Welcome back to the podcast. Thanks for being with me. Today’s guest is David McClaskey, and he is a 50 year plus trainer and consultant in excellence. He is the head of the McClaskey Excellence Institute, and today, as you can imagine, we’re talking It’s all about leadership, how to attain excellence in your organization, strive for 100 percent and stay 100 percent on brand in your hospitality organization.

That takes developing your people, that takes a framework and a template. We’re going to talk all about what it takes and how to achieve it, so you’re not going to want to miss this episode. We have so much in common. I so enjoyed speaking to David, so stay tuned.

You’re tuned in to the Restaurant Rockstars Podcast. Powerful ideas to rock your restaurant. Here’s your host, Roger Beaudoin.

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welcome back to the Restaurant Rockstars podcast. So glad you’re here. David, welcome to the show. How are you today? I’m very well. Thank you, Roger. You and I have a lot in common and we’re going to dive deep into what that means. I’m really thrilled to have you as a guest. So thanks for being here.

We always start with the backstory of my guest and you’re a hospitality leadership training guru. You’ve got the Excellence Institute, which we’ll talk about, but how did you get into this game? What’s your story?

It, I’ve been consulting for 50 years, helping companies be extraordinary at whatever they do.

And I found a secret. One of it is there’s millions of consultants. So how do you differentiate yourself? And one of the things I found is if you go to companies that consistently beat their competition over and over again, they know something that nobody else knows. It’s not written.

And so I actually consult with these companies. I said, wow, this gives me an edge with the next consulting client, not the specifics, but the generalities. So I can actually build into my consulting and our training things of how companies actually do it. So I would be seeking out the very best companies that there are.

And And then I got involved with the country’s award. I got a call from, gives from the federal government saying, David, we understand you’re a great trainer. This is 1988. And we have a quality award that’s been approved by Congress. It’s given in the name of the president of the United States called the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award.

And we have a board of examiners coming in three months. We have absolutely no way to get them to know how to do this. Would you develop the training for us? So I thought, federal government quality criteria, does that sound like a match in heaven to you, Roger?

That’s an extraordinary story, because I did hear 50 years of training, but to be singled out by the government saying you are the source, you are, you put this thing together, that’s extraordinary.

How did you get on the radar? Like, how did they know that you’re, like, the trainer? One of

the people involved in the development of the criteria knew about my training, because I had been consulting within companies and knew of it and said, look, I know one of the best trainers around. They checked around and said, yeah, we think you’re right.

And so I got the criteria, best criteria I’d ever seen. So I developed the original Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. I then would then, and here’s where it gets the answer to your question. I then would consult with some of the best companies that ones that are gonna be role models. These are role models.

There’s only been 138 designated in 36 years. This is a very tough criteria. It’s. any company in the country is eligible, six million companies. Of that, only two restaurants have ever won. And I was the Baldrige consultant for both of those restaurants. And one of the things that consulting with role models is they’re the companies that consistently beat their competition.

So you start learning how they do it from a very much of an in depth view. You learn all their systems and you know about Their systems and how they all work to help them. And then I was able to use that in my consulting and training. So that’s how I got involved with restaurants and particularly with the two restaurants that won Powell Sudden Service and KN Management is that they said basically the first one said we would like to win the award, come and work with us.

And I said, I would like to learn your systems. And they said, great, you can share it with everybody, but our direct competitors, we’re not sharing the specifics, things that they have authorized

proprietary to their concepts. Sure.

That’s it. But the things that are the general things that people need aren’t proprietary.

And then the second company was looking around to how to be a great restaurant. And they had heard about Powell’s winning the Baldrige Award, and at that point I had established the McClaskey Excellence Institute. And they said, let’s go see if this works. They said, this is the kind of training we’ve been seeking out.

