When Mike Hislop’s
famous guitarist friend wanted to celebrate one night,
Hislop offered to make him a
reservation at the restaurant
where he was working. The guitarist said that was fine — as
long as Hislop got him seated
in a certain server’s section. He
said that the server was teaching him about cabernets, and
he didn’t want to upset the man
by sitting in another section.
The multimillionaire’s loyalty to
a restaurant server made an
impression on Hislop, and
today, as CEO of Corner Bakery
Cafe — a $200 million fast-casual restaurant chain — he
seeks to earn that same kind of
loyalty.
Smart Business spoke with
Hislop about how he finds the
right personalities for the job
and how to get employees to
embrace change.
Hire great people. The way you
grow is people. Have the right
people. We have the economic
model. We have the concept.
Now we can be choosy about
who we’re going to bring in, in
the future.
When you end up losing
managers, you usually end up
losing employees.
So how do we hire the right
managers? When you’re going
through the interview and
looking at the kind of experience that they’ve had, do they
enjoy working with people? It’s
real easy to get at the core of
an individual in an interview.
You ask them certain questions. Do they have fun? When
you’re asking them to describe
their personality and style, you
can find out real quick. Are
they going to come in dressed
and ready to go? Are they smiling? They go through three of
those interviews. They start
with the assistant manager,
move to the manager and then
get to the general manager. By
then you have a real good
idea, and you can tell them a
lot about what the expectations are.
Empower managers to hire good
people. We have the best manuals and training programs, but
you really need to have that
personality, starting with management to make sure they’re
going to hire the right people.
Once you get a person who
can smile and really does honestly care about people, it’s
real easy to train them.
When you get the right personality it really meshes together. You will see the sales grow.
We’re training our managers
exactly what to look for — not
just questionnaires. We’re
looking for personalities.
When they come in, do they naturally smile? Do they naturally have that caring attitude
that we have? We talk to them
about building relationships —
how are you going to be able
to build those relationships?
If someone is coming back
every day, how do they like
their coffee? Trying to remember their names. People love
to be recognized when they
come in. When they build the
relationships, they’re going to
come back more often, and
that’s what drives the economic model and allows everyone
to make money and grow
together within the culture.
Embrace change. It’s making
sure you have a culture
around and that senior management realizes that, ‘Hey,
part of our culture is we’re going to evolve this brand and
make sure that we’re going to
be on top of research to make
that happen — every year.’
Go out and talk to your people. If you have a culture that’s
been doing it the same way
forever, and maybe it’s been
good and maybe it’s been OK,
you’ve got to go out and just
meet with them. Start with
your senior management and
get buy-in that, ‘Hey, this is
how we’ve been doing it, and I
think these are some changes.’
You have to be a good listener. As a leader, go out and ask
the tough questions, and then
really listen to the answers.
Some of the people, you’d
think they would be afraid to
talk to the CEO — they’re not
afraid to talk to you at all.
Encourage new ideas. Create a
culture where people aren’t
afraid to speak up respectively
and then leave that meeting
and all be on the same page.
Create an atmosphere where
people aren’t afraid to ask
questions.
Say, ‘That is a great question, and I don’t know why we
do it that way. Maybe we can
do it a little bit better.’ There’s
nothing worse than being
‘yes’-ed in a middle of a meeting. Some leaders might like
that, but I definitely do not. I
don’t think you can be successful unless you can create
an environment where people
aren’t afraid to speak up and
let you know some of their
ideas.
Be ready to try a few
things. You can’t say, ‘This is it.’ You have to go out there
and test out some new ideas.
You want your leaders,
whether it’s general managers or corporate support,
to be thinking of ways to
make this brand better and
knowing if they get a good
idea that it’ll be something
that we go out and try.
When I was at Il Fornaio
[which acquired Corner
Bakery in 2005], we had a
couple of guys who thought
the bar needed some change.
The older people said no, but
we ended up putting in a
whole new bar, and the bar’s
doing about 40 percent sales
versus about 25. We go back
to that guy and said, ‘You
nailed it on this one. It was a
brilliant idea.’
HOW TO REACH: Corner Bakery Cafe, (800) 309-4642 or www.cornerbakerycafe.com
