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Owning a business is a challenge. Knowing how to keep innovating in your business is an even bigger one. Join restaurant owner, motivational speaker, and innovation expert Sara Frasca each week as she guides fellow business owners in taking the next step to level up their business. If you've ever pondered hiring a business coach but want a sample first, come along for the adventure!
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Sara Frasca is the founder and owner of Trasca & Co Eatery in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, an experienced and engaging motivational speaker, and the CEO of global business coaching firm Point NorthEast.
Transcript:
You're listening to level up your business, the podcast where we talk to hardworking business owners and leaders and help them solve real issues in real time. I'm your host, Sarah Frasca restaurant owner, keynote speaker and business coach. I've spent my career not only in corporate America, but also as an entrepreneur, carrying on my family's legacy through my restaurant. Now a business coach and consultant. I'm helping other businesses to use creative problem solving and innovative thinking to drive lasting change. Stay tuned to hear some inspiring guidance that will help you to level up your business. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining me today. I am Sarah fresca from Treska. And yes, you can go ahead and chuckle I love it too. I'm in front of my restaurant. today. I'm out on the patio. It's a beautiful day here in Northeast Florida. And our guest had an emergency. And so I'm going to do the podcast solo today, the live stream solo. But I'm really excited because I've had this teed up this idea to kind of share a little bit of the connection between the consulting firm point northeast, which I started with a business partner. And that's Michael Smith. And part of the reason that I feel our operating system is so strong. And the reason is, because I've used it, and I have kind of seen the success of what it can do for a business. And I will tell you, I own a restaurant. I mean, it's one of the most challenging industries in I think the world, I think most would agree. And for those of you out there who own a restaurant operate a restaurant, I think you know what I'm talking about. My family has been in the restaurant business for 50 years, we've been serving panini sandwiches for 50 years. So I do believe that we have a really unique product, it's really delicious. But there are some things that we've done here at Treska that I think have been noteworthy and a part of building this operating system that I now use for our clients. And so I wanted today to really walk you through my path, my entrepreneurial path, in building this business and how I leveraged the point northeast journey operating system. So I'm just going to pull up the visual so that you can see the journey process. So again, this is the point northeast system. This is what we built in order to help any number of industries, any size business, it doesn't matter what you do, I believe that this can help you in your business. And so I'm going to walk you through all of the different stages of how I applied this to my restaurant. We are a single location restaurant at this point, we're located in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. And we are starting to franchise and so the beauty of this is that I can take the restaurant and this amazing product that my family has served again, for 50 years, I can put together this point northeast system and build for other franchisees a pretty tried and true model. It's a pretty easy model at this point. And I think anybody can do it. So we'll see. Alright, so as you look at this graphic, I want to make sure that you understand the kind of the, the operating system is a journey. So if you can picture that you are climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, or any other amazing feat, right any other 14 footer in Colorado or any other place in the world. There are all sorts of terrains. And where you start from helps to determine the path to get to the summit. And so if you look at this graphic, you can see on the very bottom, we've got the base camp options. And making the analogy to Mount Kilimanjaro because Mount Kilimanjaro actually has several different types of base camps. Some of them, you can start your climb, and maybe it's a faster track to get you to the top faster, but it's a harder terrain. It's a little bit you know, more challenging, more risky. Some of the options of base camp makes it so that the climb is less treacherous, but it probably takes longer, you might need a Sherpa things like that. So where your business is starting from the base camp is really critical to understand. And so I just want to walk you through this and then I'm going to talk about the journey which is the top portion. So each of these different points in time are our pieces to the journey in order to reach the summit. So the base camps, the first one is a survival base camp. Now this is when you are Starting out, right? This is when you're maybe an owner operator. And that is what I was when I first opened to the restaurant. It's pretty crazy what I went through at that time, I don't know that I could do it. In this day, I don't know if it's that I've aged or that I've just gone through it. And so I don't know that I could do it again. But every day I got up, I probably was at the restaurant around 6am, we operated a coffee shop at that time. So I opened it every single day, counting the drawers, opening, getting the product going, serving all by myself, prepping the food, doing all the things that needed to be done for the day. I also had two little kids at that time. So oftentimes, I would bring them to the restaurant with me, open the restaurant, get them off to school and their daycare, and then come back, get through the lunch rush, go and pick them up, bring them back to the restaurant catering order setting up for the dinner rush, whatever it was, bring them to it at the time I had a nanny, bring them to their childcare or to my parents who took them. And then I would come back for the dinner rush, I would close up the restaurant, I would count the drawers, I would do the deposit, I do everything that needed to be done to close the restaurant