How do you learn to be a role model restaurant performer? And so that’s how we got to be delivering role model practices to companies, all the restaurants all over the world, and all service companies all over the world. So that’s how I got into this. And it’s a delight dealing with leaders who actually want to be extraordinary rather than the settling for ordinary, which is where most leaders are.

You got my attention. We’re now speaking about leaders and I want to get into PALS and KNN in a few minutes, but before we do that, you’ve also worked with some other illustrious brands that everyone’s heard of, the A& Ws of the world and Five Guys Burgers, right? And Buffalo Wild Wings comes to mind.

Like this is extraordinary stuff. So what you’ve got to teach is relevant and it’s important to our audience. And I want to learn more about that, but let’s go back to leadership. What does that word mean to you, David?

Leadership to me, and I’m going to be very specific in what I do, we’re talking about the role of every company is deliver its products and services 100 percent to its brand requirements.

Now, we don’t, mostly if, when I ask leaders, what, how do you define leaders or managers in their role? They give me this long list, like if I were to ask you, Roger, if you were running a restaurant, what, they give a long list, what we’re going to do, coaching, leading, development, scheduling and this is how they define the job.

And it’s so great that you, nobody can manage that kind of nonsense because it’s like everything, we want you to be everything to everybody and do everything right. But then we define it and this is what role model companies have done. They define it very specifically. The job of any company is to deliver their products and services 100 percent of their brand requirements, 100 percent of the time under 100 percent of the conditions.

Now there is a product development side. But if you just talk about the operations, and we only teach in the operations side, not the product development side, so you have an ongoing product. Your job is to produce it over and over again to the brand spec requirements. Every time, every customer, no excuses.

That’s my definition of leadership when you talk about operational leadership.

Beautiful. Something you said comes to mind because there’s always the human element. element involved here and we can all strive and work towards excellence and perfection perhaps, but we can never achieve perfection. So is there any gray area missing between say somebody works with you, we go through the training, We embrace it, we execute it as best as we possibly can, we impart that to our teams, but yet that human element is always going to be there.

Do we ever fall short? How do we maintain a certain level of consistency with this training once, once we’ve adopted it?

And Roger, you have hit the very first thing we talk about, and because it’s the real key, is that. We’ve all heard these expressions like, to error is human, therefore, we have humans, we should be making errors, right?

Or else what? We have robots. And that’s giving way too much credit to robots, by the way. And so what you really find is that a quote that comes from Vince Lombardi, and it goes something like this, perfection is unattainable. But if we strive for perfection, we will catch excellence. And that’s what most leaders have missed.

They have said, look, and it’s just simple logic that it’s like everybody’s fallen for, but not the ones that run great operations. They’ve fallen for this. We can’t be perfect. And that is a true statement, by the way you operate anything long enough. Some of your brand requirements aren’t going to be met in some of your products.

But if you say that’s my target is that we’re all, we’re just going to get it right. And this is what most companies say. We’re only going to get it right. Most of the time, we’re going to mostly get it right. Most of the time. What more can you expect? We got people, we got humans, and what you find out, that’s the best your company can ever do.

Why? Because that’s the leaders. Talk about the role of leadership. The leaders set the standard. And when your standard is most, that’s the best your company can ever do. And they can do worse but the reason they can’t do better is because you, the leader, have settled for most. Look, we made a mistake.

Of course we make mistakes every week and every day. It’s just expected. But you know what extraordinary companies do? They say, no, we’re going to get every customer’s order right every time. Period. No excuses, no asterisks, no, we’re short staffed, we have new people, we don’t have the managers here, we’re busy.

No. They actually paid full price. Don’t they expect to get what it is that they paid for?

That’s called value and service and great, excellent food. All the expectations should be met, like you’re saying, but yes, every order should be absolutely correct. And if it isn’t, if it falls short, you got to make it right.

You got to empower your people to make it right on the spot so that, the customer doesn’t have to call a manager if that’s what you call them and say, and then, Oh, I’m not, I can’t fix this for you. Let me call my manager. That is horrible service.

