your guests. They don't care. Half the time, they're out back having a smoke. They don't show up. They're not reliable. You know what I mean? They're not team players. That's a C player.
An A player is the complete opposite. It's someone with a great personality. It's someone who has a true passion or desire to serve the public. It's someone who makes friends every shift. I'm not just talking about front of house. I'm talking about back of house. It's an approach to a job. It's team spirit. It's respect and it's working together symbiotically. That's an A player. The kicker is they are also experienced. They've been working in restaurants for a while. They've been working in your place for a long time. They're veterans perhaps. You can't have too many A players. You wish you had twenty more of them.
A B player. Let's say a B player has all the same attributes. They have the personality, they have the approach, they're reliable, they show up on time, they do what they're told, and they take initiative. These are amazing qualities but maybe they never worked in a restaurant before and they don't have any experience. That's where mentoring and shadowing come in.
If you have a couple of A players that have been there for a while, have your new employee, new team member, or your recruit as I call them shadow a couple of shifts, and even more than one person because of best practices. Everyone has a different way of approaching a different personality. You can pick things up from multiple people before you turn somebody loose on the floor. What your team says and does in front of a guest is a positive or a negative impression on the guest. You want to put your best foot forward. It is vitally important to train.
Recruiting Strategies That Build A Dream Team
What is recruiting versus hiring? If you put a sign on the door, on the wall, or wherever it is outside, people might come in. That's hiring, “I'll give you a shot,” and that's a warm body. Recruiting is incentivizing people to bring you other good people like them. You ask your A and B players, “Who do you know that might not be happy in their job right now who doesn't work for a place that encourages them to move up, gives them opportunities, recognizes and rewards their performance, gives them a voice and flexibility, your opinion matters, and treats you like you're part of something? You bring me that person. I'm going to give you a cash incentive for bringing that person in.”
If I hire that person, they assimilate our training and our culture, do a great job, and they're still there 60 days later, I'm going to give that person a cash incentive. No matter how many times you do this, it's still far more cost-effective than hiring a C player. They stay for a couple of weeks. You train them, get them up to speed on the job, you pay them the wages, and all that kind of stuff. They leave or you fire them. You then have to find new people and go through the process all over again.
The average tenure they say of a new restaurant employee today is about three months. Every time you go through this process, it costs you a ton of money in lost wages, productivity, training, and all that kind of stuff versus a couple of hundred bucks that you toss out and you build your dream team. I did that for every restaurant I've ever owned. That's recruiting versus hiring.
Internal marketing is a huge idea. I didn't create it. I wish I had. It's a genius idea. It goes back to the pandemic. There's a chain of restaurants in Southern California. They have 28 locations. They're open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Imagine the staffing challenges that they had then. They overcame it by giving gift cards. They put these on tables, tents, bulletin boards, chalkboards, and on social media.
They said, “We will give you a $250 gift card if you bring us a great new hire. If that person lasts for 60 days, we will give you the gift card.” It was genius and they got a ton of great people. They were able to staff all those locations. Think about that. It's a unique idea that would still work today. I have to emphasize that it's not $250 for every person. It's your food cost. It's pennies on the dollar. If you have a 30% food cost, it's 30% of $250 or 30 cents on the dollar. That's smart.
That's a great one. You have fans of your restaurant. They want you to succeed as well. They may know people who would be a great fit for you. I love that. This is a debate. We've used the term leadership versus management and people think they're the same. You could have a whole big debate about why they're different. Management is like there's a checklist and you're managing what you're doing and watching what you're doing, and making sure it's done.
Leadership is building the vision and getting people with you to go on the journey with you and telling the story why. There's a big difference between the two. We've all worked in environments that have one versus the other. I think you would all agree that people who are natural leaders and exhibit those qualities, we want to work harder for them. I'll let you rant on, but that's my quick take.
I don't use the term manager much anymore. I'm on a one-man mission to change the thinking. It's a paradigm shift because the management or manager term is overused. Just because someone holds the title of manager, general manager, floor manager, or whatever, it doesn't mean that they're competent and experienced, or they inspire or motivate and get the best out of people. They're simply the boss.
