Owning a Restaurant Doesn’t Necessarily Make You a Great Leader

Your prosperity is my goal. Prosperity is at the core of what I coach restaurant owners, like you, to achieve. Prosperity is freedom from your restaurant when you want it, confidence in your business, confidence in your restaurant’s numbers, the ability to have a life outside the restaurant and, finally, financial freedom.

In this episode of The Restaurant Prosperity Formula, I am going to focus on the importance of being a good leader and how your leadership will get you to prosperity. Listen in to learn why leadership is so important and what you can do when you’re not a natural leader. You will also learn how to identify what kind of leader you are and what behaviors you need to avoid. If you want to achieve prosperity, you must take on the responsibility of learning to lead and become the leader your restaurant needs. 

Leadership is a core part of the Restaurant Prosperity Formula, which is something I created based on what the most successful restaurant owners I’ve worked with do on a daily basis to achieve their success. The basic premise of the formula centers around achieving prosperity, freedom from your restaurant and the financial freedom you deserve. To achieve prosperity you have to follow a very specific formula made up of leadership, systems, training, accountability and taking action!

Leadership - A restaurant leader makes decisions based on the systems and numbers and leads their team with strong communication skills.

Systems - the implementation of systems for everything that needs to be done to run a successful restaurant, no matter how small or large, which allow a restaurant owner/manager to impose their will without being there.

Training - The ongoing information gathering, education, and instruction of the restaurants’ management and team members toward constant restaurant operational and financial improvement.

Accountability - The acknowledgment of responsibility for your obligations, decisions and actions and how you are answerable for the resulting consequences.

Taking Action - To take responsibility for one’s success by consciously performing acts that move you toward your goals of running a profitable restaurant and getting your life back

In the old days, before video became the norm, everything I did when it came to content creation was done over the phone, recorded, duplicated and mailed as a CD. This required a very specific piece of equipment. There came a time where technology changed, and video became king, so I found I no longer needed this specialized piece of equipment. So I put it up on Craigslist.

The buyer was a restaurant owner/GM of a chick fil a. When he came to my office we got started talking about what I did and he asked me a questions. “What do you think is a restaurant's greatest challenge to be successful?”

I had to think about it for a second. If he had asked me that question when I first started my business back in 2003, I would have told him that most restaurants fail before they ever open because they are undercapitalized, and they coupon themselves to death.

If he had asked me that question five years later, I would have talked about food costs, pour costs and labor cost being the killer.

But today, I answer that question completely differently based on years of working with independent restaurant owners… today I would answer, “Lack of LEADERSHIP!”

Why Leadership?

Through my years of experience, coaching calls, seminars, workshops, speeches, consulting, mastermind meetings, and more, I have worked with literally thousands of restaurant owners, and it’s become apparent.

I came to this conclusion early on as I learned the following lessons: 1) It’s less about implementing systems and more about changing your company culture, 2) Core values must be put on paper and used as the guiding principles to run your business, and 3) There is no such thing as common sense. You must be specific and clear with everything you want done.

All those lessons don’t matter if no one leads the team. Leadership is the glue that makes all of this work.

Tune into this episode to learn the leadership killers, such as a lack of confidence, what makes a great leader, how to figure out what kind of leader you are in your restaurant and how to grow your leadership skills so you’re becoming the leader your restaurant business needs.

A great leader is confident, knows what they are talking about, makes decisions while not worrying about if they are good or bad, has a real passion for what they are doing, thinks like a winner, has a clear vision of what success looks like and where they want to take the business, is able to communicate their wants, desires and vision, and no matter the obstacles in front of them… stays the course!

The goal of this podcast episode is to help you look at yourself with a critical eye. Then, after you assess where you fall, make the decision to improve. Your team and business are counting on you, and that’s what great leaders do.

If you want help on this journey of becoming the leader your restaurant needs, want to learn the systems that make this all possible, then I invite you to jump on a call with one of my member mentors, Ryan James. The 15 minutes you spend with Ryan is your gateway to getting on a discovery call with me, which could end up changing your life and that’s no exaggeration.

To learn more and talk with Ryan, please email him directly at Ryan @ davidscottpeters.com.