down, lock up the doors, I would leave here at approximately, I would say 10 or 11 Every night and then rinse and repeat. And that was three years. So part of me setting this up. I know it's kind of like this PTSD, right? But that's what business owners do. That's what entrepreneurs do. We go through this headache, heartache, you know, I mean, it's the blood, sweat and tears moment, right. And it's a really, really important moment. First of all, you're here. So you're setting the tone, you're setting the culture, you're doing everything, you've got your hands on everything, you're doing the hiring, firing training, you're doing the kind of setting of all the processes, and you're learning on the fly. So they're constantly being tweaked. But they're being tweaked, according to what you know is best for the business. You're doing the service. So you're actually setting the tone for the community to understand what this business will serve. Like, at the very beginning, my main role was to stand in the front of the business and actually shake people's hands and say welcome. I'm Sarah fresca, welcome to my restaurant, we serve my grandmother sandwich that we've been serving for over 40 years at that point. And, and, you know, I would explain to them what Appennino was, we also serve pizza, and what kinds of meats Do you like, and what kinds of food and I would help them select their menu items so that it was perfect for them. So anyway, all to say, I was in the survival mode. So again, if you operate an accounting firm, and you're opening an accounting firm, you're probably doing all of the work servicing the clients, you're doing the payroll, you're hiring, you're firing, you're doing the marketing, you're doing the HR, you're doing that, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right, that's survival mode. That is starting from the survival base camp. The next one is the sustainable base camp. This is where you have hired a couple of trusted people to be alongside you working in the business. Now, you can finally really get some work done right? Now you've got someone that's helping to serve, or someone who is doing the bookkeeping. You have people around you now that you can trust, you're no longer doing it by yourself. But you're still working in the business, when you have started to be able to work yourself out of working in the business, and you can see the forest for the trees. Now you're in the third base camp, and this is the stabilized base camp. This is when an owner can step away from the business and trust that it will run and operate smoothly. This is when I was able to hire a general manager, I was able to bring in someone that could help me operate the restaurant on a daily basis, which allowed me the capacity to look beyond to network and find ways to help the business without actually doing the serving and the payroll and all the things. Then I was able to build a leadership team. And I was able to stabilize the growth. And I was able to actually then become in the next fourth base camp, which is the strategic growth aspect. So that allowed me to look around and see what do I want to do from here? Do I want to open another business? Do I want to have more of these? Do I want to add different date parts or different offerings or expand in some way? You know, it kind of actually happened during COVID. Believe it or not, I mean, it was pretty ironic. The you know, kind of, I would say the world had changed. There were so many different dynamics happening. But we were able to see that it probably was better for us to look at franchising than to actually open other restaurants. So that's what we did. We hired a company that helped us to build the opportunity to franchise. We are now registered in all 50 states and we are ready to go. So that's kind of exciting right now we've got a model that allows us to be able to expand in the way that we want to do it. The last base camp is when you have that succession plan. This could be you've got a child that you want to pass the business on, or a key employee that you want to give the business to, or you're going to sell the business perhaps outside, perhaps getting acquired by a larger entity that's going to take it further. In the restaurant industry. This happens a lot right here locally, we have Maple Street biscuit, really, really lovely business. And the gentleman who started it is a good friend, he actually sold to a multinational corporation that now has taken that Maple Street biscuit business, and broad it all over the country. So there's lots of opportunities, this could be an m&a This could be, again, just closing the doors and moving on retirement, or any of those types of kind of succession plans. So now that you can kind of see the different pieces, I believe that I'm in the strategic growth for the task of business. And so I think it's really important as business leaders and owners to try to find out where you're coming from. Sometimes you need an outside person to come in and see where you're at and be able to assess and be able to communicate. All right, you're in this base camp. Right, Michael and I's book, which is coming out soon, we'll also talk about this, but this is a good place to kind of understand, where are you starting your climb from? When I was starting the restaurant again, you know, I think some of those key employees really made a big difference. And so establishing a culture established in kind of my norms for what I wanted in the leaders of the business. And it wasn't until I really established that leadership team, and was running a good cadence of meetings with KPIs to find key performance indicators to find. And they were measured and they were tracked, and people were held accountable for them. It wasn't until that point that I was really able to, again, kind of become a more strategic leader for the business, they now rely on me, you know, I think, in very specific ways, but they don't need me doing the service, I can trust that if I have a friend that orders a catering order, or brings a party or brings her family in to celebrate an event that they are going to be treated in the way that I want them treated. And the food is done well, we have a good consistency, I can now go on vacation and not worry about the restaurant, it is in great hands with my team. And so you can see that, you know, from the