Thanks for joining me back on the Restaurant Rockstars podcast. My guest this week is so interesting. Michel Falcon is a restaurateur and entrepreneur Now, what’s really unique is Michel has a very different approach to running restaurants and building a world class company culture.

He believes in equality and closing the income gap and creating careers, not just jobs, and paying 20 plus percent more than minimum wage across the board. You’re not going to want to miss this episode. There’s so many key learnings here. Speaking of key learnings, There are so many things that impact a successful restaurant.

 I call them systems. They’re foundational. They’re fundamental. We’re talking about controlling costs, but maximizing profit, building a company culture like Michel talks about. leadership, accountability, staff training, not just for hospitality, but for salesmanship and marketing that is trackable for new and repeat business.

All these systems are available in the Restaurant Academy. So check that out at restaurantrockstars.com. And now you can assign any lesson to help your team learn the business and help run your business. Again, at restaurantrockstars. com. Now, on with the episode.

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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hey everyone, welcome back. This is the Restaurant Rockstars podcast. So glad you’re with us. And Michel, welcome to the show. I’m glad you’re here too.

I’m thankful to be here. I’m excited.

Awesome. You have a very unique and different approach to both hospitality and running restaurants, and I think there’s lots of lessons to be learned for operators listening, and it’s going to be really fascinating talking to you about the differences, I call it paradigm shifts, that is an unusual, perhaps, way of thinking.

But it’s clearly working for you and your organization. But before we get there, tell us your story, your hospitality story. Take us back as far as you like. How’d you get interested in this business? What have you done and how did you get to where you are?

I’ll tell you that if you looked at my family history, I shouldn’t be attracted to restaurants because the first time I saw my father cry, was because he owned a restaurant in Vancouver, Canada.

I was in the 10th grade and he had to file for bankruptcy because his restaurant didn’t do well, but not because it didn’t, not because he wasn’t hospitable, not because he didn’t have a great product. He just signed documents he should have never signed. And that’s a different story.

Oh, I hate to hear stories like that. We’re so passionate about this business and people put their life savings and their life work into something, sacrifice so much to make a dream come true. And when it goes sideways, it’s, it can be devastating. And I’m sure it had an impact on you, but that may have influenced and inspired you to do what you’re doing,

I started my career in a very unconventional way, couldn’t be further from restaurant, the restaurant industry. I was living in Vancouver at the time, this is now 2007, and I left business school with the dismay of my South American parents and I emphasize the South American part because as immigrants to Canada it’s You know, get a degree, security and then off you go and build a career, work for a company for 30 years, and then that’s it, you retire.

I didn’t do well in academia, so I went out to go find an organization in Vancouver that I could learn from, get paid to contribute, and use those lessons to do something else entrepreneurial. And at the time, Vancouver had two very popular companies, one more so than the other. There was Lululemon, the apparel company, which is headquartered in Vancouver.

Familiar with that one, I’ve got two daughters and a wife.

There you are. And the other company, which was more, seemingly more popular, had just been voted the best workplace in all of Canada. And that was 1 800 GOT JUNK, so you’ll see blue trucks driving around your city throughout North America and in Australia, and today they’re about a half a billion dollar a year company.

And that was where I started. I said, wow, this could be a great lesson for me on company culture, customer experience strategies, and these things that I never knew that one day I would use in restaurants, which I am today. And I worked there for five years, real world MBA, getting paid to learn, and of course contribute.

I just, I thought it was such a racket wow, I’m getting paid to learn rather than learning to pay, which is what I left. And you can imagine, Roger, my traditional parents hearing me say I’m going to go work for a garbage company instead of Oh yeah,

I can only see it. Yeah, I get it. They,

I, my mom didn’t cry, but it looked like she was.

But I just said I got it. Oh.

So Yeah, they had to trust you. They had to trust your judgment and your instinct and your gut feel for this is going to lead me to something special, and you just have to believe in me, and I’m sure they did.

And great parenting lessons for me when I have children. Then I became a management consultant just working for myself worked with Verizon Wireless and Lexus and McDonald’s Canada and I was helping them redevelop and rethink their approach to people their teams, team building, recruitment performance management and which ultimately pencils out to a better customer experience.

And I’m the proponent that forget about improving your customer experience or customer service levels if you have not figured out the culture piece within your organization and really what motivates people to come and work with you. Then the restaurants came. This is now 2016. I get a phone call from my friend named Brandon who is living in Toronto and he was about to open a new restaurant in his portfolio Four floors, 16, 000 square feet.

Just a monster of a restaurant.

That’s huge. Yeah.

Yeah. And, on day one, we had always wanted to work together, but we never found the opportunity until then. And he said, will you come and consult for us to do these people management strategies you’ve always told me about? And I said, sure.

