FULL COMP: The Voice of the Restaurant Industry Revolution

In most cases, the folks that help start a great restaurant concept are not the folks running it at scale. Most leaders within a startup fail to meet the new challenges they’re presented with in a larger organization. But not Bob Ray. Bob went from managing a single restaurant location to COO, overseeing the massive growth of the Margaritas Mexican Restaurant chain over the last 30 years. In our c...

What does restaurant college look like? Where would you go if you wanted to learn how to create a sustainable business and a global restaurant brand? If you said TGI Fridays, today’s guest, Ricky Richardson would agree with you. Over his decades long career at TGI Fridays, Ricky learned the tactics, tools, and strategies that this massive company used to take over the globe. He then turned around...

Marketing is hard. It’s hard because it’s nondescript and it’s a moving target. Restaurant marketing looked different in 2020 than it does in 2023. But there are experts in the field and we’re chatting with one today. Meet Paul McEnany. Paul is the founder of Plein Air, a marketing agency that specializes in helping great restaurant brands grow. Today he unpacks the same gameplan he gives the big...

Tyler Simmons wants to sell your trash. Our industry is famous for the amount of waste we create and Tyler is here to help. Today we’re talking about Too Good To Go, a company dedicated to eliminating food waste by elevating trash to treasure through innovative marketing and powerful tech tools. In an industry desperate for reasonable solutions to foundation problems, this just might be one.  For...

What comes to mind when you hear the words “vegan food.” For many of us, it’s burlap clothing and plates made of cardboard, but Steven Salm is out to change that. Steven founded Planta, a vegan restaurant that transcends every boundary placed on that genre of food. The branding, the buildout, and the culinary program all speak to what it is: one of the most compelling restaurant concepts in the la...

Before Cyrus Batchan became a bar owner and a Michelin-rated restaurateur, he was a lawyer and that’s what drew me to this conversation. How many nights have you laid awake wondering if tomorrow was the day you were going to get sued? We’ve all consulted with lawyers in the past but I wanted to see how a lawyer-turned-restaurateur would go about setting himself up for success and limiting his liab...

Jack McGarry has achieved the accolades most of us dream about. He’s been awarded the best bartender in the world and his NY bar, The Dead Rabbit, was awarded the distinction of Best Bar in the World, a few years after that. But that’s not the end of Jack’s story. Since hitting the top, Jack has redefined excellence through the lens of bar ownership and has spent the last several years working to...

A great business starts with a great plan but, in our industry, those plans can take many different forms. Today, we chat with Michael Jantz-Moon of DC Vegan, a catering company turned deli turned bar concept that’s revolutionizing the way people eat and think in the DC area. In our conversation, we unpack how this storybook ending began with a bulletproof plan and discuss the ways in which we can...

Che Ramos is quickly becoming a household name within our industry. His efforts to create an inclusive environment within the beverage industry are what initially sparked my interest but, once he had my attention, I was floored by the amount of value he was providing across every digital platform. In today’s conversation we tackle diversity, inclusion, and what it takes to make a damn good drink a...

How do you become a restaurant expert? You take the time to learn from the experts themselves. Sam Fonseca received the education of a lifetime working at In & Out, Cane’s, and Dave’s Hot Chicken. In today’s conversation, we discuss the lessons he learned from the greats and how he’s leveraged that knowledge to scale Roll Em Up Taquitos into a national brand. For more information on Roll Em Up...

We’re back with part two of our interview with Jim and Sabin from Cousins Maine Lobster. We continue our conversation by diving deep into the skills needed, best practices adopted, and the lessons learned as the cousins navigated their way through the difficulties of scaling a restaurant concept to massive proportions. That’s Sabin and Jim from Cousins Maine Lobster. For more on the guys and their...

Today’s conversation is part one of a two part series. I sat down with Sabin and Jim from Cousins Maine Lobster. Maybe you know them from Shark Tank, maybe you don’t. What you should know is that these two cousins have scaled one food truck into a $55 million dollar business over the last 10 years. Over the next two episodes, we’ll unpack the tactics, tools, and strategies they used to build a res...

