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PRESTON LEE

@the30rule

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Consistent Hospitality Scales Restaurants.
I build the systems that make it happen.
Not a theory. 400+ venues scaled.
Not just train ⏭️ transform ⤵️

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a month ago

Restaurant leadership training

only works when your standards are
clear before you hold people accountable.

Most teams don’t push back on accountability…
they push back on confusion.

Because when expectations are vague,
correction feels personal.
Unfair.
Targeted.

But when training is clear,
accountability becomes alignment.

Not calling someone out.
Calling them back to the standard.

That’s the shift most operators miss.

They try to enforce what they never clearly taught.

And then wonder why the team resists it.

Training removes emotion.
Consistency builds trust.
And trust is what drives performance,
retention, and the guest experience.

If your team keeps “missing the mark”…
it’s not a performance issue.

It’s a clarity issue.

Comment STANDARD to learn how to
train it and hold it consistently. by @the30rule

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5 months ago

Restaurant training systems

are outdated and costing you results.

After working with 350+ restaurants,
the pattern is always the same.

The hospitality isn’t consistent.

Not because the team doesn’t care.

Because the system doesn’t exist.

Most restaurants are still training
the way they did five years ago.

Shadow shifts. Information overload.
No follow up. No accountability.

But everything changed.

Gen Z learns differently.
Post-COVID expectations are higher.

AI has sped everything up.
And your training didn’t keep up.

The restaurants winning right now simplified everything.

Clear standards.
Simple systems.
Daily reinforcement.

That’s what creates consistency.

That’s what builds culture.

That’s what drives results.

Train the new way.

Or keep getting old results.

If you’re interested comment
“TRAINING SYSTEMS” by @the30rule

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7 months ago

I noticed the same trend:

👉 Owners were willing to pour time and effort into aesthetics, equipment, technology, and food development but not into training, culture, and systems.

It always ends up on the back burner.

“Just teach the staff the menu and ‘steps of service.’”

✅ The truth: mediocre training will ALWAYS yield mediocre results.

📈 statistics show the key to any profitable restaurant is in an amazing, CONSISTENT guest experience.

The data shows that restaurants without an amazing, consistent experience had a customer retention rate of around 25%.

BUT. the restaurants that DID have the amazing, consistent experience, had a customer retention rate over 70%.

So, what is an amazing - consistent experience?

Let’s break it down…

First, provide an amazing experience:

“Steps of service” is just service.

Service = business transaction.

Hospitality = personal experience.

In 2001 Chick-fil-A consulted with the Ritz-Carlton to design their hospitality experience and training.

They went from $1B to over $21B to date.

The owners credit much of their success to knowing the difference between proving service vs hospitality, and instilling that into all their employees through proper training and culture through systems. So…

Give your customers a personable orchestrated experience through hospitality that’s supported by the host, runners, bussers, servers, bartenders, managers, and even the kitchen staff.

Everyone has the same goal in mind, and they’re on a mission to WOW each guest 🚀

THEN, make that experience CONSISTENT through SYSTEMS.

Each front-of-house (FOH) staff member should have their part in the experience memorized.

It should be written down in the back-of-house (BOH). They should be quizzed on it EVERY pre-shift.

Share their wins with managers daily. They should believe in it, provide it, and always be talking about it.

To get my book where I dive deeper comment “HOSPHANDBOOK”

#entrepreneur #restaurantowner #restaurantowners #systems #consistency #training by @the30rule

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2 years ago

Obviously, you want to eliminate FOH mistakes as much as humanly possible, but they’re still going to happen.

However, properly handling a mistake, no matter how big or small, can turn a casual guest into a hardcore Loyal Repeat Guest faster than you would if you provided an amazing experience.

That’s why it’s so important to look at each mistake as an opportunity.

So how do you use a mistake to win a guest over?

1. Make sure there are High-Level Systems in place for each possible mistake and rank them: small, medium, and large. Then act accordingly.
2. Use the right verbiage and tonality when handling each mistake. This is key.
3. Make sure the systems are set up to get management and/or the kitchen involved at the correct times.
4. Always know how to go above and beyond without comping. Comping will be necessary, but it’s paramount to learn the art of compensating without discounting to ensure the guest comes back!
5. Collect contact info to follow up with the guest and make a true personal connection.

If you set these systems in place, you’ll capitalize on honest mistakes instead of taking a hit from them by possibly losing a guest, bad press, or even a bad review.

Share this with someone who could benefit 🚀

#restaurant #restaurantdevelopment #marketing #growth #profit #bar #hotel #hospitalty #development #branding #systems #hospitality #restaurantowners #restaurantowner taken in Dublin, Ireland by @the30rule

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2 years ago

Restaurant accountability systems

are what separate high-performing
teams from chaotic ones.