I looked at what he needed. I said, this is about three months worth of work headed over there. And then after three months they said, Hey, do you want to be a partner in our restaurant group? Yeah. And at the time I was going to be responsible for anything related to people is how I categorized it from recruitment to one on ones and that strategy to customer experience.

So anything people related. And then on the other side was on the brand side I took care of. We opened several venues we grew from zero to 200 employees, nearly 20 million in revenue in about a year and a half, two years. So that was challenging. But whenever I’m not challenged by something, I find my engagement to go down.

So I always need to be trying to solve hard problems. And we know that the restaurant industry, we are in the people business, perhaps more so than any other industry.

 Not just with employees, with customers, suppliers, vendors, anybody that makes us run has to have that same level of integrity of how we manage relationships with those individuals.

Now comes 2019. And I find my personal lifestyle changing. I don’t stay out late anymore. Going to bed at 9 30 is an absolute luxury, right? Whereas before then I was operating restaurants, nightclubs that would close at about 2 AM. And I started thinking about, okay what’s going to be next if I was to leave this partnership or at least pursue something else?

And, very serendipitous moment, I was walking in Toronto along Front and York Street, and if anybody’s from Toronto they’ll know that intersection, and right there, there is a Chipotle right next door to a Starbucks. Two companies I admire for different reasons, but both admire. And that’s where it hit me.

I was like, that is what I’m going to build,

 So in July 28, 2021 is when I opened my first pop up in Toronto. We were in a basement of a coffee roaster and they actually coincidentally roasted Peruvian coffee.

And they were a supplier to major restaurants in Toronto, and that’s where we got our start. And during the pandemic, Toronto, you may not be familiar, but outside of China, Toronto was the most locked down city in the world during the pandemic. I believe it was four lockdowns. And you could imagine how crippling that is to restaurants.

Open, fill your supply chain, close, it was terrible. But I saw the opportunity, I saw a straight ahead. And I said, landlords are looking for people to sign leases right now. So I went and diligently signed three leases, corporate locations, and we opened three locations in about a year and a half.

And we have three in Toronto corporately owned restaurants. And then on Monday, this coming Monday,

 So fantastic for you.

Where we started, and it is a major metropolitan North American city and it allowed us to make a few mistakes operationally, find our footing, and thankfully they weren’t fatal mistakes. Going into New York, I shared with our team, we have confidence.

But let’s measure that confidence appropriately. We have to earn it all over again. Nobody knows who we are. We don’t have that cachet that we have in Toronto. And, perhaps Howard Schultz said this one quote only the paranoid survive. And those are strong words, aren’t they? But for me I’m going to remember the lessons that Toronto taught us.

And Remember that the human behavior of the customer experience is people want value, and in New York, they want the value quickly, very quickly. It’s just a representation of the city and how quick it moves. If we can provide an element of hospitality to fast casual restaurants that I learned in my full service days, I think we’ll do well.

But it’s New York. There could be something right around the corner looking to bludgeon me over the head, figuratively speaking.

Let me ask you this comes to mind for any of our audience that are looking to open a new location. And you might have an established business in one place, and then even if you’re in a completely different city, it’s like, how do you build that initial awareness to, you do?

Get the whole momentum rolling. And in a city like New York that is uber competitive, like every cuisine under the sun, 10, 000 restaurants in every street corner is an exaggeration. But you know what I’m saying. How are you going to market this and get people to try it and get them in the door so that you can get that momentum building?

There’s got to be a strategy already formulated.

Yeah, there is. There’s three pillars. And we learned this because of Toronto. It worked really well for us. Number one influencers on social media. What is your food cost? Let’s just say, let’s just use easy numbers. Let’s say that your food cost is 5 and you allocate a 5,000 budget for food cost to be able to get your food in the hands of influencers.

Compare that to a PR firm. Which might be 5, 000 a month, which is a

retainer that is a longer term contract. And that just, we’ll try this for a month. And if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work that way. You’re right.

And. There is a place for PR, absolutely, but it’s not for everybody and there’s a certain time where it is appropriate.

It also depends, are you marketing full service or fast casual, right? I have found that full, that PR firms work better for full service, more so than fast casual. I have found with my own evidence, just speaking for myself, that the influencers absolutely move the needle. Now, so be it, just like anything, you have to have a phenomenal product where these individuals who work hard to build their followings of trust have to have, they’re only going to post a phenomenal product.

So that was one, that’s one pillar that we’ve leaned in on. And just yesterday, actually we were doing dry run training with our team and I leading up months later, we were That’s leading up to to the, yesterday and this coming week, I identified who are all the big influencers in New York and what I did, and I recommend to everybody that’s opening in a new city, find your angel.

