Steele Platt will never be successful. At least not by his standards, anyway.
Every time the founder and
CEO of Yard House Restaurants
LLC reaches another benchmark with his growing chain of
upscale-casual eateries, he
thinks back to the time when he
lost it all.
“I’ve failed in the restaurant
business and lost everything,”
he says. “I went bankrupt and
basically started my career over,
coming back and opening the
first Yard House with none of
my money and then growing it
into the company it is now.”
By staying sharp and avoiding
complacency in his successes
— whether that’s what he
would label them or not— Platt
has grown the 20-location
restaurant group to include
approximately 3,100 full- and
part-time workers while posting
2007 revenue of $138 million.
Smart Business spoke with
the leader about how to press
your reset button and how to
step back to get a better look at
what’s happening under the
hood.
Press your reset button. When
you start opening two or three
or four restaurants, they’re
busy and packed, and then you
think you’re really successful.
‘I’m going to go play golf,’ and
this and that. Everything’s
working out great.
The minute I think I’m successful, that’s when I fail.
Instead, you take a different
route. I figure the worst can
happen every day. You mentally prepare yourself for that.
You don’t lean back on your
heels. You lean forward and be
ready to look at what’s in front
of you on a daily basis.
It all starts with your mind. If
you can reset your mind every
day to create a little bit more
humble mind and less ego and
more aggressive to success and
do it on a daily basis until you
retire, then you’re in a better
spot. If you kind of relax and
say, ‘Things are going great,’
human tendencies tend to
relax, and you’re’ not looking
for the details that have made
you a success in the first place.
Step off the pedestal. The first
thing to hold (employees)
accountable, you have to be
honest. If you can’t, then it’s
kind of hard to expect others
to do it.
As much as we hold our
employees accountable,
they’re allowed to hold us
accountable. It’s really like the
hourly employees in our
restaurants hold the managers
accountable. It’s really like
they’re the managers’ boss. If
we hear a lot of employees
start to chat and chatter about
that manager, he gets called
into the office. It’s not the
other way around.
We’ve created e-mail access
directly to the executives that
an employee can access that
only (we) read. It’s basically
being able to connect to your
front line and not putting yourself in a position of thinking
you’re better or in a different
class than them. You should get
on their same level and be able
to communicate with them.
Most of the employees appreciate that, but you still have
friction between a lower-level
employee and a CEO. It’s really
how the CEO acts. Act humble
and approachable and not so
stiff and coat-and-tieish. If you
can fit in with your employees,
then it makes it that much
easier for the company to be
a whole company.