Most hospitality problems do
not start with bad employees.

They start when leaders stop
coaching, stop inspecting standards,
and start accepting excuses.

The moment accountability disappears,
consistency disappears.

Standards become suggestions.
Training loses its impact.
Culture starts drifting.

Great leaders understand that
accountability is not about catching
people doing something wrong.

It is about protecting the guest
experience, protecting the team,
and protecting the culture
they worked hard to build.

Because what leaders tolerate
eventually becomes the standard.

And the standard always becomes
the guest experience.

What is one standard in your business
that you refuse to compromise on?

This is the leadership metric. by @the30rule

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12 hours ago

Disneyland is packed shoulder to shoulder on a Tuesday at three in the afternoon. There is no slow time.

Think about what they put you through to get in.

You sit in traffic to reach a parking structure. You wait in line for the structure itself. You hunt for a spot. You pay a hundred dollars for the day.

Then you unload the car, take the stairs, walk to a tram, ride it, walk the length of Downtown Disney, and you are at the gate.

Now you get to pay for the food. And the drinks.

Expensive and inconvenient at every single step. And still full, every day.

Why? Because every person there is trained to give you an experience.

Now flip it. When you spend your money somewhere, does the person handing you the product make you feel valued?

Or is there someone in front of you who could not care less that you showed up?

The host who will not look up from their phone until you are standing right in front of them. Who seats you without eye contact, mumbles something, hands you menus and walks off.

Every one of your steps of service was technically completed. Nobody was made to feel anything.

Same business. Opposite outcome.

Here is the part that should stick. At the Ritz-Carlton, hospitality is not the front desk's job.

Walk past a groundskeeper hedging the bushes and he stops. Makes eye contact, smiles, asks how your stay is going and whether he can do anything to make it better.

Maintenance does it. Everyone in the building does it.

Not because they hired warm people. Because every one of them was trained to.

That is what restaurant training systems produce. Not a script. A standard that holds at the edges of the building, where nobody is watching.

Real hospitality training reaches the person sweeping the walkway, not just the one taking the order.

Most restaurant leadership never gets that far, and the gap shows up at the host stand.

Your restaurant culture is whatever your least-trained person does when a guest walks by.

That is also your guest experience, and it is where retention quietly begins.

People will forgive expensive.

They will not forgive feeling invisible.

#restaurantowner #hospitalitytraining #restaurantleadership #restaurantculture by @the30rule

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4 days ago

A guest pointed a finger in my server's face and barked one word at him. Iced tea.

We called Brett the unflinching server. You could not get under his skin. We tried, for sport.

Slow lunch. A guest sits at the table right in front of me and Brett walks up.

Before Brett gets a single word out, the guy points at him and says iced tea.

Brett says, you got it. Did you want lemon with that?

The guy puts his menu down. Yeah, I want lemon with that. It's an iced tea. Did I say no lemon?

And Brett says, you know what, that's a great point. That's a dumb question to ask. Iced tea, lemon, coming right up.

I followed him into the kitchen. Are you okay? Do you want me to say something?

He said, Preston, he's having a bad day. I got it.

Thirty minutes later I look across the room and the two of them are laughing together.

When the guy leaves, he pulls me aside. He tells me Brett is not just a great employee, he is a great human being, and he hopes I appreciate him.

I said thank you. He said no, I am serious.

He had lost a close family member unexpectedly a week before. He had not smiled once since it happened. Until that lunch.

Here is the part that stuck. My instinct as a manager was to go tell that guest he cannot talk to my staff like that.

Brett's response was, why not.

That is restaurant culture at its best, and it is not a personality trait.

You cannot put that on a schedule. But you can train the thinking underneath it.

That is what restaurant training systems are for. Not scripts. Judgment, taught on purpose.

Most places stop at the steps of service, because the steps are the easy half to write down.

The hard half is what happens when a guest is rude. Real hospitality training teaches that, and it teaches why it usually has nothing to do with you.

That is a restaurant leadership decision, and nobody ever makes it by accident. Somebody has to decide it matters.

Get it right and your guest experience survives your worst table of the week, and your best people stop absorbing the damage alone.

It shows up in retention too.

#restaurantowner #hospitalitytraining #restaurantleadership #restaurantculture by @the30rule

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2 days ago

Huge shout out to @vineyardvines leadership team.

One of the most impressive groups we have worked with, at every level. Engaged, humble, hungry to get better. Rare at that size.

Time with them reinforced something I keep coming back to.

Everything in this industry is about to change except one thing.