What I mean by that. is find a single influencer who has a large following and great engagement, but also you believe they align with my brand in terms of what they post. So you’re checking their feed for what type of cuisine they’re posting. That is going to be your angel or your gateway to all the other influencers.

So my angel is The Carboholic. Her name is Rachel. And my wife and I are like, she is God sent to us. So she helped us understand. We, we compensated for her time. Just help us understand New York. This is our company. What do you think we have to be aware of? How do you like the positioning? Can you audit our social?

And she did a complete audit. And now, she’s not necessarily a partner in the business in regards to equity or a cap table, but we’ve partnered with her to bring this to New York. And because she enjoys the brand, she’s put her stamp of approval on it. Our hope is that her network of influencers are going to see if they’re down with Rachel, if Rachel’s down with them, we’re down with them too.

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Yeah, that’s foundational, of course. They’ve gotta vet you, believe in you enjoy it themselves, and think it’s unique and special enough so that it’s a representative of their personal brand.

They have to align with it, right? They have to have brand association and align with it. And another thing this should not go unsaid, pardon me, is that with food creators and social media influencers, This is their livelihood in many cases as well.

So you have to respect their business as much as you’re wanting them to respect your business also. That’s been a huge unlock for us. The second catering. Build your catering list before you open. One thing that worked for us is we went on upwork. com, we hired some virtual assistants and said build us the catering list for law firms and agencies and this and that and get all this contact information.

So we have that armed and then finally partnerships. It’s hard to partner with any organizations before you’ve opened, unless you have, tremendous brand awareness in the city that you started in, but that’s something that you could lead to, that third pillar. So I’m thinking, I have some companies that like ice cream shops in New York that I would love to get some Peruvian superfoods and do a collaboration ice cream.

Do I sell ice cream? No. No, but I sell superfood smoothies. So thinking that, and that can be like an aspirational list. Imagine us partnering with X company and it might not happen right away, but maybe three years down the road, like work for that. So that, that’s the playbook. And we’re about to deploy it on Monday, but yesterday we had some of the influencers come and they gave us some confidence for Monday.

I’ll just say that. We’re feeling good, but again, you gotta earn it.

Let’s bring that concept to life for the audience that are thinking, okay, the food sounds really intriguing and amazing. What’s the ambiance of the typical location? Walk us through, I’m walking through the front door and I’m bombarded with the sights, the sounds and the smells.

Something that really captivates the audience and the target consumer and not only captivates them the first time, but wants to bring them back. Can you describe the feel of the place? Thanks.

The brand is bright, right? Peruvian culture is bright, colorful, beautiful. So you’re going to see some great color in the restaurant when you step in.

Similar to perhaps our Instagram, similar to our food. Peruvian cuisine and the special ingredients that come with it, you’ve got like a Take a look at our if you’re behind our sneeze guard and you look at our topping section, you’re seeing golden beets that have been peeled and roasted that day, just piercing yellow color.

You’re seeing this red sweetie drop peppers that are grown in the Amazon that are high in vitamin A and vitamin C that come from Peru, just a lot of color. We invested in good lighting, Lighting isn’t cheap, but it enhances the customer experience.

When it comes to the customer experience, I think it has to touch on all your senses, your sense of sight. What am I seeing? I’m seeing colorful food. I’m seeing smiling employees and team members, the sense of smell, like you’re, we’re word food. Of course it’s gonna smell beautiful that what do you hear?

What kind of music are you hearing? How are the team members engaging with you? So it really should be, when we built the brand and designed the restaurants, we wanted to touch on as many senses as possible. And of course we, I told our contractor, I said, Going back to Lululemon, actually, I said I want, pardon me, I told our brand designer, who actually happened to be my cousin, he was in Portland, he’s Peruvian, and before I saw a logo or any color codes or typefaces, I said, one day I would like to open a location.

Next to a lululemon, and everybody would say they fit in, because the way our menu has been constructed, it is for individuals that are very active and well traveled people. So active as in, you’ve got, you want great protein, you want some clean ingredients, you want vegetables that have been roasted that day and peeled and then well traveled.

So you’re used to trying. New flavors. That doesn’t scare you. That excites you. Just like New York. People in New York are very open to trying new cuisines. Absolutely. And I can tell you, we have a location in Toronto across the street from a LuLu Lemon. It happened. And I didn’t do that consciously. I didn’t say, oh, there’s a LuLu Lemon, sign this leaf.

It just worked that way.

That’s terrific. Yeah, that’s great.

And we actually, that same location is right next door to a Chipotle, which I greatly admire for their operations. And I love their food. Lastly we have a sneeze guard and during learning development on day one I compare us to a jewelry store and I say, why is it that jewelry stores can have such clean glass?

But why is it that some restaurants don’t adhere to that level of integrity, of cleanliness? And we say our restaurants have to be clinically clean.