beginning of being in that survival mode to building, you know, a team that I could trust to get me through that sustainable period, then stabilizing it and be able to being able to step away work on the business, and then building it from there. So again, I believe that we're in the strategic growth aspect here. Sometimes you go back and forth a little bit, sure, you might lose a key employee and take a step back for a bit or realize that you need to do some things different, take a step back. So you can read document the process. But ultimately, our philosophy is that everything is up into the right, right? It's incremental changes up into the right, if you were looking at it on a graph, a little bit of improvement over time, and Kaizen is king. All right, let me walk you through the operating system. So now we're walking through kind of the mountains on this chart that you're looking at the very first and what we believe is one of the most important yet most under appreciated and therefore least likely to be done steps is the organizational assessment. And at point ne This is where we will come in and assess the organization. We look at the communication styles, the culture, the people, do we have the right people in the right seats? And do they have their roles defined? communicated? Are they being managed to those roles? And are they being actually analyzed? measured? Right? And so this is really understanding a 360 view of the business, looking at the marketing, looking at the way they're serving their clients or customers looking at the tools that they have at their disposal? They have an HR leader or are they even at least knowing that HR is a very important function? Are they doing the type of marketing they need to to bring in new business? Are they supporting their current business? So these are all aspects that we really appoint northeast dive in to get a good understanding. And this is what Michael and a couple others have done from the point northeast team. So look at the trends ask the team to see how we're doing. So that's been kind of fun to be able to leverage one team to help the other. The next thing is to resolve short term issues. And I would say, sometimes, this is not always, but sometimes we will find that there are issues that we can't go any further on this journey until we actually fix them. This might be, you know, a toxic key employee, this might be something as dramatic or threatening to the business as theft or having your cybersecurity not met. Not having proper insurance, not having proper HR steps. I mean, it really can be, you know, shoring up some of these key risks to the business. And it's not in every case, sometimes it's a little bit, I would say, less, maybe dramatic or maybe still important, like, you don't have an organizational chart, right. People don't know what, what the roles and responsibilities are through the organization. And that's very easily communicated defined, and set in place, but they've never done it. And so that's a key issue. And we've got to attend to that before we can move on to this journey. The next thing is building a leadership team. And this is really looking across the T functions in any organization, looking at the marketing, looking at the sales or business development, looking at how we're in taking new clients, or customers, looking at how we're actually doing the work providing the service, looking at the finance function, the HR function, technology, innovation, the facilities management, there are all sorts of different functions that have to be attended to, doesn't have to be that we have one individual person responsible for each of those functions. But we have to have someone that is as I would call it, the tip of the spear. The tip of the spear is the person who is saying, I will take care to make sure that the HR function is met, or the finance function is met. At the very beginning of opening the restaurant, again, I wear all those hats, I was the only one raising my hand. But eventually, over time, I was able to find leaders in the organization that would take on those responsibilities. One of my favorite and you know who you are out there was when I had a young woman who was in college, and she was working for us part time, and she wanted to be a teacher, or she wished she has a teacher now I think, and she was the perfect HR leader for us, she was the perfect person to dig in and to be able to serve and develop our team. Because ultimately, that is who she is, she is the people development person. So she was perfect. And she filled that role for a long time for us even part time. So again, it can be someone doing this fractionally in a lot of our clients cases, we actually bring in fractional leaders for them, when they're not big enough to be able to support a full time person. But you've got to have someone in charge of it, you have to have someone looking out for the facilities, right? Who is making sure that you're ordering more toilet paper and making sure the bathrooms are clean, and making sure that the front walk is you know, swept. These are just examples in the restaurant, but in your business to these things need to be attended to. The next step is doing the strategic planning. About four years ago, we started by learning some of these operational principles and putting them in place in a restaurant. So this is like crazy if you know people in restaurants, right? Imagine taking the time every week to pull my leadership team together in a restaurant, bringing them together talking about different issues and opportunities, talking about what they felt was going well what they wanted to do in the future opportunities that they saw for improvement in the facilities in the functionality and the processes, making sure that everything was defined, documented, communicated, managed to and measured. It was a game changer. I mean, truly, we met every single week, in a leadership team meeting, we met every single quarter, talking about what the next 90 days would look like, and what projects each person would take on. Then we would come back at the next quarter and analyze how did we do? What were the next quarterly goals going to look like? And on and on. And then we had big annual planning sessions where we brought our out of town folks like our CEO who lives up in upstate New York or Hudson Valley area, he would, he