Step into your shoes as a Visionary Operator of your F&B Business

By Kimberly Belle

After we released Part 1 of this blog series on How to Stop Working "In" Your Restaurant and Start Working "On" It, we received an understandable clamoring from industry leaders asking:

“But how?!”

“How do I actually, practically, realistically start spending more time developing my vision for my F&B business, and less time leading daily operations?”

This article offers 12 tactical tips for implementing our advice today, so you can start freeing up space to invite more vision work into your leadership life and spend less hours grinding it out on the floor or in the kitchen. 

12 Tips for how to actually spend more time working ON your business and less time working IN it

Our approach to this work is to walk you through each of the following 12 strategies we invite our clients to take empowered action toward with the goal of carving out space weekly to do the thought work, the systems work, the research, name the possibilities, and have the conversations that will advance how you lead your business, team, and life forward.

This is essential work for leaders.

We know it is far too easy to lose yourself to the daily hospitality hustle, and many of us lack the boundaries and are suffering through burnout because of it.

Taking back time to do the sort of visionary work that likely attracted you to this industry to begin with is the remedy for your commitment to overcommitting, no matter how uncomfortable it makes you feel to ask for what you need. These 12 hacks for reclaiming time to lead creatively will help you get there:

1. Evaluate your Meeting Culture
2. Customize your Meeting Schedule
3. Set & Clear the Table at Meetings
4. Create & Circulate Meeting Agendas
5. Commit to Time Blocking
6. Be Transparent with your Team
7. Make Pre-Shift a Daily Practice
8. Deepen your Pre-Shifts
9. Try on No Meeting Mondays
10. Boundaries, Baby!
11. Obey Yourself
12. Hire a Coach

If you’re ready to spend more time working on your business and less time working in it, these 12 tactical ideas will support you in making space on your calendar and in your life that you didn’t think you had. #LFG

1) Evaluate your Meeting Culture

Are you over meeting or under meeting?

Very few of us are hitting this nail on the head, and our recommendation if you are an owner or are sitting on top of the food chain in your food business, is that you meet individually with every leader on your team and every strategic partner you work with at a minimum of once a month. For the leaders you’re working with most closely, we suggest a cadence closer to once a week.

It is also imperative to lead recurring team meetings that might range from pre-shifts to operating reviews, budget reviews, and leadership team masterminds.

Use our evaluation tool called How to Give Good Meeting, to help you decide how to adjust your meeting culture to add meetings that empower your team to provide more operational leadership and in the trenches coaching, and remove meetings that fail to meet that threshold.

Far too many clients we work with haven’t yet committed to a ritualized meeting cadence in their operation, and we’d argue that this is essential work that can’t get skipped (as it wouldn’t in any other industry, but too often falls by the wayside in restaurant service). That being said, you can and should tailor this work to your team and culture.

2) Customize your Meeting Schedule

What these meetings look like depends greatly on the team members and business type you lead.
Every meeting you schedule or cancel from here on out should be customized to fit the needs of the particular players you are meeting with, and often, the only way to find that out is to ask them what style of meeting and what cadence of meeting might work best for them.

Some people work best in short bursts, and they might want a standing 30 minute meeting every week just to run through the topical hit list in their head, or perhaps 10 minutes every day you’re both in the business could prove a better fit. Other folks might want a full hour to sit down with you in a formal meeting environment every other week or once a month…the two of you get to decide.

Some of us don’t do well in formal meeting environments, especially in our industry with so many creatives on our teams, so it could be great to have options that look like, “Let’s go for a walk together every other week,” or “Let’s grab lunch out once a month.” Maybe this even morphs into a bit of a comp tour wherein you visit competitor establishments to taste across a menu, pick up service tips, and expose team members to industry benchmarks while holding them accountable to a monthly check-in conversation. For many of us, a more convivial social experience of connecting while doing so with business intent helps us to hear what's being offered and deepens trust.

3) Set & Clear the Table at Meetings

To help you do that, we have two tools we recommend you try on at your next meeting.

The first is what we call our Setting & Clearing the Table exercise, which we do at the top and bottom of every meeting we lead. We adapt this practice wildly, depending on who’s in the room with us and what the nature of the meeting is. Sometimes the setting and clearing goes on for half an hour to really hear everything that’s on the heart and in mind of a team member, and sometimes it goes for just two words we ask them to name in response to a particular prompt.

For example, we might say, “Name two feelings that are showing up at the top of our time together today,” and someone might respond with something like, “Anxious and eager.” In a 1-on-1 meeting, we might take the time to explore the thoughts and circumstances that are prompting this individual to feel this way, but in a group setting, we often lack the time and intimacy to process feelings. In that instance, we would note that a team member feels anxious and eager, and circle back with them privately after the meeting to ask curiosity questions about what’s showing up for them and how we might best support them.

Download our free Setting & Clearing tool.