Maybe they were promoted, “I'm the boss and I'm the figurehead. You're going to do what I say. I'm going to delegate.” I hate that word too because delegate means to tell somebody what to do or even how to do it. Anybody can bark an order and say, “Sweep the floor” or “Clean that window.” That's delegating.
Leadership is recognizing and developing talent within your organization. It's leading by example, not being too important to do the dirty work, and having people see that. It's not your job, but you're a part of the team, then you recognize those standouts. You encourage them to take on additional responsibility, and then you incentivize them. You critique them. You don't criticize, you critique. You lead them along until they are stellar performers in whatever you're asking them to do.
Leadership is about recognizing and developing talent within your organization. It's leading by example and inspiring your team to be their best.
I have to emphasize that it doesn't matter if everybody doesn't want to rise up in the organization. You might have a killer dishwasher, line cook, fry cook, or host, and they loved that job. They want to stay in that job. That's perfectly fine, but you have a lot of people that are looking for opportunities. If they don't find it with you, they might move on to somewhere else. Empowerment means giving them additional responsibility, giving them even a chance to make mistakes, and showing them the right way until they get it. They shine and now they're up leveling your organization, then there should be an incentive for doing so. That's the difference between empowerment and delegation, leadership and management.
Big difference and it leads right into this conversation. How can restaurants create that entrepreneurial mindset? That means they're thinking like the business owner. How can you create that mindset?
Let's first define that word because not everyone is aware of it. Everyone has heard of an entrepreneur. Everyone knows that an entrepreneur takes a risk to start a business in the hopes of making a profit. Very simple definition, but that pretty much sums it up. An intrapreneur is someone who approaches their position within your restaurant or restaurant company as if they owned it and had to pay for it.
They have a vision for things. They see things and they want to improve things. They are encouraged by you to take on new responsibilities and move up and treat your businesses as if they owned it and had to pay for it. That's an intrapreneur. It's an entrepreneur within your business. You're the owner, but then the incentives are super important.
It all started many years ago when I recognized that I didn't care whether the employee was a dishwasher, a fry cook, a host, or a busser. These people work in our restaurants every day. They see things that could be improved, made better, or mistakes, “If I owned this place, I do it like that.” I always encourage those ideas in the trenches. They see things. You have 10, 20, or 30 employees with a set of eyes and a brain. They think. We created this thing where once a month, I gathered the whole team together. I'd have all these flip charts and dry-erase markers in the dining room. We'd all sit around for twenty minutes.
The very first time, I said, “I recognize that you guys see things, but if I don't ask you, you're just going to go in doing your job every day because you're not paid to care. I want to pay you to care. We're going to do this once a month. If you come up with a good idea I think I can track an improvement to the business either in a bottom-line increase in profit or cost savings, whether it's preventive maintenance, a new marketing idea, or a way to prevent all that silverware from ending up in the trash, I don't care what it is. If I can track it, I'm going to put a short list together and then whoever comes up with the idea is going to get an incentive, a percentage of that cost savings or profit every single paycheck as long as it continues to deliver a bottom-line improvement.”
You wouldn't believe some of the ideas that people came up with that continue to this day in restaurants. That's empowering people and creating entrepreneurs. It could be catering. Create a catering program. For every dollar that you bring in catering, I'm going to give you a percentage of that action. The Mug Club was a huge idea in our restaurants. My bar leader was incentivized with a certain amount of money. “For every mug you sell, I'm going to give you $5.” That was credible because he ultimately sold 1,200 mugs in my restaurant. Every year, he got a renewal of $50 and that $5 went to him because he sold them to begin with, even though it was automatically renewed on the website every year. This is empowering people.
I scribble stuff as you're talking. I wrote down that phrase, “I want to pay you to care.” People need to be incentivized. They just check in, do their job, and check out. What have you got here?
Empowering Employees With Training And Accountability
This is the framework and this is a template in the academy also, but it starts with career descriptions. Everyone has heard of a job description. I always call them career descriptions because I want to give people opportunities to move up and not leave for another job or another industry. I wanted to give them an opportunity. I called it a career description.
