You cannot inventory
how somebody felt.
Every other business sells a thing that exists after the transaction. You sell two hours of how a person felt, which cannot be stored, cannot be discounted, and has to be produced again from nothing tomorrow. That gets made by a nineteen year old busser and a line cook on his fourth double, and nobody in the building has ever framed the job to them that way.
These formats are free, they fit inside pre-shift, and nobody needs to have read the book first, including whoever is running it.
Where this comes from. Chris Sund is a keynote speaker and the bestselling author of You Are Capable of More. He has spent fifteen years building and leading organizations staffed by shift workers, including taking one company from a startup to one of the largest in its industry. He has not run a kitchen, and the problem overlaps almost exactly: high turnover, hard hours, and a lot of people worth more than the role they are in.
What this is
not.
This is not service training. Nothing here touches steps of service, upselling, wine knowledge, or ticket times, and your group already has all of that.
Hospitality turnover is structural and one session does not touch it. What it changes is who is ready when a shift lead or sous spot opens, and whether the people who do leave are better than when they arrived.
Development in this industry stays front of house, because that is who talks to guests and who gets promoted into management. Back of house gets a knife skills class and a safety video. This is written for both rooms.
Family meal is already the one moment the whole team is in a room and nobody is in the weeds. That is the vehicle, and the formats were built to drop into it.
No budget line, no vendor agreement, no license, no per-location fee. Print it and run it.
The concepts that land
hardest in a restaurant.
There are ten in the book. These four are the ones that get a pre-shift quiet.
Leave People Better
Start here, because it is the only industry where this is the actual job description. Somebody is at table twelve on the worst week of their year, or the best, and they will not remember the dish.
The concept says success is what you achieve and significance is who is better because of you. In most rooms that is a nice idea. In yours it is the product, and saying so out loud changes how a nineteen year old sees a shift.
Read the concept →Own It. Every Day.
The ticket came up wrong. The reservation was double booked. The host sat them in the worst section. Somebody called out and the whole floor is short.
All of that can be genuinely true and none of it is what the guest experiences. This session separates the accurate explanation from the useful one, and it is the one that most reliably reduces the front-of-house and back-of-house blame loop, because both sides recognize themselves in it at the same time.
Read the concept →Train Your Inner Voice
This industry still contains a lot of people who learned the job by being yelled at, and a fair number of them now run kitchens. The voice a young cook uses on himself after a bad service was usually installed by somebody else.
Whatever follows the words I am becomes the ceiling. Run this one with a young team, and run it before you run anything about performance.
Read the concept →Finish What You Start
Restaurants start things constantly. New menu, new POS, new pre-shift format, new training binder that made it to week three. Individuals do the same with the certification, the class, the plan to open something of their own.
Run this with managers and with anybody who has a stack of good intentions and no finished ones. It surfaces something about the operation as often as about the person.
Read the concept →Five formats,
five calendars.
Same material, different levels of commitment. Start with whatever your people will realistically show up for.
The Lunch and Learn
All ten concepts at about five minutes each, with a full run of show and the exact question to ask for every one. A manager can run it having read one page, and it splits cleanly across several pre-shifts if an hour is impossible.
Works for: an extended family meal, a pre-opening week, a manager meeting, or a session at a franchise or association conference.
Open the Guide →The Book Club Guide
One session per concept, written so anyone in the group can run it rather than requiring a facilitator. Honest questions, one that asks more of the room, and a challenge to carry into the week.
Works for: a management team across locations meeting monthly, a sous and shift lead cohort, or a GM group. Everyone needs a copy of the book.
Download the Guide →The Workshop
One concept worked properly instead of ten skimmed. A question on the board, silent reflection, tables of four, and the group deciding together what it will change. Sixty, seventy five or ninety minutes.
Works for: a manager meeting between services, a GM session across the group, or the hour version run before doors on a slow day.
Open the Guide →The Boot Camp
All ten condensed into a day. Each concept runs the same loop: short teach, silent reflection, table discussion, decision. The group leaves with a written plan instead of notes.
Works for: a manager conference, a pre-opening week for a new location, a slow-season leadership day, or a franchise convention.
Open the Guide →The 10-Week Program
The deep version, and the one that builds a bench. One concept a week with real service life in between, so people try something and report back.
Works for: a shift lead pipeline, a sous chef development track, or a cohort pulled from several restaurants in a group so people meet peers outside their own house.
Open the Guide →Running it around
a service.
Things Worth Knowing Before You Start
Use pre-shift. Do not invent a meeting. Family meal already exists, everybody is already there, and nobody is in the weeds yet. The hour-long format splits across four or five pre-shifts without losing anything, and that version gets run. A meeting scheduled on a Tuesday morning does not.
Never after a double, and never in your busy season. Nothing lands on people who have been on their feet for eleven hours. Slow season, slow day, early in the week.
Both rooms together. The temptation is to run it separately because the schedules differ and it is easier. Running front and back of house in the same room is most of the value, particularly for the ownership session, because each side hears the other recognize themselves.
Pay people for it. If they are there, they are on the clock. This is the industry with the longest history of blurring that, and hourly staff notice immediately which kind of employer they are working for.
One honest limitation. The material is currently English only. In a lot of kitchens that means it will not reach part of the team the way it should, and translating a page yourself before you run it is worth the twenty minutes.
If You Are Building a Reading List Instead
There is a separate page of books for restaurant and hospitality workers, with honest write-ups of seven titles including Guidara, Meyer, and Charnas. Most of them are not mine.
The highest level of success is helping others become more.
Or bring Chris
to the room.
Franchise conventions, manager conferences, pre-opening weeks, and association events. Bulk copies can be paired with a keynote so people leave with the material rather than the memory of it.
Bring Chris In
The keynote, a facilitated day, or bulk copies for a convention or a manager conference.
Start a Conversation →The Comfort Ceiling Assessment
Twenty five questions across five areas. Runs on a phone in ten minutes, answers stay on the person’s own device, and it gives a room something concrete to talk about.
Take It →The Promise
One thing you have been putting off, with a date on it. A strong closing exercise for a pre-shift, and it takes four minutes.
Make One →The Printables
Worksheets for all ten concepts, ready to print for every seat at family meal.
Print Them →Seen On
Chris has taken this material onto morning television across the country, and writes for Forbes and Inc.
When I’ve got something worth sending.
Just a story or an idea I picked up that I think will help you.
Sometimes that’s twice in a month. Sometimes it’s not for a while.