4) Create & Circulate a Meeting Agenda

Nothing’s worse than an unproductive meeting that leaves you feeling like you need another meeting after the meeting!

So we’ve got another tool for you to support you in creating meeting agendas that really focus your highest level priorities and set you up for success to spend whatever time you do have together wisely.

Adapt our free template and read through the sample agenda we provide to create a roadmap for meetings that helps to make an evergreen agenda template that is gonna work for you time and again. This is truly “set it and forget it” work insofar as once you’ve curated a meeting agenda that’s getting you results in your F&B business, you need only rinse and repeat from meeting to meeting, tweaking as necessary, with no need to start this process from scratch.

PRO TIP: if there’s a trusted member of your team who’s great with attention to detail, I would consider delegating this task to them or rotating who is in charge of drafting the agenda each meeting. Bonus points for asking for the agenda to be distributed at least 24 hours in advance of the meeting for everybody to have time to absorb the content, add to it, and prepare for the conversation. Same goes with taking minutes. Maybe it’s you, maybe you delegate it, maybe you rotate whose responsibility it is, but somebody should be charged with sending out those minutes within 24-48 hours of meeting.

5) Commit to Time Blocking

To make space for all these meetings or to clear up space for meetings you’re canceling because they’re no longer of highest service to the spirit of your business, we suggest it may be time to take our Time Blocking Masterclass that teaches you how to 86 your scheduling overwhelm for just $86!

This hour-long course includes sample calendars, journal prompts, podcasts for continued listening, and bonus coaching on what to do when you (inevitably) fall off the wagon of your time blocking practice and need an assist back up. It is hot off the presses and a fan favorite among our clients that absolutely transforms the way they work from firefighting mode—running from one emergency to the next—to actually holding dedicated time on their calendars every week that is for thought work and creatively developing their business, whether that looks like recipe development, reaching out to strategic partners to implement more efficient systems and training, bringing in new guests via new marketing campaigns, etc..

You name it, you get to carve out time for it, and this tool will help you to 86 your biggest roadblock to getting this most vital work done.

6) Be Transparent with your Team

We find that the biggest barrier our clients have in committing to the discipline of carving out time to work on their business and not in it is actually the guilt they feel for being off the floor or out of the kitchen, locked in an office (or God forbid their home office) to work on the business.

As such, an essential piece of leadership work you must do to work through any emotional blocks you have to stepping out of daily operations is to be transparent with your team. Explain to them the WHY behind you carving out space to work on and not in the business, HOW it stands to benefit them, you, and your bottom line, and WHEN they can expect you to do so.

Maybe you host a meeting (or a series of them) wherein you let your team know (collectively or individually) that it is your express intention to spend less time leading operations alongside them because you trust them to lead in your absence. Offer to support them through this transition in one-on-one or team meetings that you’ve ritualized as recurring events, to work through any challenges that come up in your absence.

When we let people know what our clear expectations are, we set them up for success by giving them a fair shot to meet those expectations. Often this involves saying the part you didn’t think you had to say out loud. Like, “I need you to lead with excellence in my absence, and this is what excellence looks like…” or, “If you have questions bring them to our meetings; I will answer and mentor you through them so that you grow as a leader and I can free up the bandwidth to move our business forward.”

7) Make Pre-Shift a Daily Practice

We’re incredibly fortunate that in our industry there is an SOP around daily meetings that happen before service to share information and develop people. Some folks call them lineup, standup, pre-meal, or a huddle, but we call them pre-shift. And here’s the one rule about pre-shifts every organization would benefit from adopting:

Pre-shift is not optional!

If you run an F&B business and you’re not leading a daily pre-shift, you really should be, every day, before at least one of your shifts, with as many of your team members as possible. Pull them off the floor and out of the kitchen and lead them through a check-in that could be as brief as a 5 minute huddle wherein you share any updates and news of the day, or as inspirational as a 30 minute motivational speech wherein you share leadership tools, lessons, stories from the previous day’s service, anything you’d hope for them to hear and respond to.

You don’t need to be the only person leading pre-shift at your organization. You absolutely could delegate responsibility to any number of the leaders on your team to lead a particular pre-shift, being sure to give them time to prepare thoughtfully and offering to mentor them to rise to this responsibility, especially if they’re nervous about public speaking in front of the team. Help them to shape the remarks they’re going to share, build their confidence and their capacity to do this essential work, and eventually, it might be something you can pass off entirely to a team that knows how to do this work and finds purpose in it.

8) Deepen your Pre-Shifts

If you’re not sure what type of motivational or leadership concepts and tools might prove a wise fit to introduce during pre-shift, use this very blog, Pre-Shift: a blog for Hospitality People, to refer to our dozens of posts that will offer an assist. We’d be honored for you to use our materials and free resources to guide the leadership voice of your business.

