Renee Guilbault on transforming your restaurant career

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Are you on track to hit your profitability goals for this year? If you're struggling to hit your numbers, I might be able to help. Here's how I do it. Every year, I offer five complimentary growth sessions, to restaurant owners looking to scare. In this call, we'll examine your current situation to see what is and isn't working. We'll identify your growth possibilities by the close of the year. We'll uncover the number one thing holding you and your business back. And we'll develop a growth plan that will get your business results. Go to planwithjosh.com to schedule one of the five complimentary growth sessions. They're going to go quickly. They always do. Your employees deserve a career they can get excited about. And so do you. Today, we sit down with Renee Gilbo, an industry expert to discuss how intention, modeling, and road mapping can give us a clear path forward for ourselves and our teams. As it turns out, a clear vision of the future reveals the path to get there. [Music] Very much like you, I have been through it in many different seasons and many different chapters and kind of had all sorts of stops and starts and pivots and turns. It's more like sheets and ladders. But I did start my career as a high school dropout. I left home at 17 and worked my way through all sorts of different jobs and landed with a very small business helping other small businesses set up their computer systems at home offices. And one of my clients was the best friend of my uncle from high school. And he had an egg brokerage firm and I had been doing hourly jobs at restaurants. I'd tried being a server and I was absolutely disgraceful and been fired. California pizza kitchen, by the way, responsible for that firing. And I was completely obsessed with what this gentleman was doing with his business. And I had no idea. It had never occurred to me how things like 10,000 pies showed up in bonds across California all at once for thanksgiving. Where'd the pies come from? I never thought about it. It was just the pies were there and it was like, okay, cool. And what do you want, Apple or Pumpkin or what? So he had this whole crazy business and I said to him, look, I think what you're doing is phenomenal. I want to learn everything. If you let me work side by side with you, I will grow your business. I'm sure I can do that. And he for some strange reason said, okay. And I worked with him for five and a half years. And that was my jump into food from the non-restaurant start that I had. And from there, I realized that I wanted to take a chance and go into culinary. And if I didn't do it soon, I felt like the moment was going to escape me. And I was kind of stepping into my mid-20s at that point. And so I took a really big leap and I had a lot of mentors and supportive people who really go for it, do it. And ultimately landed in France, went to culinary school there, worked my way around Europe, cooked, and I really wanted to become an executive chef and did all of that and landed the job and realized that I hated it. And oh my god, what do I do now? Because there's this whole trail of blood, sweat, and tears that I've just followed to get to this role. And am I the only person in the world who's ever made such a huge mistake? And then what do I do? How do I marry all of the things that I love about the work that I've done over all the years before into something that's a new pathway? And I didn't even know things like food and beverage management existed. I didn't understand that. And I also didn't go to college that I don't know that many people who do go to college understand those roles either, unless they go to a hospitality school. And those doors are open for them. So anyway, I will not regale you with the rest of the career history, because I'm 47 now and there's 30 years of it. But the long and the short of it is when I went on maternity leave, I decided to write a book because it was a time it was right before the pandemic that this decision was made. And there was just this real lack of hope in our industry. And I had experienced this kind of wonderful side of food. And I had experienced this with my team. So I mean, my first team was eight people. And my last team included 1,200 people at the headquarters of Google and Mountain View, executing 60,000 meals a day across 42 restaurants. And I didn't know that any of these roles existed when I started. And I thought, you know what, we got to crack this open. And we need to show people that if they do the hard work and if they're willing to go on the ride and learn that everything's available to them, if they stick with it, right? And if they don't get derailed by the hard stuff, it is hard. And you know that. I know that. But it's hard everywhere, right? So I decided to write this book because I wanted to talk about the opportunity side of food, the side that you and I know very deeply. But that is never discussed kind of in the mainstream. We always pick apart the problems. And the reputation is horrendous in the food industry, especially the restaurant industry. And it's very, very well deserved. But there is this whole other side. And I thought, I want to talk about this other side because I've experienced it. I lived it. I've been blessed by it. And I've been an eyewitness of front row seat to so many team members go from hourly rules into very senior leadership roles where they could become the change they wanted to see. But you can't become that change if you keep quitting every job you have, because your boss is a dick or you don't want to work so hard or you want more free time or flexibility or these things. And I think the industry has to respond to those things. And we have to train and get roadmaps for those things. But you got to stay in it to win it, right? So that's kind of the snapshot of how the book happened in the early years of my career. You talk about quitting in a couple of different capacities. And I think that it's really important to call it out, because it wasn't really until the pandemic that I really saw the value in quitting. And I kind of already started that process for myself of extricating from myself and my life the things that were no longer congruous in my life. You know, I as an example, I