Oh, you’re right. And what about you didn’t have to do that very often?

Because it didn’t come out of the kitchen wrong. So the server doesn’t have to explain why it wasn’t right. And the order went into the kitchen 100 percent correct because the server did their job 100 percent right. So when we look at the answer to your question is, if you target perfection, if you target what we call 100%, you will get excellent performance.

You will not get what you target because it is truly impossible. You go long enough, you will make, something won’t be to your brand requirement. But if you target, We’re going to only do it most of the time. That’s, and John Maxwell the famous leadership trainer his 21 irrefutable laws of leadership.

The first law is the law of the lid. And the law of the lid means that your organization will never be better than your standards, but it’s not because of your organization. It’s because of your standards. And that’s the first thing we teach people that are in our classes, because you can’t Accede the leader’s standards.

And most leaders in most companies, and I’m almost sure about almost everybody listening to this podcast, their standard is most. We get it right most of the time and call it a day. What’s a bad day? We get it wrong more than usual. What’s a good day? We get it less wrong than we usually do.

But that’s not the standard of extraordinary leaders. Extraordinary leaders, we get it right every customer, every time. And every time we miss, we diagnose, find the root cause, correct it, but we never accept it. We deal with it, and we know it’s going to happen, but we never accept it as a standard.

Is there a template that restaurants can follow to set the bar high, set the expectations, and clearly communicate those expectations to everyone that work for us?

So that we are hitting 100 percent every time and that people are striving to not let the leader down and not let the guests down in the experience and take pride in what they’re doing so that they are delivering a hundred percent.

Yeah. And Roger very astutely have hit the next part. Once the leader has set our standard is 100%, which means we’re going to get every customer’s order 100 percent right, 100 percent of the time.

And right is a strange word because there’s no right food or right steak. Means it met your brand requirements. If you’re Domino’s, it meant your requirements for a Domino’s pizza. So we’re going to get this every time, and we’ve actually got processes that, first of all, need to be designed for that purpose, but we need to set, and here’s the answer, we need to set our employees up for 100 percent success.

I’ve dealt with over 15, 000 different leaders in the 50 years I’ve been consulting.

That’s amazing.

And almost nobody sets their leader their crew their team members up for 100 percent success. But you know what they do 100 percent of the time? They 100 percent of the time blame the person who delivered the wrong product.

But they were set up to deliver the wrong product by the leaders. And therefore the problem never gets solved because you’re not, your attention isn’t where the problem is. It’s where the problem isn’t, and it is very much with what you said. You set the team members up for 100 percent success, but you wouldn’t do that unless that was your standard in the first place as a leader.

Sure.

Most people have already conceded, we’re going to do it mostly right. So why should I design systems to get it right every time when that’s not even my standard as a leader?

You’ve been at this a very long time, David. Would you say that your techniques and your approach has evolved over the decades, or are there still tried and true techniques that go right back to your beginning that you’re still teaching today?

I would say that the basics Have not moved a bit. The techniques, like if you’re going to use, a long time ago, nobody used video training. Now, it could be very common.

Sure.

But the techniques of how you do it is changed, but what you do isn’t. What you do to set people up for success now is what you would do to set people 30, 40, 50 years ago.

You and I grew up at a similar time when service was expected in all varieties of service enterprises. Like you’d pull into a gas station, they’d check the air in your tires and they’d check your oil under the hood and they’d wash your windows for you while they were pumping your gas. That’s unheard of today.

You’d walk into a restaurant and there’d be a maitre d that would greet you at the door. They would pull the chair out for the lady, take her coat, hang it up. It’s this is all a lost art. But those basic tenets of what that really means and, what hospitality is to a guest should remain.

How do we bridge the gap between that extreme level of service before to exceeding guests expectations today through training, through elevating our expectations of our people and giving them the template for success?

Yes, and I think that we shouldn’t think of service as if you’re Motel 6, you’re inferior quality.