If you’re looking for another source of inspiration from the tippity-top of the fine dining pyramid, join Will Guidara’s weekly newsletter, Pre-Meal, that offers brilliantly penned, quick tips on how to deliver unreasonable hospitality, or try listening to industry podcasts or start following industry thought leaders on the socials, to glean inspo from conversations that might inspire a dialogue between you and your team.

9) Try on No Meeting Mondays

Consider a No Meeting Monday (or any day of the week, really…or even just a half day a week) in which you have a standing calendar block on your schedule that makes plain you do not take meetings at this time. Typically, we find this works best at the top or bottom of a week, so if you work Monday through Friday, Mondays or Fridays might be your best bet here. That said, you are the master of your own calendar and can place this block anywhere that works.

For me, I block out the entirety of my No Meeting Mondays and my final hour of work on Fridays, and I do not take any meetings, coaching sessions, calls with my business partners or strategic partners of any kind. I use this time to work on the business to develop it, lead new initiatives, prepare for client sessions, and to do my own inner work to support me in leading from my values with integrity and confidence. In my final hour of work on Fridays, I focus on reviewing what I’ve accomplished and what I didn’t get to that week, make changes to my calendar accordingly for the week ahead, and gift myself the peace of mind to head into the weekend free and clear, knowing precisely and intentionally how to set myself up for success the next week.

I wanna let you in on a secret I’ve gleaned from working for and with Fortune 500 CEOs running multibillion dollar international companies: they’re not the first in the office!

Or if they are, they’re in a locked office hidden behind one or more executive assistants who do not let anyone through to disrupt them for at least the first hour of their days. No meetings, no phone calls, no so-called emergencies. Unless the building is on fire, CEOs running really big brands protect their first hour in the business each day and dedicate it to doing deep thought work. Tiny neighborhood business leaders (and everyone in between) would be just as well served by protecting your thought time for at least 15 minutes if not an hour or more each morning before the day gets away from you to work on your business instead of in it.

And that requires boundaries work...because not all of us have assistants who act as barriers to protect our time.

10) Boundaries, Baby!

Boundaries have become such a buzz word!

And for good reason. Many of the tips we’ve named above come down to boundaries work, and we coach on this topic relentlessly in this business. Boundaries are clutch in the practice of creating and maintaining healthy relationships, and healthy relationships are essential to lead your team, your family, your livelihood, and your life forward.

Trouble is, in our coaching work, we also find that boundaries are often misunderstood. Too many folks mistake setting a boundary with giving an order…and giving away their power.

We’d love to share our approach to setting and maintaining boundaries that support you in holding onto yourself and creating safe spaces to connect with others. Read our blog post on keeping personal boundaries, and another blog post on professional boundaries. Here’s one and another, a third and a fourth Instagram reel we’ve posted on the topic. Claiming an hour, a day, or even a week’s sabbatical to step away from operations and delve deeper into the vision work that’s required to grow necessitates making clear requests of your people and following up with predetermined consequences when those requests go unmet. That’s true boundaries work, baby!

11) Obey Yourself

This is probably the most important tip of the dozen: obey yourself.

Keep the promises you make to yourself. That’s how we build self-trust as leaders, and we need to trust ourselves if we’re asking our teams to lead in our absence so we can move the business toward new or brighter horizons.

It’s okay to make mistakes along the way that dampen self-trust, screw up your schedule, and break your own promises from time to time (we all will) but becoming aware of these missteps quickly and doubling down on your commitment get back on the wagon and try again, is the most fundamental leadership cornerstone we can invite you to turn toward.

A lot of what we’re asking of you in this article is going to be new. It’s going to challenge your psyche and your schedule. That’s not a reason not to do it. These tips might be the lifeline you need right now. They have zero chance of not transforming your business if you commit to these strategies and obey your plan to spend more time working on your business.

12) Hire a Coach

This work ain’t easy, but you don’t have to do it alone.

If you need help holding yourself accountable to tactical strategies for growth, we got you. This is the exact work that we offer inside both our 6-month leadership development programs where you can join us for either:

1. Private mentorship offering one-on-one coaching once a week for 75 minutes a week by filling out an application and signing up for a free consult to speak with one of our coaches about whether this could be the right work at the right time to help you transform your schedule and your leadership style from an operator’s mentality to an owner’s mentality
2. Group coaching with a community of like-minded industry leaders who support each other in reaching for that same sense of freedom, by doing very similar work to the coaching we offer one-on-one, but at a lower price point and with a major assist from the other leaders in our Zoom Room. You can join The Walk-In waitlist anytime. 

Let us Help you Lead

We have no doubt that taken in combination, these 12 tips won’t prove game changing in redesigning your leadership landscape and making it possible for you to more fully step into your vision for your business.

It will take time to integrate each tactic into your workflow, and if we were coaching you, we’d advise you to take a brick-by-brick approach to cherry pick the strategies that feel warmest and try them on one-by-one, layering them atop each other to compound their impact.

You do that, and pretty soon you’ll start shedding your operator’s skin, spending more and more time working on the business and giving voice to your inner visionary.