I love that term. It’s attention to detail, and the most important detail, what the customer sees and experiences, and forms an immediate impression of this place is clinically clean, or I’m not going back there, that’s a little sketch, absolutely, that’s a great point. You

wouldn’t feel comfortable You wouldn’t feel comfortable in your doctor’s office if it was not well kept. Food is the same. We could get people very ill. It’s a, it could be very dangerous for our customers if we are not, if we don’t have this high level of integrity, of cleanliness, and that is a huge element of the guest experience.

It can be ignored of how great your cuisine flavor profile is if the aesthetic or if the cleanliness of the restaurant is not upheld, and it just requires a little bit of effort to maintain that. I see

that as also a marketing strategy and a hook. I’m big on hooks and on what sets a place apart from the competition.

And clearly we’ve already talked about the food and the ambiance, and those are hooks unto themselves. But that whole clean, meticulous attention to detail because your experience is important to us. That’s great. I’m

going to borrow some, I’m going to borrow something from a customer experience expert.

He’s not a restaurateur, but his name is John DeJulius. And many years ago, when I worked at 1 800 GOT JUNK, he was the keynote speaker at one of our conferences one year. And he was talking about making price secondary. How do you make price secondary in the eyes of the customer? If you want to sell a premium product, by all means, But you’re gonna have to make price secondary.

Now, how do you do that? You can’t having flavorful food is table stakes. What else are you gonna bring to the table? No pun intended, but if for us, it’s threefold. Our meals are gonna be flavorful, consistently flavorful. Number two, we’re gonna have an element of hospitality that you’ve never seen before in fast casual restaurants.

One of warmth and kindness. Gratitude also. And number three, our restaurants are going to be cleaner than any place you’ve ever been. And I take a lot of pride in that. Anybody that comes to Browse for Peruvian Kitchen, If you see a smudge on the glass, I want you to take a picture and I want you to DM it to me.

I I’m obsessed with the cleanliness part, but Peruvian people, if you go to Peru, there’s two things that you’re going to come back and notice. The food is phenomenal, and why is everybody here so friendly? There’s just a warmth to the culture that I’m so happy I have in my DNA that my parents and my grandparents, it gets bestowed on me.

But, Not everybody we hire is Peruvian, but if we’re going to have a brand that represents the country, you can’t get a job with us if you’re not a warm founded person. So we have many guardrails in place to make sure that the people that are serving you, Roger are gracious. Thank you for choosing us.

These are some of the words that we train our team members on. Thank you for choosing us. Good to see you again. Welcome back. Because without our customers, and I’m not going to name names, but I’ve moved to New York to open this restaurant, been here for six weeks. I don’t get the rudeness. And, oh, they’re just New Yorkers.

I That’s not a pass for me. That’s not a pass. I’ve come here with my good money, just Kill them

with kindness. Even if New Yorkers have this reputation, not all of course, but sure, it’s an abrupt culture, and suddenly you shift the tables and people walk in and you kill them with kindness. It’s such a breath of fresh air.

It’s a fresh approach.

One thing I’ve noticed, the thing that I pick up on, if we’re just to talk about, let’s say restaurants and coffee shops for us if I’m delivered customer service, that is rude. Let’s say my, where my head goes is I wonder if their manager treats them this way, which is why they have no inspiration to do it for the customer.

Cause why should that, why should somebody. care about the end customer when their manager knows nothing about them, doesn’t treat them hospitably. There’s an argument there. But then if you look at Danny Myers coffee shops, like daily provisions, they got it going on, phenomenally clean cafes, friendly people.

So that element of hospitality in New York it’s out there, right? But you have to have an environment worth coming to. as a team member because if not, then why should anybody care about your customer?

This is a perfect segue into your people first approach, and as long as we’re talking about culture, that cuts to the heart of what culture really is.

Can you explain people first to our audience?

Yeah, in 2018, I wrote a book called People First Culture, build a lasting business by shifting your focus from profits to people. Now on the surface, you might believe that I don’t believe in operating a for profit business. I do. I just see profit as a reward.

It’s an outcome or an output of how you build a team hospitably, so internal hospitality. Whenever we think of hospitality, we think the end customer but, shame on us if we ask our team members to improve the customer service if we don’t first give them an experience that they’ve never seen before.

And, look, we have all the case studies to show that it works in all industries. But what I find and what the book was about and what I still continue to post on LinkedIn and social media is the strategies aren’t cemented or common practice yet. Now let me compare that to something else buying digital social media ads.

You can go online and find courses and experts and consultants and agencies, shake a tree and. Three digital marketers are going to follow. But where do you go to learn these people practices and customer experience management strategies? There’s not a lot. So I think there’s an awareness piece.