And I got to work with both times the Ritz Carlton won the Baldrige Award, learned from the legendary leader Horst

Schulze. Fantastic.

Oh Ritz Carlton is A wonderful hotel, and it is, and motel 6 is terrible. What you want to do is, if you’re a motel 6, you first have to set what your brand requirements are.

And so you don’t think about, you can run a world class hotel 6, but you could also run a cruddy hotel 6.

Huh, you’re absolutely right.

So I think the first thing you do is you set the standards for your business. This is our standard. This is what our products and services are. And then you set your employees up to deliver that standard every time.

And that’s what quality is. So if your standard was to greet the guest within 30 seconds when they come in your door, or something like that, then you need to have a process that’ll do that. If your standard is to you meet the guests outside and escort them in the, that’s, so whatever your standard is, you decide this is what we want to be.

This is because you can be a great restaurant regardless of the level of which you’re competing in. You can run any level poorly if you don’t design your products and services to meet your brand requirements every time. So the first step is define your brand requirements. This is what 100 percent is for us.

And then the second step is set up your employees to meet that standard every time.

You mentioned a key challenge and pain point in our industry a little while ago, and you said short staffing. Now that is a problem. And just about every restaurant I talk to or hear about, and it’s in the news every day is This industry is really struggling with the labor crisis post pandemic.

And a lot of people left this industry. They’ve moved on to, other jobs and other industries and things. What is the key to retention right now? To get your good people to stay and recruit, not hire, more great people so that you’re never short staffed and that you can deliver 200 percent every time.

Is there any keys to that?

Oh, there are two really big keys to it. And if you think about it, there’s one key at the front door and there’s one key at the back door. And a lot of times we don’t think about the back door because the number of employees you need is the number of employees you need plus the numbers that have left.

If your employees aren’t leaving, you’re not having to Hire that much because your needs aren’t so great. If you have a hundred percent turnover, which isn’t unusual for restaurants, you’re hiring a hundred percent of your staff every year and , that

costs a ton of money, David, as

oh, yeah. And just think you that also means that compared to somebody that has 50% turnover and a hundred percent the 50% turnover has employees that are twice as experienced as the restaurant that has a hundred percent turnover. And they’re paying the same labor cost. So if you think about on the front end it’s actually, if you’re an operation, which is what restaurants are, we’re not, so we’re, I’m not talking about the food design portion.

Most of the labor is spent actually delivering the product after you’ve designed it. We don’t want people creating the product on the fly. This is our brand product. When it’s in this menu, this is what they order. So you want people who will who actually want to follow instructions and want to work in an environment where things are set up for 100 percent success.

On the back door you need to train your employees and set them up for 100 percent success. One of the reasons employees leave is because they are set up to screw up. And actually, employees don’t like to screw up. They don’t like to I got that wrong. One of the questions I ask in our class, Is how many of you trained 100%?

And almost nobody does. So we already are, because we didn’t expect them to 100 percent right. We don’t train them to do it 100 percent right. But the customer expected their products 100 percent right. You can’t get 100 percent products with 80 percent training. That’s what most companies are doing.

So we teach people, how do you do 100 percent training?

So that avoids, that guards

the back door.

Okay. I love that. That’s wonderful because again, we can’t afford to lose people out the back door, but part of the reason we are is certain organizations and companies are setting the employees up for failure by not training, by not setting the expectations, by not having accountability for what those expectations are and holding them to those with consequences or recognition or rewards that reinforce positive behavior.

You’re absolutely

right. And one word I would ask, everybody trains. So if you say training, there’s not a, even if the job is, look, there’s the job, go figure it out. That’s our training program. It’s training to a hundred percent. That’s the key. Training isn’t a differentiator at all because everybody trains.

But if you train so you’ve got your employees set up so they can do their job 100 percent right, 100 percent of the time, then you’ve set them up so that they’re set up, they’re set up not to screw up. You want to train them until they can’t do the job wrong. And almost nobody’s training at that level.