owned a bar that printed money in Hollywood. And it was awesome. I met my wife there. She had her 25th birthday there when I was a much younger man. But 11 years into owning and operating this bar, it wasn't an asset anymore. Even though it still made money, it was a liability. It negatively impacted my overall lifestyle. It was something that took energy from me instead of giving me energy. And it's there wasn't a person on the planet that I could talk to. They would, you know, I'd say, hey, you know, I really need to get rid of this thing. Say, well, does it make money? Yeah. I mean, do you spend a lot of time in it? No, not particularly. But like, I could feel it. I could feel that it was a drain. It felt like a shoe that was getting ready to drop. So there is this idea around strategic quitting. And not in the way that you referenced where like, you're just making these lateral changes in your life, right? You're not just moving from one dead end position to the next in a very lateral way, never actually moving forward, just kind of moving sideways. Is opposed to, I think what you're talking about, which is figuring out what resonates with you and moving in that direction, even if that means moving away from something that you currently do it. Yeah, absolutely. And it's really hard to move away from the comforts of success, right? Because it's a little bit of a trap because the unknown is really scary. And at the end of the day, we all have to pay our bills and we've all worked hard to get where we are, regardless of whatever the role is. So the unknown kind of becomes this grass's greener situation where it's like, do you want to take the leap? And as you get older, as you have more responsibilities, that becomes more and more scary, I think. But it's also important to talk to people about what they want for themselves. And that matters a lot. And we don't often have those conversations, you know, professional capacities. It's kind of like left to each individual person to figure that out. Hopefully they have some great mentors or people who've been through it, who can tell the truth of what it's like to make those kinds of decisions. But career development on its own really rests within all of us. What do we really want for ourselves? What does success really look like? Success to somebody might be a car or a big TV or knowing that there's money in the bank for retirement or a house or whatever it might be. For somebody else, it might be feeling good about the work that they're doing. And going to sleep at night, knowing they helped somebody else. And that they have the comforts of home. And actually, they are really encouraged and inspired by growing others and helping them on their way. And there's all different shades of what that looks like across the spectrum. That's just a teeny tiny little percentage of what success can mean. And I think we don't talk enough about what each person needs to go through in order to pick and pull that apart and also accept that it changes over time. What it looks like at 20 is different than 25. It's different at 30, it's different at almost 50. It's all the things. And to constantly reevaluate that and check in so that you're not just on this roller coaster that you've buckled into and it's taking you places. And suddenly, you're like, how did I get here? What happened on this journey? And I think it's really helpful to talk about those things because we just don't talk about it enough in team environments and also just in our families, right? - You zoom out and you look at my show and you see 430 episodes, but they're not episodes and they're not guests on the show. It's 430-something ideas. And every guest that I have on the show is the expression of an idea that I want to relate to the audience generally. And I don't want it to come from me because I think everybody's tired of hearing me talk. - I don't know about that, but carry on. - But I've got to believe that the same is true with a book. The you and creating this book get a specific intention. There was a singular idea that you wanted to get across and that thesis is what the book is built around and everything else supports that argument, props that argument up, moves that argument forward. - What is that idea? What is the big idea behind the book? - The big idea behind the book is that the opportunity's there and it's your choice to grab it or not. - And what does that look like? How does that manifest? For those that don't know that live behind the veil when you pull it back, what is the opportunity that you see? - Well, I mean, I think the food world and I'm setting aside all of the things that we know about it that are hard, don't work, challenging. The things that do work are that the barrier for entry is fairly low. And there's a lot of opportunity with organizations to move from entry level into management in a pretty rapid period of time, right? If you can demonstrate some very core skills. And when you move into management very likely, it's a complete paradigm shift because just because you were good at doing something yourself with your own hands doesn't mean that you have any skill set to then help others achieve those same things with that same success because now you're not doing now you're influencing and you're starting to lead. So there's that piece of it there, but I think the idea is if you're a young person and you don't know what you wanna do with your life, come into food because you're gonna learn about people. And the food industry is really a people industry and all of the skills that you learn there are transferable to any industry that you're in. And you might just get bitten by the buck, right? But if you don't, there are all sorts of incredible programs. I mean, the corporate programs right now where you can get a free college degree, you can get to six figures in three years, they guarantee it, look at places like Chipotle, Starbucks, even Walmart, everybody has these very clear programs. Despite what you think about those organizations, they are really trying to drive talent and development and hopefully earn some loyalty to keep those folks in place, as they grow their workforce. So my daughter who's five, if she's faced with college in 13 years or so, I would very happily say it on her, hey, if you wanna learn something while