So that’s why I wrote the book to say, Hey, these are the things that I’ve learned going back to my consulting days. Now I was 25, working with Verizon Wireless, and I thought this was like, I was like, how did I even get in this room? But I’ve seen this from different industries, telecom, automotive, and the commonality is this, it’s the study of human behavior.

That is it. When I An employee comes to work. No, it’s a human being that comes, right? And this human being has certain aspirations of their own. Maybe they want to be your next general manager, or maybe they’re just here to earn a little bit of money because they’re in school. Whatever the case might be, they want to be treated with respect.

They want to respect the leader that they’re with and working for. And the output of that is this engagement. That almost can’t be measured, and that customer feels the engagement, but not only that’s when your products are made consistently every day. You don’t, you have team members properly portioning things, not over portioning where your food costs are out of whack.

That’s where your restaurants are clean every single day, because this individual looks at their leader or their company and reveres them and thinks, I’m going to serve them too. And that is the study also of servant leadership. How am I as the leader and Roger as my team member, how am I going to serve Roger whether Roger wants to be with us for 10 years or just for 10 months because he’s in school.

And I’ll give you two real world case studies. And on our website if you go to brassapproving. com, scroll to the bottom, click careers, and scroll halfway down the page, you’re going to see two sections there. And there’s the graduated section. This is where we share the stories of people that joined BRASA and then left for other things.

So you’re going to meet Vanessa. There’s a picture of Vanessa. And when did she join us? And what is she doing now? There’s a picture of Diana. When did she join us? What is the, what are they doing now? And then there’s the section called the elevated section. And this is my meaning in the work.

Meet the people that have come and grown within the company. You’re going to meet Natalie, who two years ago, she was working part time as a team member in the restaurant, earning 19 an hour. Today, she’s overseeing New York, making 95, 000 a year USD. And what do I get out of that? Clean restaurants, consistently cooked meals, served with hospitality.

That’s the trade off, right? And it’s not dissimilar, Roger, to the relationship I have with my wife or my best friends. Or my parents, we serve each other and for some reason we have erected this barrier between how we behave in our personal lives as humans and how we behave in our professional lives.

Something Howard Beha he wrote the foreword of my book, he was the president of Starbucks when it was really growing. And one thing he told me, and I reference it in the book is that when I come home, I don’t have my husband hat on. And then when I go to work, I put on my president hat. That’s the same hat.

And that was paradigm shifting for me. You referenced that earlier. I love that word.

I love that, that the theme of paradigm shifts is disruptive in a good way.

Absolutely. And where do I go to get my lessons? Very few times do I actually look at other restaurants. Not to say I don’t admire and revere them.

Of course I do. I absolutely love what Danny Meyers and many other restaurateurs are doing. But I look outside of the industry for inspiration and one of the companies that and going back to paradigm shifting is Netflix. I read a book during the pandemic when I was patiently waiting to open Brasa Peruvian Kitchen.

And Roger, one thing that if you asked my wife, she’d say he’s the least So you can imagine a restaurateur or entrepreneur wanting to open this business and the world saying you can’t do anything. But it allowed me to pause and I read this book called No Rules. It is a description of how Netflix operates as a company and their company culture.

And it’s written by Reed Hastings and Aaron Meyer. Aaron Meyer is a business school professor and it’s escaping me what institution she’s at, but Reed Hastings is a former CEO. And there’s something that I read in the book and I read it and I said, what did I just read? I got to read that again. I think I read the chapter three times in a row consistently because I wanted it to resonate.

But the idea of talent density was something that I thought, would this work in restaurants? The idea of talent density is how they compensate at Netflix their engineers and anybody that works there. And essentially it’s this, we’re going to pay you more than anybody else in the industry, but we need you to be equal to one and a half people or this whole business model doesn’t work.

And Netflix is there, right? So I thought, I wonder if this would work in restaurants, an industry that is notorious for paying little. Rely on tips for close to minimum wage. So I mapped it out on like a piece of paper and okay, how much revenue would I need? What could my labor percentages be if I paid this or this?

And he modeled it out and I was like it papers out, shared it with some restaurateur friends. They’re like, there’s no way that’s going to work. I said, I’m going to do it and see what happens. I can tell you that our labor percentages are 8 percent lower than industry average, and I pay 21 percent higher than the industry beginning.

So it pays to pay more. So be it that you manage performance, not weekly, daily. And that was the huge unlock for me. We are healthily profitable and we pay the most. Can I tell you something that I’m doing in New York? There’s a, on our sneeze guard, first thing that the guest sees on the sneeze guard is a deckle that’s four by four inches.

And it says, we are no tipping environment. It is our responsibility to pay a living wage. The team serving you today earn 20 to 21 percent higher. Stay comparable restaurant and our customers care.