I’m gonna throw two concepts at you and tell me if there’s overlap between the two or if one needs to go or if they’re both relevant. We’re gonna talk mission statement And company culture. Is there a place for both in an organization that’s reaching 100%?

Actually they’re essential because part of this the, if we talk about a company that says, okay, we’re going to get every customer’s order right.

And let me say that correctly. We’re going to say every customer’s order 100 percent to our brand requirements, 100 percent of the time. Yes. That’s a culture. That is a cultural thing. If you think about a culture is, this is our common behaviors that you get. This is what you should expect from us.

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And what you find, and this is, again, very astutely, Roger, you picked up one of the just really key elements of leadership. Is that one of the things that extraordinary businesses do, and this is why it’s so much fun to share these secrets with people who actually want to be extraordinary in their own business.

Absolutely.

They all have the mission statement but they, you, they actually apply the mission statement and almost nobody else does. What do I mean by applying the mission statement? In extraordinary operations, and I can tell you absolutely 100 percent for sure in the two Baldrige winning restaurants, but all companies that are extraordinary, people know the mission.

They have memorized it. They understand it. They can actually tell you what it means. It’s got to be really short for that to happen. And, but here’s the real key. They make decisions. Every employee makes dozens of decisions every day. Every decision they make is guided through that mission statement. And we teach people how do extraordinary companies do that?

We can show you how to do it. But all of them do that. And I can tell you, most companies Almost ignore the mission statement. You can’t even find the leaders. You say, what’s your company’s mission? Most of them don’t know. And the crew people who are actually making the food and the product and the service, they may have heard it once in orientation maybe, but they’re not using it to make decisions but you can’t get people to work together.

Unless you get everybody aligned to a common purpose. And that common purpose is your company’s mission.

Shorter is better and train to that mission. And then company culture is consistent performance applied by all. What about personalities and teamwork and team spirit and how people feel about working with their peers in an organization?

If everyone’s pulling in the same direction, that’s part of culture also, isn’t it? Even if it’s ill defined.

Yeah, oh, it’s a critical part of it. And because, working together versus everybody for themselves, but nobody serves their customers with one person. Unless you’re the owner and you’re the owner, you don’t have employees, but that’s not what it’s happening.

So if people aren’t working together towards a common, and the common goal is to delight customers in a way that they’re going to come back, that’s the common goal at a high level. And if we’re all not working towards it, we work against each other. And if you think about a mission, when I get to talk to lots of employees as we, and nobody likes, you I try to do my work right, but the person before me did their work wrong, so because their work was wrong, my work can’t be right, because it was already, it was already set up wrong.

And I hate being, giving inferior product that I didn’t even cause. I know, it’s so true. People love working in an environment where everybody around them is dedicated to doing the things right. So that means, They don’t have to worry about if you’re putting condiments on a sandwich. The condiments were all set up 100 percent right.

You don’t find lettuce that’s wilted and brown and stuff if because the person doing the condiments already weeded all that out. So you don’t have to worry about it. If it’s there, it’s 100 percent your brand’s requirements. So I can concentrate on my, doing my job. Why? Because the person before me concentrated on doing their job.

I’ve always said that this is the business of a thousand details, and they really are, and I know my audience has heard me say this over and over again, but the guest has certain expectations, we’ve talked about that, and if you have trained to excellence and to a hundred percent, you’re Then we’re going to get most, if not all of those details correct.

And again, there’s the human error of, element of error and all that sort of thing. But I always expected people to walk through the front door, see what the guest sees before they see it, and to fix it, empower people to fix what’s broken before the guest sees it. And I rarely see that. It’s restaurants today, they want their employees to walk through the back door, hang up your backpack and your coat.