you're figuring out what you really wanna do, go take a job in food, jump on one of those free degree programs. The other side of it, you're gonna have zero college debt, you're gonna have management experience, you're gonna have relationships. And most of all, you're gonna have all these transferable skills that will serve you as you start to figure out what you do wanna do. And I think by and large, a lot of people will stay in food because once you get bitten by the food bug, it's really hard to kind of get away from that. And the pathways are endless. And so I think you've read the book. In the book, there are QR codes across every chapter, right? There's this chapter summary of skill sets and takeaways that you kind of get from each step on the way. And there's the QR code that links to an industry leader talking about his or her own career journey, starting from the beginning in their families, how they started, what their hourly jobs were, summer jobs as teenagers into hourly roles, and how they ended up in many of them in billion dollar PNL roles. Many of them is several hundred million dollar multi-unit rules, some of them in mid-level management rules, spanning from health and safety, all the way to culinary, private jet, food management, you name it, it's all there. And I think when we look at food and we talk about food, we talk about restaurants and we talk about chefs. We talk about operations and we talk about culinary. That's a big piece, but that's not the whole piece, right? Like that's not the pie. There's a whole bunch of other jobs and rules and opportunities in that. So kind of cracking that open across the book and helping people just to broaden their perspective. And imagine, oh, hey, I could do that. If this person did that and I've done jobs like this, I could do those things and to encourage them and help them and support them on the path, right? For me, that's the goal with this work. - It's this evolutionary idea. The idea that it goes from being a restaurant job or a hospitality job or a food business job to a career. And I think that what bridges that gap is this idea that you talk about in a bunch of different ways. It's road mapping is what it is. It's saying you start here and this is where you can end up. And not like if you work really hard and you hope for the best, but there's a step by step process that will take you from here to there. And I think it's a lesson for every owner and operator listening today. Because if you can chart what that looks like for you in your own career, whether you own that business or you operate it and you can do it for everyone that works alongside you and beneath you, it's transformative. Is that being your experience as well? - Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and that I think everybody can resonate, they can think about the leaders in their lives who've inspired them, who's pushed them. There's a difference between a demanding leader and a toxic leader. A lot of people have difficult bosses, but are they pulling you to bring your best and to perform at your best and to discover what you're capable of? Those kinds of bosses you look back on later and get, gosh, they were hard, but they really pushed me and look at what I was able to do. And I think discomfort and growing is something that we need to talk more about. Failure is something that we need to talk more about. And that's what I love about being the salty old age of 47 where I'm like, yeah, I blew it. I blew it here, I blew it here, I blew it here, and all these other people I know did too. And guess what? The sun came out tomorrow. We all picked ourselves up and we rubbed off our skin knees and we just carried forward. And that's kind of this metaphor for life, right? Nothing's perfect and it's never gonna go away. You plan it. Whether you have this full career path where you know exactly what you wanna do, curve balls happen, life happens. And I think it goes back to what we originally started talking about, knowing what you want for yourself. And then not letting anything get in the way of you achieving that, right? Because it's easy to blame other things or failure or fear or circumstances. But at the end of the day, your career journey rests on your shoulders, right? And you have the opportunity at every point to step out and say, I'm not doing this, I refuse to go down here and pivot and go another direction. And to put in what you wanna get out of it and you just never know what's gonna open up. But for sure, opportunities will continue to come if you keep going forward and bringing your best every day. - When you talk about this in the book, this idea of like evolving leadership styles and how your definition of leadership changed over time. If there's only one universal truth that I've seen in my careers that my greatest obstacle to overcome has always been myself. And what I've learned over time or what I didn't know at that time, hubris is a mother, you know what I mean? - There's no place for things. - You used to start figuring that out, right? In your management journey, you're just like, oh yeah, that actually is not gonna work at all. Not at all. - For sure. So that being the case, walk me through because I think in the earliest stages of our careers, we spend a lot of time talking about management. And then over time, you figure out that management is just controlling human behavior, which is not the most efficient way to get things done. And so you begin to look at leadership styles. Ain't you wear it like an outfit? You try on this one. And that one, you figure out what works for you. In doing research for the book, you studied a bunch of different leadership styles and you've adopted several along the way yourself. What have you found to be most effective and what are some of the universal truths around that? - I think transparency has become kind of my biggest default leadership style of just saying the truth, right? We don't need to hide our imperfections or the things that have gone wrong. Everybody can collectively learn from them and also appreciate that they're not alone in the room. And I think we all have these like inner voices in our heads where we tell ourselves that we don't know something and somebody else will do it better or we're failing because we don't instantly have this success