Oh, of course they do. There’s a, there’s another hook and another marketing story that leads to buzz, that leads to people supporting your business because you’re supporting your people to that extent.

And people know that this industry traditionally does not pay well or living wages, and that’s a constant controversy. And now you’re. Channeling that energy to improve and up level the industry, but you’re educating the end consumer that this is one more thing that makes your concept special. I think that’s wonderful.

our mission statement as a company, so I’ve rephrased our mission statement to why we work. Why do we exist? And a word for word, Roger, I’m not looking anything to remind myself of it, but here it goes. To build a company that the world needs more of, one where everyday people are empowered to make

To make great money.

Yeah.

Achieve career growth and help close the income equality gap. I’m not going to solve that on my own, Roger, but I’m not going to, I’m not going to pay minimum wage or any work close to that. Now, why does this matter to me?

This is personal. I saw my dad had to file for bankruptcy. My parents are, and Roger, I hope you meet my parents, I hope everybody listening gets to meet my parents, they are angels on earth, the salt of the earth, okay? Polar opposite people too, which is bizarre to me, but the commonality is they’re the kindest people.

And Did we ever have financial freedom as a family? Not really. Not a paycheck to paycheck family, but that shouldn’t define them. Shouldn’t define anybody. But I saw these hard working people who were kind to every person that they met. Get the short end of the stick financially. I don’t want to be the reason why somebody can’t pay their bills.

I don’t want to be the reason that somebody, can’t take themselves out on a date with their wife or something. And something else Netflix taught me, adequate performance earns a generous severance. I read that and was like, what the? So it’s in other words, hey, if you’re not going to achieve your goals, We’re gonna have to replace you, but we don’t want to be the reason why you can’t pay rent, and we’ve done that at Brasa too.

There’s been times where our HR person said, hey, at least in Canada where severance is more prominent than in some states in America, we’re gonna have to pay them X. Give them four times that. We made the mistake, perhaps, of hiring them. Maybe they shouldn’t have been hired. Maybe we made the mistake of, properly training them.

But if we have to terminate the relationship, I don’t want them to stress out about having a job because I’ve seen that. It’s, that, I never wanted, I wish it never happened when I saw my father have to go through that financial aid. But I can take that experience. And positively impact the people that we employ.

This is authentic, genuine leadership we’re talking about. And it begs a question, because one, ok, the word is out on the street, and people talk, and now that people know that you pay those kind of wages in this business, You’re going to attract all kinds of people that want to make that money, but they may not necessarily have what you would be looking for to bring to the table to be one and a half people and to excel in a job and to care about quality and the guest service experience.

So tell us about your, say, recruitment process and how you Find the best people, and in one way, you’ve got you’ve got a great problem to have, perhaps, because everyone is struggling with finding great people, and everyone complains across this country about not having enough people and hiring the warm bodies versus the great people, because we need the people for the show to go on, So let’s just say you’ve got a pool of talent or potential talent.

Now you’ve got to figure out who’s the best talent, right? And then you must have expectations. You must set those expectations and then monitor performances. You said daily, and this is a process. It’s a system unto itself that’s leading to that amazing guest service. That’s leading to company culture and morale and all those things.

How do you do it?

Yeah, certainly. And it’s not going to sound believable but it’s working. And it has worked for me because I had a blank canvas. Remember, I started a new brand and I started this from the beginning, but there’s ways anybody can do this. I’m not special, right? That’s not just unique to me.

Takes two hours to apply to work with us, minimum two hours to apply to work with us. Our career description I formally, or more, a more common name is a job description. But if you Google the word job, it’s something like compensation for ordinary work. I read that. I said ordinary work.

That’s terrible.

I don’t want ordinary. That’s demeaning actually.

Yeah, I want extraordinary. So I ban job description to career description because this should be a career. There you go. This can be a career. Yes. And it’s five pages long.

Oh, I like that so much. And it

has 30 minutes of videos that you must watch.

And then at the bottom it has a link to apply. And then in that link, 17 questions. And the first question is, did you watch the four videos? You can imagine the people that select no aren’t getting an interview.

Of

course. We’re looking for grammar, punctuation, enthusiasm in their responses. If they’re, what, we asked this question, Roger, in the application, what’s the temperature of the sun?

And you look 99. 7 percent of people don’t know what that is. But it’s a Google search away, right? So if somebody says it’s very hot, how are you going to behave when somebody, when a customer inevitably asks you a question, you don’t know the answer.

Path of least resistance, right?

Thank you. So we’re interviewing you during the application process and you don’t even know it.

This is awesome sentence

structure and all this stuff because that’s how you’re representing yourself right now. Like when you don’t think you’re being monitored and perhaps monitor’s not the right word, but when you’re, we’re evaluating you but the enthusiasm I like robust answers. You can see someone’s character too cause it’s a theater.