They don’t want you to come in the front entrance that the guests are using, but you miss so much that way, and you, I’m sure you travel quite a bit. Are you seeing, if you could possibly give us an overview, and in terms of the times that you travel, do you get great experiences ever? Do you get average experiences?

And where are restaurants falling short?

Yeah. And what I look for particularly is the restaurant delivering the brand requirements? So if this was the way I was supposed to be greeted, is this, was the greeting like that? You can look at cleanliness. You don’t have to really know what the company’s standards are.

You can look and say, This store isn’t clean, or this restaurant isn’t clean.

Certainly. You

would think about if if they were supposed to go over the menu with you, or if it’s a quick service restaurant, if they were supposed to greet you in a certain way. If you go to that place more than once, you can tell, did I even get the same experience twice in a row?

Versus, so what I look for is people delivering the brand requirements over and over again, because that’s their job. And what I see is you can see variation all over the place. If people are not very consistent, and that’s one of the big reasons that customers are unsatisfied. Because when you don’t deliver your brand products 100 percent to your brand requirements, you don’t fulfill the customer promises.

And we call them our key customer requirements. Because when you fulfill the customer promises, People think delighting customers is hard. How about just meet what you promised them? You don’t have to put extra stuff in the bag, just meet what you bought. If they ordered this, they actually got that in the bag or they got that on the plate.

They didn’t get some variation of it. And that’s the end result. And I was talking to a manager and he was talking about his back of a house. In a full service restaurant And I love the way, what he said, I have cooks, they come in they they’re here to make money and leave and, they’re just here for the hourly rate.

And that’s, pay is a good thing, but he said, I always get this mediocre performance. They show up, they do their job, they leave, but the product isn’t 100 percent right. So what I needed to do was exactly what you’re talking about with the back of the house. So I needed them to take pride in what they’re producing.

And one of the ways I did that is I made sure that customer comments about the food always got back to the back of the house.

And if

I could ever hear, if I can ever let the customer say it firsthand, I’ll actually walk the customer back where the back of the house can hear it and say, look, this guy just said it was the best meatloaf he’d ever had in his life.

And and he said, that way I created pride in that. And then what I noticed, he said, my cooks, instead of producing stuff that’s almost right, If it’s not right, they will fix it right then before that plate is passed on to the next level. And that’s the kind of things I think exactly you’re talking about, Roger.

This is so important, David, because we talked about earlier times, right? Where things before technology took over. And now there’s so much technology in restaurants. But it’s, it almost becomes Some of it puts us at a disadvantage as restaurant owner, operators, leaders, whatever you want to call it.

And that is this powerful thing called the internet and online reviews. Back in the olden days, there would be someone you’d call the customer who doesn’t complain, but doesn’t return. You give them a bad up, a bad experience. They’re going to walk out. They don’t want to make a big deal of it.

But they’re never going to come back again. They might tell a handful of people, but now the world knows if a situation went sideways or bad and how we deal with those online reviews and how we build those relationships with the guests through our people is so critically important to sustained, continued success.

It’s like you have to perform at this level. Because people will find the slightest little infraction, and some people just love to throw that out there on the internet. And if you don’t respond to it correctly and acknowledge the customer’s problem and say, this is what we’re going to do to make it right and some restaurants are really good at that.

And some restaurants feel like, I don’t really know how to handle that. And they ignore that at their peril. It’s so important today.

Yeah, and I think if you go one step even better, how about we didn’t give them anything to complain about in the first place? That’s what we did. Cut it off at the pass right there.

Yeah. Absolutely. We delivered what Now, if we have made a mistake, we need to correct it right then and apologize for disrupting their dinner and their food. Remember in a drive thru, a person had called in and said, look, I just ordered five sandwiches for my family. I’m home. You left out one of my sandwiches.

And they felt devastated. They said, we screwed up this entire family’s dinner because we forgot to put a sandwich in a to go order.

Right.