Create clear career descriptions with defined responsibilities and opportunities for people to move up.
Very quickly, those are three elements in any of my career descriptions. The very top was a series of words or phrases that varied for the position. It's essentially what you would expect that person to bring to the table on day one before any training, just their personality, their characteristics, their approach to the job, or whatever it is, accurate cash handling, eyes wide open, hustle, personable, and friendly. It could be anything. That tells them, “This is what we expect every day every shift.”
The main body of a career description has primary responsibilities. It might be five line items. It might be ten. It varies by the job or the position. Next to every one of those is a blank line and therein lies the accountability. Unless you set clear expectations and people know what they're being held responsible for, you're not going to get that performance consistently.
I would sit down with each of my employees, one by one in each position, and I would have very clear primary responsibilities. I would give them a copy and we'd read. I would read it to them and I would ask two questions. Do you understand what I expect with this responsibility? Can and will you do this to the best of your ability every shift every week? If they say yes, they get a pen and they initial that line.
Sometimes little training happens in between but after they're trained these are the expectations. I made it very crystal clear and they know I'm watching. You as an owner or a leader in your business should have a very good understanding of every job in your restaurant and what you expect the performance to be.
Five or ten initials on that line. If a week or two or a month later, you notice something going sideways and the person said they were going to do it this way and they're doing it that way and something is deviating from performance, now you have the accountability. You call them in private in your office. Instead of being the boss or the manager saying, “Get out there and do it the right way. I see you're doing it this way. I told you to do it that way,” that's the boss, now it's a critique.
Unless you set clear expectations and people know what they're being held responsible for, you're not going to get that performance consistently.
You simply say, “You said you could do this and I'm seeing you do that.” Instead of being the boss yelling at the guy or the lady, I simply threw the ball in their court and said, “What can you do to get your performance back on track to meet that expectation?” I sat there and I waited for the answer. They have to tell me what they're going to do to correct the behavior. They get up and walk out of the office. They know I'm watching and they know they have to fix the behavior because they don't want to be called on the carpet again. That problem goes away. There's your accountability.
Finally, the last piece of the career description is if they do a stellar job with all their primary responsibilities, where can they go from here? What's the next step to uplevel their career within your organization? They're going to take on more responsibility. They became a floor leader or a dining room leader. We always promoted people from within based on their performance in their original job. Once again, not everybody wants to move up and that's okay.
The next piece is disciplinary procedures. There are minor infractions. There are major infractions. I have a template for that. It outlines what the consequences should be for either. If you have a zero-tolerance policy for drug and alcohol use or sales on the property or some kind of harassment, that's a major infraction. Showing up late for a shift here and there, that's a minor infraction.
Documentation is super important. I don't care if you keep it in a three-ring binder or the cloud on the computer, you document every single time someone does something great. If they earn a reward or their performance is stellar and they get appraised, you document that. Whenever something goes sideways, you document that too. Now that you have the framework of a career description, that leads to performance reviews. It's very easy to look at six months' worth of documentation and say, “This person did a stellar job,” and you give them a letter grade on their career description. They got an A, B, or C based on their performance with their primary responsibilities.
The recognition, rewards, team building, and daily training always happen. What's in it for me? People want to know, “If I'm going to move up, what's in it for me?” There has to be a clear path to success and an incentive for doing so. It's a framework, a template, and a system. That is included in the academy as well.
There has to be a clear path for success and an incentive for doing so.
Roger, you just walked us through HR 101. Some of the stuff has become techified in terms of tracking and managing your people, but whether it's done digitally or not the key is it gets done. I loved your idea where you have them commit and be accountable. It's an easy conversation to come back to. You said this. You’ve been doing this. How can we get there? Asking them questions and putting it on them. All that is terrific. Snip that piece. Go back to it and rewatch that if you're having trouble with your people and performance. Good stuff there.
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That was a clip from our recent webinar I hosted with Roger Beaudoin of Restaurant Rockstars. You can find it on by searching for Restaurant Operator Hot Seat Webinar. Please do us a favor and like, subscribe, or review the podcast wherever you happen to listen or watch. That's a big help for us and we appreciate it. We'll see you next time.