Introduction:

Have you ever wondered how your beautiful and crystal-clear vision of what your restaurant was going to look, feel or sound like and how profitable it would become didn’t come true? That vision got completely crushed and lost, then afterwards you’re struggling to even see it at all? I’ll tell you exactly how that happens and how to fix it in today’s video.

Get your vision back on track:

How did that vision disappear? It happened because you weren’t communicating your vision clearly enough. You weren’t holding your staff accountable to the standards to support that vision. Now you’re living in their vision.

When I get on the phone with clients they often tell me, “I opened up my restaurant and it was doing great. Then over the last year or so things have really slowed down.” The economy isn’t a major factor anymore because it’s getting better. Seven years ago I could understand that was a valid reason. We were coming out of a bad economy, but now it’s not the same case.

I promise you, 20 years from now I’ll be hearing the same thing. It’s because when the owner steps away a little bit, they lower their standards, their vision isn’t as clear, they’re not holding their staff accountable, and then their staff starts to enforce their vision on things.

They’ll change some rules slowly to suit them over a period of time. Before you know it they’re no longer a puppy that you can easily manage but a huge dog. You can also look at it like looking back at your kid when they were two months old and now they’re 18 graduating high school and doing their own thing. You’re wondering how did we get from here to there so fast?

Ultimately this comes down to a previous video I filmed a few weeks ago about the cadence of accountability and your standards.

If your vision was to have a clean bar with only 10-20 liquors in the bar and now you’re looking at 40 liquors in it because your bar manager wanted this, a customer wanted that, your rep said you should have this, etc. That’s not your vision! Get back to yours, it’s what found you the success. Stop allowing others to influence that vision unless it’s a good conversation where you can get great ideas that eventually becomes part of your vision – that’s fine.

But most of you are not living your vision right now, you’re living somebody else’s. The way to fix it is to raise the standards and hold people accountable. But more important is to continually communicate that vision. Tell them why a particular rule is important, why you want it that way and how you want to do it in a certain way. Do it like a broken record over and over again until your vision is so clear among your staff that they’re able to follow it even when you’re not there.

I hope this video helps you out  and I hope it gets you thinking a little bit about some things that have maybe shifted from your original vision and how you can get it back.