And that’s the kind of idea of saying, look, we need to make sure that doesn’t ever happen because we want our people enjoying our food, whether they’re eating it in restaurant or out of restaurant.

And we need to care. And then we need to set up the environment. So that’s what happens.

You talked earlier about PALS Sudden Service, and I’m sure my audience is curious. And then there’s another company called K& N that you’ve worked with as well. And these are larger organizations with multiple units and all that sort of thing.

Are there common threads between there? They must be different concepts. Are they full serve, fast, casual, combination of both? And what’s the common thread? They both went through your training and now they’re performing at an extremely high level. They’ve been able to sustain that. Tell us about those concepts.

Oh, okay. We’re glad to. Now, the Malcolm Baldrige Award, there’s only been two restaurants to ever win it, and it’s those two restaurants. Powell’s Sudden Service and K& N Management. Powell’s Sudden Service is is a drive thru only. It’s a quick service restaurant. I like to describe it as a McDonald’s that doesn’t have a restaurant and has 150 items.

And and K& N Management is a counter service. They don’t even have drive thru. They’re 100 percent counter service. So they have, they both have different kinds of service in that regard but their characteristics of getting, and here’s the common characteristic, they deliver their products and services 100%.

Now this includes services, so how people are greeted, and it also includes customer experience, like how clean the restaurant is the uniform is exactly 100%, so all the appearances are 100 percent to their brand requirements, 100 percent of the time under 100 percent of the conditions. ________________ So you can, you know what that, whatever you order is going to taste like before you even have ordered it.

Because they’re going to nail it every time, of course with customer allowable variations. And so you can count, how many restaurants have you gone into where you go, if you’ve done multiple times, you go one time and it was great, and the next time it was just okay?

And

that’s because inconsistencies in how the brand requirement was actually delivered.

If you can count on somebody. So Powell’s customers say this, and this is the characteristic. Powell’s customers say this, they’re drive thru only you don’t have to look in the bag because you know it’s right. Powell’s is 10 times more accurate than McDonald’s.

That’s extraordinary.

That’s quite a claim.

Oh, and it’s true. It’s a thousand percent more accurate than McDonald’s, while they’re going four times faster. So speed is also important, critically important for a drive thru for a quick service restaurant. They go four times faster, they have one tenth the air, they are the benchmark in hospitality.

When third parties assess it with direct customer input, Pals always comes up to be the leader of that list. And the result of that is they have four times the repeat business of the national hamburger chains. 400 percent more repeat business. And here’s another just really clue, they do it, they have half the turnover of the industry.

Wow. I know everyone listening to this is saying, how do I achieve this? Oh my gosh, That is the holy grail of operating a restaurant, what you’re talking about. We’re talking about strong revenue, consistent sales, happy guests, happy teams, all delivering on brand to that hundred percent. And with the speed and accuracy besides that, it almost sounds like we’re, we’ve taken the human element out of it, but it’s all about the training.

Which is a perfect segue. Let’s talk about the McClaskey Excellence Institute and what you do. And give us an overview of the training and how long it takes and what the framework is there.

Oh thank you for asking. And you summarized it very well as to what it is that’s different. It starts with leaders having that standard.

Because your company can’t stand it. And so what we do is we first tell people, most leaders, so most leaders don’t want to even be extraordinary. They have long since settled for, and here’s the insidious mindset. I’m doing the best I can with what I got. What more can you expect from me? Yeah, we make mistakes.

And yeah, we could do a little better, but I’m no worse than my competitors. And then, and because they settled for that their improvement has been capped at that level. So the first thing we show them is look how much more you can get if your standard is, and so here’s a visionary statement.

We ask. What would your business be like if you were absolutely sure every customer, your products and services and customer experience kind of variables are 100 percent to your brand requirements, 100 percent of the time, under 100 percent conditions, and you’re so sure of it, you’d bet a thousand dollars of your own money.