unfolding in a particular project that we had mapped out meticulously and then it just went sideways because people are people and that's how life goes. And I think if you're just honest with your teams, if you're honest with yourself, I could tell you, I had this really transformative experience in my early 30s, I was at a food systems design workshop. And Stuart Brandt was there who was the Godfather of the internet and just a really incredible human and speaker. It was real privileged to hear him. But he said something that always stuck with me and I wrote about it in the book. He said, you know, you're not better than anybody else because you lead a team or because you're a leader owner or CEO of a big business or anything else and you have to understand that who was in the room was all of those kinds of people. You said you just have a different assignment. You just have different responsibilities. We're all people and we're all just figuring it out in our own moment and our own way. So that for me changed everything because I realized I could absolutely approach things like that and I did and it unlocked a lot for me. So I think being transparent and it's also I'm not going to lie. It's a little bit difficult as a woman in leadership as opposed to a man because that gender thing is real right and I had to stylistically kind of twist or myself to figure out like how can I talk to people in different capacities in different ways and have the messages land and it's something that is real and that we have to navigate and hopefully one day it won't be that way but I think if you really care about motivating people and inspiring you also care about figuring out how to message to create those magic moments right it's just part of the work that we all have to do. It's about becoming in love with the result. I've said it a hundred times to young managers. It's like I know what you want to say. I know the words you want to use and it's going to be effective potentially but it's going to be stinging and it's going to be this cathartic thing that's going to feel so good because they're going to feel stupid but they're going to learn from it but it just doesn't work. You just have to be in love with the outcome. So I would assume that by and large that's one of the biggest struggles we have as a leader is not saying the thing that we want to say but it's working towards the result that we want to see. Absolutely and understanding and recognizing how important communication is and style is and that your job is really to influence and motivate and help others perform in the way that you're hoping they will to achieve collective goals for the organization and for the success of everyone. It's not your success right it's your team's success and the only reason why you're successful is because they're lifting you into success. So the sooner you get to that conclusion and understand how interconnected everything is I think the sooner it really unlocks team performance. So yeah. Let's talk about enrollment because I think that's really where it gets difficult. It's that Jerry McGuire moment where you're like here's where we're going who's coming with me and then it's just crickets. It's so true and it's I mean that moment is literally I cannot tell you how many times I've referenced that moment especially for people who think you know they're going to burn it all down on the way out or something and you're like guess what you really care. Five minutes later the world is still turning and life is going. Yeah. So what does that look like? What does enrollment look like from a leadership perspective? I think that when you look at the industry at large and you see that for a long time we were considered pirates and mercenaries and even in manufacturing even in the more corporatized side of food it's still very much that industry of second chances especially in back of house and if that's the case how do you enroll people? How do you have that Jerry McGuire moment and more than that one person stands up? So I think it goes exactly to that interconnectedness. I think we all have a collective responsibility as food service leaders as industry people to swing the door wide open for the next generation of leaders and to help them understand what their opportunities are and what they can gain by stepping into whatever the operation is or the industry role or the environment. And I think the way that I talk about this is when you go to a college and you're looking at career padding nobody ever talks about food unless you're going to a very specific college because it's completely dismissed as a real career path like you tell people oh yeah I want to go work in a restaurant and they're like oh when are you going to go get a real job? It is a real job it's a trillion dollar industry restaurant sales in 2023 hit almost a trillion dollars that's restaurant sales alone I mean it's an extraordinarily powerful industry with all sorts of robust career paths but we in the industry have to start nurturing that reputation that exists that is real and also unlocking the tools to help people thrive in their businesses and in their roles period. So when you talk about enrollment it's about reputation it's about putting the energy toward the industry that's positive and also helping people to understand that hey that gig economy job with the flexibility is awesome and it creates and it works in this chapter of life but unfortunately if you want to keep moving forward in your career if you don't have access to people who are lifting you up who are challenging you who are teaching you new skills who are teaching you new processes opportunities colleagues and you're continuing to evolve then you're kind of staying stagnant so what do you want for your future because I get why this works today and in this time period but for tomorrow have you thought about that because this is how we grow we grow together we grow in environments that push us out of our comfort zone where we stretch and we leap and we all need those things in order to achieve more and more so I think that's one of the things that the gig economy hasn't been spoken about enough is that it's really desirable sure for this period of time but then what yeah absolutely you speak about the demands on leaders on teams which brings about this idea of