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I’m a huge sports fan and for a short while, I had the pleasure of being a prospect baseball coach for young men looking to advance both their athletic and academic futures. In sports, as in business, we hear a lot of conversation about character and being coachable, ‘’locker room guys” and leaders. Sometimes it just sounds like white noise and coach...

An interesting challenge any leader or owner faces is being able to paint for their team the art of what’s possible. Have you ever had those moments where you find yourself saying, "they just don’t get it" or "how do I get them to understand what I’m looking for?" So, how do we convince people that the excellence we envision can truly be achieved? That if...

What do you expect out of your people? Do they know? I ask myself those two questions a lot. The moment that we assume someone else knows what we want out of them in any given situation, we tend to set them up for failure. At the very least, we waste some hours we never had in the first place. Whenever I am told by one of my managers that someone on the...

As social creatures, a large part of our lives are affected, shaped, and defined by the relationships we hold.  These relationships don't magically sprout into being; they start, are nurtured, and evolve. During any professional relationship people might treat you in a way that upsets you. At these points in time, it is vital to take a breath and remember...

After my years running venues, I still look back and reflect “Wouldn’t it have been nice if everything went smoothly every day?” We know that we need to work hard to design an experience that is as amazing as we can for each guest who walks through our door.  However, most shifts, unexpected points of chaos came our way.  Even with the unexpected, there...

I have worked in a number of fields including restaurant management, acoustical engineering, physics, hospitality consulting, and inventory management that have required sharp mental acuity on some level. At one of the most challenging points in my career, while running 3 restaurants at once, I was burning out, working 70+ hours a week; mostly nights.  I...

In our industry, it is all too common to get to a plateau of development and then stagnate. It is truly difficult to run the floor, talk to customers, cook countless steaks, run food, and then - at the end of the day - not just want to go home to get some precious…..vital sleep. Back in my bar management days, when I started pushing my staff to expand...

Raise your hand if you enjoy confrontation. If you are like most people, your hand is still down (not just because you feel silly raising your hand when you are reading something on your computer). The problem with holding this feeling is that avoiding confrontation will generally hurt relationships much more than facing someone you need to talk with in a...

As human beings, we love our caffeine so much that it is the most heavily abused drug on the planet. Unfortunately, there are severe, undeniable side effects to being addicted. In case you are not sure whether or not you are addicted, if you feel you can not get through your day without it, you are a caffeine addict. For 20 years of my life, I was in a...

Your bar back tapped the wrong keg for the second time this week and you had to dump another 15 pints down the drain. For the third time this week you had a server leave without rolling their silver. When we come across a problem we want or need to fix, we have two initial courses of action. Slap on a band aid. Take the time to work out a solution that...