Your team:
hire better, train well, lose fewer people.

Recruit with what you already have

Russ Hawkins frames it as a channel change: instead of competing on job ads, activate your own people. Your employees have networks and relationships, and if their experience is good, an incentive turns them into a channel with an edge: someone on the inside can tell it like it is.⁸

Tom Kilby starts further back: before recruiting, set clear expectations and get the team to buy them. Life is pretty simple, he says; after that, you only deal with exceptions.⁹

Onboarding: an hour and a half on day one

Andrew Roy, a general manager, describes his process: paperwork and orientation, around an hour and a half on the first day. A tour of the place, what the training will cover, who to go to with questions, and what is expected of the person. After that it depends on the area: hosts take a one-hour class and three accompanied shifts; food runners take half an hour of class before their first shift.¹

The mentor who also gets evaluated

Every new hire comes in with an assigned mentor, and the system audits itself: the first evaluation lands at 30 days, with the mentor and a manager at the table. The detail that makes it different: the trainee evaluates the mentor, to see whether the training is working.²

There are two appraisals a year per person, and promotions get built, not improvised.² Chef Daniel Lugo adds the cross-training: front-of-house managers work every kitchen station and chefs shadow servers, runners and dishwashers. They understand the whole operation, and that is why they run it better.⁴

The standard holds from day zero

Jason Brooks puts it bluntly: if you are not consistent holding the standard from day zero, not day one, you are the one failing them. They did not fail management, he says; management failed them. Culture, in his version, is what people feel at work: it is fed daily, it cannot be decreed.⁵

The other side is in Daniel Lugo's operation: every employee owns the situation. His example is a wet floor at a hotel: you do not wait for housekeeping; if you know where the mop is, you solve it.³ With clear rules and job descriptions, and consistent coaching when something drifts.³

Retention: the number that pays most

Steve Kislow, CEO of Firebirds Wood Fired Grill, says it directly: of all the numbers in the business, retention is the most important.⁶ And he sizes it: in the post-pandemic years, the typical tenure of a new employee was three to four months, and each cycle of hiring, training and losing someone cost 3 to 4 thousand dollars in wages and productivity. His practical recommendation: measure your turnover against the industry's top quartile, not the average.⁶

Russ Hawkins adds the uncomfortable tool: exit interviews, asking why someone you trained is leaving. And a comparison almost nobody makes: the cost of replacing that person against paying them a little more, giving better benefits and a reason to stay.⁷

With more people, well led, it gets easier

Abraham runs a group with around 900 people. Counterintuitive: he says it was harder with a single restaurant, because he was human resources, payroll and purchasing at once. Scale brings resources and leverage. His front-of-house training takes five or six days at an established restaurant and up to eight or ten when opening in a new market; managers take weeks or a month. And the phrase that sums up the filter: “you can't teach them how to smile.”¹⁰