balance right like people talk about work life balance but there also needs to be balanced within work and you talk about this dichotomy this management big five talk to me about the push and pull of that and how that works in a larger ecosystem okay so the way that I visualize this and I write about it in the book this way is a really cool bar with all the cool bar taps where you've got all these bar taps that'll labeled with different things and it's really about how do you prioritize business initiatives right so you've got the needs of the business you've got the needs of your bosses of your customers the needs of your team but then you also have the needs of yourself and figuring out when to pull which lever is part of learning and growing right from management and into leadership and I think a big shift that we also don't talk about enough in helping people try to navigate challenging situations at work is recognizing that at the end of the day when we're in a management role or in a leadership role we have a responsibility to the company to achieve the goals so that we do stay in business and how important the business thriving is to paying payroll our salaries and for food and product cost and transportation logistics and all of the utilities I mean you know I mean you go through the list of the costs and we talk about it all the time in our world restaurant operations and food operations running a less than five percent profit margins right very commonly even less than that right sometimes not even that which is obviously a big problem but you have to remember that you are in business and you want to stay in business and if you want to grow people and champion people then helping them to understand their fiduciary responsibility to the business and why it matters to them if we give food away if we give product away if we turn a blind eye when it's walking out the door if we don't have discipline and controls in our business those are all things that ultimately can take us down and our jobs right so I think when you frame it that way and you start looking at the specifics and you think how can I find more here and how can I inspire my team to understand that the money isn't just coming from this kind of non entity like the Wizard of Oz hiding mind the purple thing this is a real thing this is a business and we have to figure out how to be more and more successful incrementally because then everybody's going to benefit from that right jobs are going to stay wages are going to grow food opportunities really interesting more creative jobs are going to come through that but it all starts with this one thing which is running a business that's profitable it's cash flow positive and that stays that way I think that it goes back to something you discussed earlier which is transparency for so many of us as business owners our teams think that we get in our Bentley totally you know that we take whatever car we're in you have it so easily so that nobody sees that we haven't one thing I said time and time again especially in the earliest days of the pandemic it's just because you own a beautiful restaurant doesn't mean you live in a beautiful house there is almost never a correlation between you do have a beautiful house you're never seen in any way because you're in your restaurant all for sure there's that so that being the case it's not about empathy but it is about visibility because I don't expect anyone to feel bad for me and my situation as a business owner I got myself into it but through the visibility I think that we're able to show it seems like for so long it was always about infallibility there's this story I've told time and time again about how caddy cornered to my restaurant it was to do the owner restaurant and I was always busier than him and not that we were competing it was two different types of cuisines he was lunch and dinner I was just dinner I was all of these things but I would ask him all the times I would walk to the bank because I would pass him on the way to the bank and it's house business and he would always say great and every now and then I'd be like fuck really because my business isn't great this way we're up and down and like you're always great but like nobody's ever in here but like I didn't question it I just assumed he was a genius and I was great because that's what we do it's always you know doubting ourselves right and then one day it's just shuttered the week before great week for him. Broke records the next week. he's out of business and there's no transparency there's no visibility there's no vulnerability. I mean in my own business when I let people know how much money we made or didn't make when I let people know what the expected result was of whatever the next initiative was they were able to enroll in that and it was super valuable. Absolutely. That's the critical piece. Having access to the tools so that you can empower people to understand how a business runs, how it functions and upskill every single person on your team so that you're sitting down and having financial conversations around what's happening in your business. There's nothing more important than that and I will say having worked for a lot of restaurant companies. The ones where they would literally carve out time to talk about the financials where there were projections and goals every day to hit and understanding things. I remember as an hourly worker really looking at the weather and wondering you know is there gonna be a big catering event today? How is the outside gonna do? Are we gonna do okay because I had a manager who was awesome and who talked about these things all the time and it took me a while to understand when I was growing into management why my team didn't know these things because nobody had taught them and trained them and I realized oh I lucked out but now I have to kind of pay it forward. This is really important piece so I think you talk about enrollment you have to talk about empowerment and you have to show people and help them incrementally and invest in them because together you're so much stronger right you're so much stronger. Well I think that you lead by example so being based in Los Angeles for 20 years I didn't hire bartenders and servers and buses I hired actors and models and singers and everybody was literally one