would get me on that. But this would be a time for us to all come together. And so we were not only managing the business and talking about great things, when we were building our culture together, supporting each other, having fun, and these are all a part of building a business. So again, believe it or not, I did this in a rush Not every business has the opportunity to do this. In part as part of the strategic planning, we talked a lot about the momentum building components, our culture, what did we want our core values to be? What would our meeting cadence be? What tools would we use? So we use a communication tool called homebase, which is a way for people to communicate with the people that they're working together on that shift. They might have different roles. So different supervisors might communicate with each other. Or it might be an entire team, like, hey, everybody makes sure you remember, we've got a major golf tournament coming to town this week, just different things like that, that we need to communicate, we also use a software system that is really helpful. And this, I think, does a good job of folding together the high level strategy with the momentum needed on a daily basis to accomplish the tasks that need to be accomplished. And for people to kind of put in issues that they need to manage that they need to talk to the team about that they need help with. And so all of these are ways that we built momentum. And these are, again, things that you can do to in your business, as we have developed on this, I believe, at Trask and company eatery, I believe we have reached probably the start of our summit. Our next summit is the expansion into other areas, probably at the Jacksonville market, but elsewhere in the country. And so, you know, our summit are it'll take a while probably, you know, I envision there being hundreds of tracks goes throughout the country, I envisioned that the Camino will be a household name. So those are parts of my vision, and that my family's legacy is secure and safely held. And as part of that we have above industry wages, we have a team that truly cares, we are caring for our community, and we are involved, which means we're giving back and we've got great relationships with folks. And I want it to be a place where people can have a career. Again, I think this was noteworthy in the in the restaurant industry or the food industry, because most people kind of flit in and out well, I will tell you that we are managing careers for our people, I believe that our kitchen folks can become general manager one day, just like our general manager now who started out as a dishwasher. So we are building a career path for them. And there will be upward expansion and mobility opportunities, I think endless opportunities into the future. So that's my Summit. My summit is all of those components. And we're on our we're on our way we're on the track. And I'm having a lot of fun doing it. So all to say, this is the point northeast journey, which again, helps any business in any area, any size, any owner or multiple owners to get to where they want to go. They have to understand where they're starting out from. And that's the base camp. And each of these elements on this journey, need to be attended to, I believe you can do it. But of course, sometimes it is hard to have the discipline. So that's why I brought in the point northeast team to help my track a team to do all of these things so that we could reach the summit. So, you know, I think that was the main gist of what I wanted to share with you today. I hope that if you're out there, and you are struggling as a business owner, that you find someone that you can ask questions to, because it's lonely at the top. I you know, it's kind of funny, I actually was reflecting a little bit as I prepared for, you know, chatting with you today. In the very beginning of opening the restaurant, I would really I mean, I was killing myself. I mean, just walled wall busy, right, I just was up to my eyeballs couldn't see straight. The only break I got every day is that I would go over to the Hilton Garden Inn, which is kitty corner to us right across this past year, probably 2020 yards from me. And I would go into their lobby, and I would just sit there for a few minutes. And I wouldn't talk to anyone. And I would just literally try to decompress and get myself ready for the next shift. And I would think of people who have done this in big time businesses or other careers like Roger Federer always comes to mind for me, because one of the things that I believe makes him so unique is that he can decompress properly, and he can actually go back to the baseline and find that breath to play the next point to his utmost. And that's what I would tell myself in these moments. So that survival mode is pretty interesting to think about. If you're in that right now. Try to make sure you're taking care of yourself. Try to make sure you're finding friends or mentors or coaches that can help you through the pitfalls that every business faces. The ones that survive are the ones who are, you know, finding solutions to those pitfalls. And there are other people out there that can help you through it. You're never ever alone. So thank you for joining me here today. I am so proud of the journey that my team has been on. I could not have done this without them. I mean, I truly, I hope that they understand how much they have been a part of the past and have been a part of the success of this business. It's not just me anymore. In fact, it's very rarely me any longer. They are so important to me and to this business, and I just again, publicly thank them. But you need those people too. So anywhere you are in the world, if you need help reach out, I am here for you. The point northeast team is here for you and we will help you build your business. So I hope you have a wonderful day. Enjoy. I hope you find joy in your day just like I do and take good care of yourself. Take good care of your business. Thank you everyone for joining me. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of level up your business with me, Sara Frasca. If you have a problem in your business that's keeping you up at night. Please join us in a future episode so we can help get you unstuck. Just clicking the link in the show notes and send us a message. Please remember, stay innovative friends.