What we do in restaurants, it’s theater, it’s entertainment. So if that doesn’t come across in the application, then it’s very unlikely. We, for New York, just to give you some numbers over about two and a half weeks, we had 1500 people apply. And get them. Why? Because we pay the most. I get it. And that’s fine.

And here’s a little trick for everybody. If you do pay at market or above market, make sure that number is in the subject line of the job posting. Don’t bury it at the bottom. More often than not, you bury it at the bottom when it’s not a great number, right? For us, it’s we’re proud of this. So we had 1, 500 people apply and only 1 percent of people got interviews.

That’s how strict our HR protocols are. And if you get the interview, it’s a group virtual interview and you show up on time, it’s almost a formality. We already know we’re about to hire you because you went through this gauntlet of like career description, videos, Application sentence structure this, and that, right?

So it’s front loading the work. Somebody might say, Michel, nobody’s going to read a six page job description. I had many people. I can disprove that. The right people will. Not everybody, the right people will, and you are literally looking for that 1%. And if you have an environment where people want to come, they will find you.

You just have to position that, and we’re so used to marketing, marketing our products, our salads, our bowls, our steaks, whatever. But what about marketing our company culture?

 part of your culture is about encouraging people’s career growth, whether they stay with your company or not, which is remarkable, and I know I learned something that you actually have coaches that work with team members to either grow within your company or even to go on a business.

And you went further to say, if you look at our website under careers, you’re going to see certain people that started with us, that made an impact on our organization, and then went on to do other great things.

That is

a hugely, huge paradigm shift from the traditional restaurant that finds a great person and just clings to them like glue.

I

want Brasa Peruvian Kitchen to be viewed as a Like a university, right? Your Alma mater, Letterman jacket.

Yeah.

I want people to see that we had a positive impact in their careers and their lives. Like Vanessa, somebody that’s on the careers page who graduated she left to go work at a consulting firm and she’s running the office there and she’s perfect for that.

And when she told me, I was like, go, this is perfect for you. Like you’re going to get paid 20 percent more. You’re in an office. This is perfect for you, go. And guess what? That office orders catering from us a few thousand dollars a year. I, we benefit too. Imagine if I fractured that relationship and look, I don’t do everything because of monetary outcomes, but if you’re a good human, yeah, if you’re a good human with a good product and a good brand, people are still going to want to come with you and.

One of the things that I did in March 2023 was something I had been sitting on since 2009 that I wanted to do, but I was never in the position to do it until last year. And I call it people first pay transparency. And I put together a document with every single person’s name on our payroll in one column.

In the next column, when did they join us? And when they joined us, what position were they in, what position are they in now, and what do they earn to the penny, including my salary, including VMO or Director of Operations, and most importantly, the last column, their career journey is what we call it. Fisher Roger is on there.

He’s now a senior team lead, but Roger started off as a team member earning 20 an hour. And now he’s earning 25 an hour. And in the last column, we’re documenting every great thing Roger has done to justify that growth and make it what he did to make that happen. And we’ve publicized that to our entire company.

Our income secures our livelihood. It’s very important. The world is getting more expensive. And when I said I was going to do that, my entrepreneur friends said, we might do that if you don’t implode. Go. I just don’t think the compensation conversation should be taboo. I remember told earlier in my career, don’t talk about compensation.

If you do, we’re going to punish you. You’re not punishing us. You’re fracturing the trust that we actually have with you around the topic that really matters to us. Stop shying away from it. There has to be this moment in time where, not just salary events, give me the exact dollar, but then tell me why.

So when somebody, when Roger’s peer. Where somebody part of his team looks at, Whoa, Roger earns 25 and out? Wonder why? Read the last column. You want that? Go do what Roger did. As a matter of fact, go ask Roger to coach you. That’s called peer cross learning. And it should be undeniable. And in a culture of meritocracy, we don’t care how Roger identifies, what’s his tenure, ethnicity, the people that perform are going to get the top jobs.

And I was speaking, because I do some keynote speaking, I was speaking at a J. P. Morgan event. They invited me to speak about company culture and customer experience. And somebody during Q& A raised their hand and they said, what’s your DEI strategy? And I remember looking at the floor and thinking, okay, what does my HR person want me to say?

And I said, I’m going to speak my truth. I raised my head and I said, I don’t have one because I don’t need one. I grew up to Rosen, Raul, Falk, and immigrants to to North America. Saw them get the short end of the stick. I’m not going to do that to anybody. So my DI strategy is I don’t care about anything other than performance.

And it just so happens, our senior leaders are female. I didn’t plan that. They earned it, right? Look, when you grow up with a name like my name, Michel Peruvian, in Vancouver where there’s no Peruvians, you get picked on, you’re the minority, right? So I don’t, it’s bizarre to me how companies are like, oh, we gotta hire this person next That is just performative.

