Food & Beverage
Smoke signals
How to keep in touch with a growing culture
By Mike Cottrill
Smart Business | November 2009
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Rick Malir, president and co-founder, City Barbeque
For Rick Malir, it was the brisket and the original barbecue sauce.
When both were developed at City Barbeque, he couldn’t stop eating them. Here’s the thing, though: He isn’t the only one with tantalized taste buds. The barbecue restaurant has become a hit, growing to more than 10 locations and 350 employees.
So while Malir still enjoys the food, his role as president and co-founder has become a lot more executive-like, as he deals with more government rules and regulations, more hiring, and so on.
“As a company gets bigger, there are more mandates and rules and paperwork that’s required ... and that does become quite a challenge to work through all of that,” he says.
But while Malir has to deal with all of that, his busier schedule can’t come at the cost of sending out a bad brisket, so he has to put in systems that allow him to take the temperature of each location.
Smart Business spoke with Malir about how he stays in regular contact with his people and how he works with his senior leaders to ensure customers are left with a good taste in their mouth.
Collaborate with your top people. We have reviews with our teams and what I do with my seven direct reports is I have a monthly one-on-one session with them. I see them all the time, but every month we put into stone to at least sit down so we know that at least once we’ve had a very meaningful conversation about goals and where we want to go.
It’s about an hour, and it’s very simple. First question is, what is my role in achieving our company goals and strategic plan? And you can write what you want. No. 2 is, how will I contribute to our company goals and strategic plan? And then, what do I want to accomplish and what are the expected results — results must be measurable — what are the key measurements that indicate success? So those are the three basic questions we talk about. Then, what are my priorities or projects for the next 90 days?
Keep an eye on hiring and training. We have probably a more detailed interviewing process just on our entry-level jobs than most restaurants, so we do that a little more in depth. We actually do background checks for everybody.
Then we have a director of training, and that’s a full-time position. He was in operations before, and what (he) does is he helps us develop what we need as a company, classes to promote our service standards, what barbecue is, the technical training, standardization of procedures, classes on who we are, what we are, anything to do with education, as well.
We’ve seen improvements, and people are at least being exposed to what we are, and there’s more consistency.
