Improving Culture Within Your Operation | Jamie Griffin - Consult to Grow

11/03/21 • 40 min

In this episode of the twelve-part Accelerate series for the Takeout, Delivery, and Catering podcast series, host Sam Stanovich and guest host Kathleen Wood chat with Jamie Griffin, founder and principal partner at Consult to Grow, to explore the power of culture and the talent pipeline.
Griffin shares his background saying, “for twenty years I spent fifteen years on the operations side working with Raising Cane’s from the ninth restaurant to the four hundredth or so.” Adding, “And started my own consulting company which is Consult To Grow, where I work side by side with restaurant owners, founders and operators to scale and grow through people, systems and processes.”
Wood asks Griffin what he thinks about culture in today’s marketplace, he says, “I really think of culture very similar to brand, so brand is to the customer as culture is to the employee and I think there are a lot of really important symbolic relationships between those two.” Griffin adds, “But for me what culture is it's the personality in the story of how we operate our business, what are our values, what is our management style, what are the beliefs that we hold about what it takes to compete and be successful.”
Griffin, when asked about the talent pipeline says, “so talent pipeline is about three things, it's about attracting the right people, it’s about retaining the right people and it's about developing people to the next level.”
To learn more about Consult To Grow, the power of culture, and the importance of the talent pipeline, listen to this episode of Accelerate.

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How Team Connection Accelerates Your Business | Jamie Leeds Restaurant Group

In this episode of the twelve-part Accelerate series for the Takeout, Delivery, and Catering podcast series, host Sam Stanovich and guest host Kathleen Wood chat with Jamie Leeds, chef and restaurateur of Jamie Leeds Restaurant Group, which includes Hank’s Oyster Bar, The Wharf and Hank’s Cocktail Bar, to explore how team connection can accelerate your business.
Leeds shares how she and her team navigated during the pandemic, staying connected and brainstormed ways to stay alive financially. Recognizing that restaurants were closed and suppliers were suffering, they developed a concept to engage that supply chain.
Leeds talks about keeping loyal clientele and growing their customer base. She says that they are very hospitality based and attributes that to her time as a sous chef for her mentor Danny Meyer. Leeds adds that they are hospitality first, staff is key, and the importance of taking care of her own.
When asked about her hiring strategy, Leeds says she has had no problems with staffing. She was able to keep most of her staff through the winter and her team came back, even relocating them at her other restaurants. Wood asks Leeds about the theme of loyalty, Leeds said it is simple, it is about connection.
To learn more about why technology is important for Jamie Leeds Restaurant Group, how Leeds is making the operator’s jobs easier, and about changing out POS systems, listen to this episode of Accelerate.

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Ghost Kitchens Go Global | JustKitchen

In this episode of Accelerate series for the Takeout, Delivery, and Catering podcast series, host Paul Barron chats with Michael Liu, executive vice president of JustKitchen to dive into the ghost kitchen and virtual brand phenomenon that has been happening around the world.
JustKitchen is an operator of ghost kitchens currently operating twenty restaurants in Taiwan and two restaurants in Hong Kong and they use a hub and spoke food delivery model and is currently expanding to the Philippines and Singapore.
Liu says, most of the JustKitchen executives come from a food and beverage background and his background, the delivery aggregator industry. When choosing brands to partner with, Liu says, “we were able to collect a lot of data to look at what is going to be an emergent trend in terms of food delivery service, what kind of brands, what kind of food that we're serving but really just studying the data.”
The process to develop a virtual brand for JustKitchen starts with a lot of data scraping, looking at restaurants and delivery and then they forecast. Liu says, “by applying some sort of algorithm to look at what kind of volume they’re doing so basically just trying to meet that demand versus actually creating one.” JustKitchen offers several brands including Smith & Wollensky and TGI Fridays.
In terms of ghost kitchens Liu says, “I do think that's definitely going to be a growing trend and I think another really big issue is definitely inflation of food cost, labor shortage and that gives not a lot of options to the traditional restaurant operators to operate at what they used to do. So I think virtual brand or cloud kitchen really gives that extra edge for them to really go to the next level to increase their income to increase their average ticket size or you know even just to increase their efficiencies.”
To learn more about JustKitchen’s partnership with DJ Khaled’s Another Wing, Liu’s insights on celebrity brands, and third party partner data and how to decentralize from the food delivery aggregators, listen to this episode of Accelerate.