Ben Kaplan of Plnt Burger is taking the fight for burger supremacy to the streets. He’s a man that isn’t content with owning the vegetarian fast casual market. He wants to cannibalize the whole burger industry. Today’s conversation gets right to the heart of what matters most to our consumers. Ben’s idea is to win hearts and minds by winning their bellies first. For more information on Plnt Burger...

I’d say my life is divided into two parts. Here on the show, my job is to ask the questions that I believe you want to know the answers to and then listen to the answers. But there’s another side to my life. As a coach, folks just like you ask me questions and it’s up to me to provide the answers. I wanted the opportunity to share the other part of my life with you and, recently, the opportunity p...

Chef Jamie Lynch still cooks. It was his skill in the kitchen that afforded him the opportunity to open his first restaurant. But that’s not how he scaled to five restaurants across two states. At some point we no longer work in a restaurant, we work in the restaurant business. In our conversation today, we chart his transition from esteemed chef to an acclaimed restaurateur. For more information...

For over a decade, I ran my restaurants the way I was taught to run other people's restaurants. I led my teams the way others had led me and I never questioned it. But what if you never got that education? Andrew Dana owns more than half a dozen successful restaurants and he began his journey as a restaurateur with absolutely no operational experience. He just did what he thought was right and fol...

We all hope to be successful, but how many of us plan to be successful? Susan Sarich of SusieCakes took the time to plan every aspect of her restaurant. The research and development that went into her business plan resulted in the success she had after opening. Having weathered two economic disasters and with dozens of locations under her belt, her plan seems bulletproof and, in today's episode, w...

Ken Grossman is a craft brewing pioneer. In the late 1970's, he, along with about half a dozen other brewers, started the first craft breweries in the US. Over 40 years later, the other guys are no longer in business and Ken's company is worth over one billion dollars. Today, we discuss what it took to survive in those early days and the critical decisions he made that paved the way for him to bec...

Marketing is this big, intimidating thing for most of us. For many of us, marketing starts and stops with social media. For many more of us, we aspire to have the time needed to even get that far. That’s why I thought it would be incredibly valuable to chat with Kim Freer. Kim Freer is the Chief Marketing Officer of Wetzel’s Pretzels, an old brand innovating in very new ways. Today we discuss what...

Winning in a major market requires a very different approach than opening a restaurant in a secondary or tertiary market. That’s why I was so excited to chat with Michael Tipps. Michael and his company Invictus Hospitality do many different things, but the one thing they’re most known for is taking successful concepts from major markets and scaling them across the country. Perfecting that process...

Personally, I believe that the biggest hurdle for most of us when it comes to escaping day to day operations is finding the right person to replace ourselves. Aside from what it takes to find the right person, it’s the risk that holds most of us back. The risk of spending more than we’ve ever paid ourselves on someone that may not be right for the job. But, what if we could be sure that the person...

As business owners, we need to take a hard look in the mirror to determine what's working and what isn't. Today's guest, Robert Greene did just that, but, instead of tackling an industry, he chose to tackle the human condition.  Robert is a NYT bestselling author who's researched the intricacies of power, mastery, war and human nature.  In reading his work, I walked away with a better understandin...

The hardest part of ownership isn't owning the business, it's in owning the choices you've made and the impact they have on you and your team. Today, we chat with multi-million dollar culinary clothing maven, Ellen Bennett. Ellen wrote a book that's one part biography and one part action plan for aspiring entrepreneurs. In this conversation, we run though what the past 10 years has been like for E...

To call Paul Pruitt a restaurant consultant fails to describe the depths of his contributions to our industry. Paul is a hospitality futurist who, in the decade I've known him, has predicted every major evolution that our industry has experienced. In this episode, Paul and I discuss the future of our industry and how holistic hospitality could be the solution to all that ails us. For more informat...

What if the labor crisis is a result of a leadership crisis? Could we build a better industry simply by becoming better leaders? Celebrity Chef Robert Irvine specializes in overcoming the impossible. Today we discuss how this career soldier from a modest background built an empire and the lessons in leadership he learned along the way. For more information on the chef, visit https://chefirvine.com...