Services
Hospitality Leadership Training: Heading the Table
We believe that your team members are your most valuable assets, and they require investment to help them flourish. Creating a positive and collaborative culture requires providing the tools, support and training that your teams need to thrive, starting at the top. Through our work with your leadership teams, we will help you create a culture of accountability by defining and embodying your core values, establishing and upholding standards for behavior, and setting expectations for contribution.
Our training program “Heading the Table” provides leaders with foundational skills to manage their operations, their business, and their teams. This includes tools for improved communication to foster consistency and awareness throughout the organization, insight to create a comprehensive and robust ongoing training program to drive turnover down and morale up, and the development of reasonable boundaries for employee and guest behavior to provide the confidence and wisdom to navigate difficult situations.
Service Training
Great service starts with getting the basics right; meaning, making sure that the “technical” components of service such as product knowledge, accuracy, timing, presentation, cleanliness, and presence are delivered consistently and are of high quality.
But the “emotional” element of the experience is equally important; meaning, you want your guests to feel good! Now more than ever, people need comfort, safety, and familiarity... But how to provide that may look very different for every guest, every day. Some want less attention, some want more; some have many questions, other have none; families have different needs than a couple celebrating their anniversary or a business meeting. Service teams must be able to assess a guests’ emotional needs, and then adapt and customize their behavior and service delivery accordingly.
Our training program focuses on the technicalities of the service delivery, while also emphasizing emotional awareness and intelligence. We offer a well-rounded perspective of all factors that impact service, and provide tools to deliver a consistent and memorable experience.
Organizational Evaluation
Often when we exist in close proximity to something, it changes our perception; we become metaphorically “nose blind”, desensitized to the environment surrounding us. We stop asking “why do we do it this way?” and just accept that it’s always been done that way, or perhaps we assume that’s as good as it gets. We stop seeing the issues right in front of us, for reasons ranging from bandwidth to expertise, to proximity to or the direct impact of the disfunction, or simply because we may not realize it’s even an issue to begin with.
With our combined decades of experience across brands, regions, and industries, we offer a unique and insightful perspective focused not just on problem solving, but problem finding, by spotting and then rectifying the issues and their source.
We specialize in being a “fresh set of eyes”; our mandate is to ask, “why do you do it this way?” and then offer and help implement solutions to ensure that you are maximizing efficiency, labor, and revenue, while minimizing effort, costs, and turnover.
Pre-Opening/Opening Support & Consultation
Running an operation is hard, but comparatively, getting to that finish line of opening is a monumental task, even more so if the process is an unfamiliar one. There are infinite decisions to be made and questions to be asked, all of which are deeply impactful to every other aspect of the business: What equipment do we need and where? Do we have training material? Who and how do we recruit and hire? How do we market and brand ourselves? What should our staffing levels be? What products should we carry and how much should we charge? Who’s our competition and how do we compete? What’s our social media strategy? How many guests can we reasonably serve? What systems should we use? Do we have clearly documented P&P’s? And the list goes on…
Luckily, we’ve done this before! We can advise on all the questions you may have… and many you may not even have thought of yet. We offer well documented and vetted critical paths to help you define and manage all the phases of conceptualization, development, and implementation, with an emphasis on longevity and consistency, so that you are able to maintain high levels of success well beyond your opening date.
As one of our mentors used to say… One size fits one.
We know you are unique, and no two teams are alike!
All of our services can be customized to your needs, location, budget and timeframe.