AI will write your schedule. Handle reservations. Flag waste. Take the order and run inventory better than any human did.

Fine. Let it.

None of that touches the only thing a guest actually remembers.

How they felt.

A machine gets the order right. It cannot notice the table is celebrating. It cannot read a face and slow down. It cannot make a stranger feel like the most important person in the room.

That is the moat. The last one.

Which means leadership matters more now, not less.

Your advantage is no longer operational. Everybody will have the same tools. The difference is whose people are better, and people get better only when somebody develops them.

The job is simple to say, hard to do. Lead people at the highest level, whoever they are.

The nineteen year old on their first job. The veteran who has seen every system come and go. The one who learns by watching and the one who needs the why.

Great restaurant leadership adapts to the person in front of it.

Then point all of it at the guest.

Make guest experience the north star. Not labor. Not speed. Those are inputs. The guest is the outcome.

Build your hospitality training around it. Build restaurant training systems so it survives turnover and holds on your worst Tuesday. Build a restaurant culture that runs when you are not there.

Let the technology take the tasks. Spend what it gives back on the human part.

Then the numbers follow. Retention climbs and turnover drops. Upselling improves because a developed team reads the room.

That is a restaurant sales increase and restaurant growth no competitor copies with software. It is what makes scaling restaurants real, because a second location needs leaders, not just tools.

The tech gets cheaper for everyone.

Your people are the only thing that stays yours.

#hospitalitytraining #restaurantleadership #restaurantsystems #restaurantowner by @the30rule

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2 days ago

Ask your team what the most important thing in the building is.

You will get six answers.

That is not their fault. Nobody told them, so they guessed from the evidence.

You check labor daily and never ask about a guest who came back. You call out a late clock in on the spot and let a rushed greeting slide for a month. Your pre shift is the eighty six list and the special.

So your team learned the real priority. Speed, cost, and not getting in trouble.

Hospitality never made the list, because you never put it there.

That is framing, and you do it whether you mean to or not.

Framing is how your people learn what matters, where it sits, and what to do when two things compete on a Friday.

So frame it on purpose.

Name the hierarchy out loud. Guest first, team second, task third. Then prove it when they collide. A manager who drops a checklist to help a drowning server teaches more than any meeting.

Tie every standard to the guest, not the rule. Nobody gets fired up about a policy. They get fired up about the person on the other side.

Frame forward, never backward. You blew that check back is a verdict. Hit them at two minutes next time is a path.

And frame yourself inside the standard. We slipped last week, me included. Stand outside it and nobody believes it.

Then put the frame everywhere it lives. Your hospitality training, so the why comes before the what. Your restaurant training systems, so the language survives turnover. Your pre shift, so it gets heard a thousand times. Your restaurant leadership, because your managers are the frame your team actually reads.

Repeat it long enough and it is your restaurant culture.

That is where buy in comes from. People commit to a priority they can see, not one they infer.

Then the numbers follow. Guest experience gets consistent. Retention climbs and turnover drops. Upselling stops feeling forced, because your team knows what the work is for.

That is a restaurant sales increase and restaurant growth you built, and the only way scaling restaurants holds in a second location.

Tell them what matters.

Then act like it does.

#hospitalitytraining #restaurantleadership #restaurantsystems #restaurantowner by @the30rule

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2 days ago

Executive Leadership summit hosted by @oph_harrigan @jwags128 . 3 days of clarity, focus and accountability. A 60+ year legacy makes you the 1% in the Hospitality industry. Leadership Development and Training Innovation keeps you the 1% in the Hospitality industry. Part 1 focuses on expectations and deliverables. @the30rule protocol is the foundation we build off of. #leadership #executive #legacy #chicago taken in Chicago, Illinois by @the30rule

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2 days ago

Restaurant management training

becomes far more effective when accountability
happens before problems become disasters.

One of the biggest leadership mistakes in
hospitality is waiting too long to coach people.

Most managers avoid feedback until
frustration builds, emotions rise, or
performance becomes impossible to ignore.

By then, the conversation feels
reactive instead of developmental.

High performing restaurant leaders create
consistent coaching systems instead.

A simple framework like Keep, Stop,

Start allows managers to have quick
but meaningful conversations with
team members on a regular basis.

What should they keep doing because
it positively impacts the team?

What should they stop doing before
it becomes a larger issue?

What should they start doing
to continue growing?

This creates clarity.

It removes guesswork.

It helps employees feel supported
instead of blindsided.

And it turns accountability into an ongoing
leadership habit rather than a last resort.

The strongest restaurant cultures are built through
consistent communication, not occasional correction. by @the30rule

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