Restaurant Unstoppable with Eric Cacciatore

An Arkansas native coming from a family of incredibly rich and interesting food-related history, Scott McGehee trained at the California Culinary Academy and cut his teeth at Chez Panisse working under Alice Waters for many years. Today Scott is a rabid advocate of treating people and contemporaries in the industry with absolute kindness, dignity, and respect. He exercises this advocacy as Executive Chef/Partner at Yellow Rocket Concepts, a Little Rock restaurant partnership, which is known as Central Arkansas's culinary juggernaut. In this episode we discuss: Never giving up. If you want something you need to chase it. You need to be consistently positive. learn to communicate effectively. Utilize the path of least resistance to get things done. Lift struggling coworkers up, don't put them down for their mistakes. Paying your dues in the kitchen to learn and become better. Cooking is about more than food. Food is about human relationships, not just sustenance and taste. Be calm and kind. Baby steps are key to expansion. If you're not improving and growing every day, you're dying.If you don't know something just ask. You should be continually reinventing your restaurant.

In this episode we discuss: Customer service IS THE BOTTOM LINE! Learning how to gain skills with face-to-face interactions. Transformative relationships. Training your staff. How do people learn and how do we successfully implement tactics for learning. When a restaurant closes it affects a large community, not just the owners. Being supportive of your co-workers even beyond work-related issues. Must succeed in your personal life to succeed in your professional life. Don't go to work just for the paycheck. Your training tactics should be flexible to the kind of learning your staff is more apt to succeed at. All problems in a restaurant start at the top. Managers shouldn't just be putting out fires but preventing them. Bringing people up to your level will empower them and you. Make yourself better to make others better. Don't just accept mediocrity. Keep moving forward. Andrew Carlson is a restaurant consultant and coach with focused knowledge on personal growth, leadership, training, customers service and social media marketing and he writes on these topics at Andrew-Carlson.com . As of recently, he is also an author and just published his first book Customer Service is the Bottom Line.

In this episode we discuss: surrounding yourself with people who want to make a difference in the world, who aren't just out to benefit themselves. Hard work and believing in yourself pays off. Providing employees with metro cards to get to and from work. at the end of the day if you don't support your community your community won't support you. being a "people person" helps in this industry. Have someone to hold you accountable because you need someone to push you and guide you when you need it. You can't teach hospitality. Increasing staff productivity. Believing in the core values of the company you work for. There is a place out there for you but it will take an effort to find it. Don't tackle a problem right away; be patient and formulate a plan first. Service and hospitality are completely different things. You should want your co-workers to move on and do better things if they want it. If you screw something up just fix it! Don't expect people to come to your restaurant just because you open the doors. Patrick Patterson has always been drawn to people and their stories. After a stint documenting Texas Death Row for publications such as Playboy, Patterson's career took a different path, restaurants. Patterson, who as a kid, had standard rolls of washing dishes, cleaning spuds, bussing tables, and getting fired for eating croutons and dressing in the walk-in cooler! In 2008, Patterson landed on the steps of the Food Fight Restaurant Group in Madison, WI where he quickly rose from part-time bartender to first time GM & owner. In 2015, Patterson and his family relocated to the NH Seacoast. Today, Patterson is the GM of Block Six, the restaurant at 3S Artspace, a local arts non-profit in Portsmouth.

In this episode, we discuss the importance of human resources, the core of HR being genuinely caring, why there isn't a problem with finding good people but instead it is a problem with good people finding good employment, going beyond transactional relationships to transformative relationships, and living a life that is true and transparent. As a human resource professional with more than 15 years' experience, Carrie has dedicated her entire career to helping restaurant owners and operators navigate the complexities of HR policy. For more than a decade, Carrie served as the Director of Human Resources for Potbelly Sandwich Works where she was a key player in the ten-year expansion of Potbelly, which included growing the chain from three restaurants in one market to more than 200 restaurants in ten markets. With her success at Potbelly Sandwich Works, she founded Restaurant HR Group in 2010.