We look forward to seeing everyone at the Restaurant Finance and Development Conference in Las Vegas November 14-16
Stop by the Wray Executive Search booth #224
Viewpoint
Building a High-Performance Culture
by Bob Gershberg, CEO/Managing Partner, Wray Executive Search
It is the mission of most leaders to build a high-performance culture, particularly when teeing up for substantive growth. The long revered strategic plan may forge a path, but truth be told, its course loses direction when the need to scramble rears its head. A strong and focused talent strategy is paramount in creating a high-performance culture. People policies drive strategy. Leaders must own employee engagement.
Instilling an unwavering sense of pride, having a concrete mission along with clear guiding principles will help ensure high performance. Winning organizations are typically performance oriented, purpose driven and principles led. Talent needs to be sourced, engaged and developed in order to execute vision and business strategy. A collaborative culture is engaging and energizing but let your eagles soar.
Restaurants: The Need for the Industry to "Walk Between the Raindrops"
by John A. Gordon, Principal and Founder, Pacific Management Consulting Group
An evening or two of watching cable television ads gives you some sense of what is happening and will be affecting consumers going forward. You see endless QSR 2 for $5 or 2 for $3 themes returning, along with ads for vacations, cruises, and exotic vacations. The 40/60 economy seems clear: Consumers with household income over $100K seem to be OK but under that are varying degrees of price and frequency struggle. Cutting back on restaurant visits is that old standby; but I’d bet with all the time and waste of shopping and cooking factored in, cooking on every occasion is more costly in the long run. But it has hard to dislodge conventional wisdom. Going into the fall, the conventional wisdom was that the 40%--the better-off component of the consumer base was relatively unaffected. Turns out that may be wishful thinking.
"The single biggest way to impact an organization is to focus on leadership development. There is almost no limit to the potential of an organization that recruits good people, raises them up as leaders and continually develops them."
John Maxwell
Check out the latest in the rise of kiosk deployment from Nation's Restaurant News
by Rebecca Patt, SVP Development, Wray Executive Search
Steve Heeley is CEO of Pokeworks, the world’s largest and leading fast-casual, premium poke brand. Founded in NYC in 2015, the brand currently has 68 locations and growing. Pokeworks’ menu features poke bowls, burritos, salads, and sides, with a commitment to sustainably sourced seafood and environmental responsibility. Heeley joined the brand in March 2021.
How did the Pokeworks concept get started?
It started with one small restaurant in New York City in 2015. The eight co-founders are all smart, intelligent, successful, entrepreneurial guys. Two sets of founders are brothers. They loved experiencing poke in Hawaii. They have the vision to make poke accessible and super high quality. They developed what we call Poke Your Way, which is where you can create your own poke bowl how you like to eat. They opened the first location in midtown Manhattan.
Management Tip of the Day from Harvard Business Review
Solve Your Team’s Meeting Overload Problem
Is your team’s meeting culture broken? If you sense that meetings have started to create unnecessary friction, it’s probably time to intervene. Start by encouraging your team to adopt a “subtraction” mindset—that is, solving problems by doing less, not more. Ask your employees to actively consider which meetings could be shortened and which could be cut altogether. You might even go so far as starting from a clean slate, purging your team’s calendars for 48 hours to assess which meetings are truly necessary. Once your team has trimmed down its meetings, redesign what’s left to make the best use of that time. Which meetings can be restructured so that fewer people attend? Which can be shortened by moving work to asynchronous communication? Once your team has gone through these steps, the collective calendar will feel a whole lot lighter. Meetings are easier to fix when people do it together—when it feels like a movement, be it in your team, department, or entire organization.
Check out the National Restaurant Association's latest report on restaurant industry employment growth
Restaurant employment growth slowed in October, but elevated job openings indicate continued strong demand for labor.
Restaurant employment continues to trend higher, but the gains were somewhat choppy in recent months. Eating and drinking places* added a net 6,000 jobs in October on a seasonally-adjusted basis, according to preliminary data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Congratulations to Wray Executive Search's EVP & Partner, Kevin Stockslager, who finished the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, DC last weekend in 3:28!
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