The next customer sees everything. That means the restrooms are clean, the people are in the right uniform, 100 percent to the standard. And people start describing what you’re just, you’re saying. And so the first thing we have to do is to get leaders to change their standard. Because nobody in their business they set the standard.

And if they’re okay with most, you’ve just capped what your people are ever going to do. Now the other thing about pals, they’re hiring from the exact same workforce that all their competitors are, because people aren’t traveling to work in a quick service restaurant. They’re all local hires.

Of course.

And their pay policy is parity. So Powell’s employees aren’t being paid any more or any less than their competitors are. So they are taking the exact same workforce, putting it through a superior system and getting the kind of results that I just and the results of the company, they’ve had 38 years in a row of same store sales growth, and they have some of the profitability per square foot of any restaurant in the nation.

And they’re doing it with the same workforce. But they’re not doing it with the same thing. So the first thing we do is get people to set the standard of every and say, that’s got to be your standard. Like Vince Lombardi, you shouldn’t be saying it’s okay to screw up some of our customers, which is almost what every service business is set.

That’s, and your customers don’t really care. They say, look, we got your order wrong, we got the 49 orders before you, right? You think that’s making your customers feel better? Of course not. And and it also says you don’t respect them. But if you say, look, we, our standard is we get everybody’s customer order right.

Now, sometimes we’re going to miss, but we’re going to try to get everyone right. And that’s where it starts. The second thing is comes to the mission that you talked about. We’re going to get everybody aligned to the mission. And we’re going to do it through our key customer requirements. So we key in on what was really important to our customers.

And then we’re gonna, we’re gonna set everyone up, the third kind of part is we’re gonna set everyone up to deliver the product, services, and customer experience 100 percent of the brand requirements, 100 percent of the time, under every condition. And when I say every condition, most people say, yeah, we do pretty well except, and that’s what I mean by, oh, except when we’re understaffed, we have new people, we’re busy.

No, the customers didn’t pay for products to be wrong then. And you get the businesses, the kind of boost that you heard I was talking about, PALS data, when your customers will bet on you. They will bet their own money, 1, 000. The next time I go to your business, it will be 100 percent correct on what I’d ordered, which means 100 percent of your brand requirements.

And when they can count on you, they will pass by your competitors because they don’t want to play Las Vegas with their order now that’s what we teach, and we teach that we have a virtual class, our Achieving World Class Results class, it’s mcclaskeyexcellence. com is our website, and we we teach this in basically a virtual class the particular class we have has five four hour sessions one week apart, so you don’t even have to travel.

And then we apply parts of it. So you don’t just get it, here’s the whole thing. We start with, let’s get the attitudes then let’s get the focus right, then let’s get the processes right, let’s get the people right. And they actually start to apply it. So the one week apart, they, we learn something, they apply it.

First, the next session a week later, we debrief what they actually did. We learn some more, they apply it. And that’s how our Achieving World Class result class works. And a hundred percent of the people are able to take advantage and make their business better.

We’re definitely on the same page with all those ideas and techniques and concepts, David.

It’s been a pleasure speaking with you today.

Thank you. Thank you for asking me. And it has been a pleasure to have this conversation. And we are absolutely thrilled because I asked leaders why they want to be extraordinary. And one reason is they don’t look at the value. So first thing is it’s worth a lot.

The second thing is they don’t know how to do it. They don’t have, and we try to get to, first of all, show them the value, and then say, here’s a proven path that companies that do it use. So we take away the two biggest reasons that leaders don’t actually want to strive to be extraordinary in their business, and it’s such a pleasure to see leaders go to that state.

Totally agree with you. For those of you not watching the video today, the website is mcclaskyexcellence. com to learn more. David, my pleasure. Thanks so much for being a great guest on the show.

Roger, thank you.

And thanks so much to our audience for tuning in and thanks to our sponsors. This was the Restaurant Rockstars podcast.

Can’t wait to see you in the next episode. Stay tuned, stay well.

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