great audition away from telling me to go fuck myself you know and truly that was it and I remember being young too and knowing that the person that was looking at me saw me in this role but they didn't see who I really was but the one day I would get that opportunity to shine and I think that so often in our business we choose to stick our head in the sand and not believe that like these people have aspirations outside of our industry and that we've done a terrible job of trying to help them aspire to do things within the industry. But you can't write people off. No you can't and also a point that you brought up that I think we should underscore is the idea of mutual investment that like they're not going to invest in your business in your dreams in your life until you invest in theirs first and it's about more than a paycheck it's about interest it's about investment it's about connections it's about showing them that they don't work for a business they are getting paid to learn and probably one of the most valuable educational environments one could imagine. Absolutely that will serve them in any capacity down the road absolutely right so true. So they say success leaves clues you've got a successful business you've worked for and with other successful businesses along the way what are the common threats you've seen. Discipline I'm gonna start that right there I think that when you have systems in place and when you take the time to do that properly it really helps everything because then you're not living in this frenetic bubble where you're just constantly trying to make sure you have enough money in the bank account for the business to keep going. This part of the reason why I wrote my second book which is called how to design the perfect menu system because I took all of my institutional knowledge from large scale corporations and these kind of common problems I continuously see with my clients in my consulting business mom and pop clients have these all these kind of repeat problems and they all boil down to not setting up the systems and investing in the foundational tools so that they can then operate those tools. So trying to create really easy access to them downloadable templates that are really customizable and they're all free on the website so it's like go get them and use them but by and large if you need help and you don't know how to run your business you got to put your hand up and I think when you tell that sad story about the guys like yeah everything's great and then he's closed all the sudden that's happening all over the place and there is no shame in saying hey I need help and I think that again the stronger to and better theme is so critical in our industry not only to create this energy and environment around the truth of the opportunity side to invite workers to come in and invest their time and careers but also to help each other so that we are running more profitable businesses so that we are growing together and then we're fostering creating these companies with resources that can help grow teams the right way right so it's all interconnected. What should we steal from him? What are the tactics tools and strategies? You don't have to do it it's all there. I think you know that's why everything all of my tools on our company website are unguided at this point I'm really looking for feedback so I really invite everybody to go in and download and customize and play with them and let us know how they need to be stronger and better and easier to use. I think remembering that you're not alone that there are so many people who experience what you experience every single day and that it's okay to say it and looking for that community whether it's locally based and it's people who are around your neighborhood who can help your business and support you and also talking about talents and turning this into I think a shared talent economy which is something that we also haven't had time to talk about but just because somebody maybe isn't thriving in their role or they're not challenged because they've kind of met the ceiling in the job doesn't mean that two business owners or ten business owners can't say hey I've got this really great person and they have timed out in their job I want to find them their next challenge can you help me I need a backfill them do you know anybody and then help them get into that next right job so they continue to grow and guess what they'll come back one day and they'll pay it forward and we can all operate our businesses and our work forces that way and so I think there's just a lot of opportunity for all of us whether it's business leaders restaurant leaders but in terms of stealing stuff it's like just take it it's available it's there the interpersonal skills development that you need as a leader it's there the tactical side those systems and tools and processes and learnings are there take it whatever you need and that's one of the joyful things about being in the season of life is building these kinds of tools that help propel people forward right now swing the door open for the next generation of leaders to hopefully do it way better and way easier than we had it our industry suffers from razor thin margins and the only way for us to ensure profitability is to make data driven decisions the numbers don't lie and Yelp for restaurants just released some incredibly compelling numbers for starters Yelp reaches nine times more customers online than open table and would restaurants pair that level of visibility with guest manager in Yelp ads they experience up to an 8% lift in diner bookings think about with that 8% lift could do for your restaurant's finances to learn more about how Yelp for restaurants can support your business visit restaurants dot yelp dot com forward slash full comp to learn more today that's Renee Gilbo pick up her book a taste of opportunity wherever books are sold if you want to tell us your story here previous episodes or check out our other content go to restaurants dot yelp dot com forward slash full comp thank you so much for listening to the show you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts while you're there please leave us a review a special thanks to yelp for helping us spread the word to the whole hospitality community I'm Josh Coppel you've been listening to full comp