It’s not authentic. But I don’t recommend the paid transparency for everybody. It’s advanced. It’s a lot. You got to build your foundation first. I’ve been at this since 2007. So with anybody that’s looking to improve their company culture and create just great workplaces, start somewhere with what makes sense for you.

And there’s no one size fits all by all means, but I’m only a, an email or DM away on Instagram or LinkedIn. If I can, Help guide anybody. I love this stuff. This brings a lot of meaning to work. Roger, I love getting my weekly P& Ls and seeing profit. I really do. But like I said earlier, it is an outcome.

It’s a reward. Profit is a reward of having a people first culture. What makes me more content and increase my engagement is when I hear Vanita, somebody that started off as a part time team member, Who I’m sitting on, giving a promotion to, sitting on, not because they still have to earn it, but because I’m waiting to get back from to Toronto, from New York.

I just love seeing people grow. That increases my engagement, personally. People putting more money in their bank accounts taking that vacation that they always aspired to take, and now they can, because they make more, and learning. Leadership, communication, all this stuff, like that brings a lot of joy, a lot of engagement for me.

I do have a producer responsibility, but there’s just different ways to do it, and the ones that will follow you for decades.

 Let’s shift gears and let’s talk about getting out in front of customer issues and resolving them. potential complaints before they turn into a negative online review.

And there’s that word empowerment again, because a lot of restaurants hesitate to give their people representing the guest on the front lines the authority or the judgment to solve and, put the customer first and handle anything versus, oh, let me go talk to my manager, because a customer has an issue, legitimate or maybe sometimes not.

And The last thing they want to do is bring it to the server or the person serving them’s attention and then be told, Oh, you got to tell your story all over again to this person who’s got to make a decision, and that is the wrong approach. Tell us about your approach about resolving situations immediately, and anyone can do it, and it must impact your reviews in a tremendous way.

Yeah, it’s everybody’s responsibility to save an at risk customer. It shouldn’t be a hierarchical thing at all. If you’re not giving the empowerment to your team, you simply just don’t trust them.

Exactly. And

that, this is why my recruitment process is so robust, because when we make that offer, we feel really good about this individual.

At the end of the day, Roger, hiring is a guess. But you try to make the best guess possible by having system in process with customer retention and we just got out of learning development with our New York team and it’s very easy for me to equate what they should do. If a guest is not enjoying their meal, we have two options.

Would you like me to make it for you again or another item? Or would you like us to reimburse you? Which would you like, which way would you like to be served? More often than not, they’re going to make it again, right? And whatever that meal costs, whatever your food cost is, five bucks, 15 bucks, 25, whatever, I guarantee you a negative review is worth a lot more than that, is more expensive than that.

And If you have the ability to think long term, the decisions will come to you faster. Now, if these mistakes multiply and compound you don’t have a customer retention issue. You have an operational issue. Something is going wrong here. Why are we overcooking the steak where people are complaining about it?

Maybe we shouldn’t have hired these line cooks. Did anybody even take them through a stage or something like this to measure their competency? Like the, something I learned at 1 800 GOD JUNK, which is very powerful, people don’t fail, processes do. So if your team is constantly making mistakes, That the customer is at risk.

There’s something bigger there. It could be that, you don’t have a proper hiring process or you don’t have a proper learning and development strategy. Something there is beating you. It’s not the individual. We want to resolve all customer complaints within one business hour. And eventually, and that’s across all channels, phone, social, Google reviews, And eventually I want to get that to 10 business minutes.

And we’re on our way to doing that, but having system and process to be able to do that and a strategy because everybody has a marketing strategy, don’t they? But what about your customer retention strategy? That goes to what I said earlier on about the customer experience management philosophies and strategies, not.

Necessarily, there’s not a whole lot of education around what to do around that. And Roger, pardon me if you’re my dog barking in the background. I that’s my philosophy around it is think long term, hire people that you can trust. And if you don’t feel like you can trust them maybe there’s something wrong with the business and the system and process that you have supporting it.

Good point. Yeah. The model’s broken. Michel, it’s been a fascinating conversationMy audience is perhaps thinking an approach toward running their business. I know you’ve influenced me. I believe in a lot of the things you’ve said, and it’s just a fresh, different approach to putting people first, building a strong culture and growing a very successful business by being different and setting yourself apart from the competition.

Excuse me, I’m losing my voice. I wish you the best of success in Brasa Peruvian Kitchen. And thank you so much for being a great guest on the show.

Thank you for having me, Roger.

That was the Restaurant Rockstars podcast. Audience, thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you to our sponsors this week, and I want everyone to stay well, stay tuned, and we can’t wait to see you in the next one.

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