"I’m working 80 hours a week, but it still feels like I’m falling behind."

Sound familiar? Any project can consume your life if you let it, but restaurants seem uniquely talented at this. It’s a common complaint both from my clients and in restaurant ownership spaces online. How can I, one person, be expected to build and maintain a menu, keep up with vendors, rotate inventory, design and maintain a dining area, build a compelling cocktail list, handle customer complains, schedule and hire staff… the list goes on.

The truth is, you can’t.

No one person can do all of those things well enough to build a strong business and keep their sanity. NFL teams typically have twelve coaches. Even high school football teams typically have no fewer than three. Fortune 500 companies have more leadership than they know what to do with. Every tech startup I’ve ever advised has had half a dozen C-levels and directors before they even have a product. Why?

Specialization and delegation. As a restaurant owner, I’m sure you can handle each of the tasks I mentioned. Maybe marketing comes more naturally to you than accounting, but you’re probably at least a little familiar with both and probably are capable of doing both. But does that mean you should be doing both?

In the book Unreasonable Hospitality Will Guidara talks about Eleven Madison Park’s ownership program. If you’re not familiar, this program is designed to break every tiny aspect of the restaurant into discrete programs that are run by people who are passionate about them. He talks about his world-class wine director who is of course more than capable of producing a solid beer, cocktail, coffee, and tea solution for the restaurant. But to make each of these things great, they had to be owned by someone who was passionate about them. Coffee grew from an after-dinner afterthought to a tableside experience. Cocktails grew from well-executed classics to award-winning creations. Tea went from bags in a box to exotically-sourced rarities. All because they were run by people with the time and passion to do so.

Most of us are not Eleven Madison Park, nor do we necessarily want to be. But we can still take these lessons and apply them to where we are today.

First step: find your gaps. Take a moment and do a little exercise with me: write down the things that matter in your restaurant. There’s no right or wrong answers here, just write what comes to mind. Try to think of at least 20. A few to get you started: marketing, menu design, kitchen equipment, bookkeeping, beverage program. Got your list? Now, I want you to be completely honest with yourself and circle the ones you’re truly good at. No one else will see this, it’s just for you. Next, in a different color, or using a different shape, circle the ones you feel most lost doing, that drain the most energy from you, the ones you wish you didn’t have to do.

The ones you first circled are what you ought to be focusing your energy on. The second ones are your gaps - what you should be hiring for. If you were opening your restaurant for the first time, we’d call these your Key Hires - the people you’re hiring not just to complete tasks, but to own parts of your business.

Second step: hire to fill those gaps. What do your gaps have in common? Are they all front of house issues? Are they all operational? Guest-facing? Whatever they are, build a job description for someone to handle a bundle of those gaps and start hiring. Importantly, this is going to be different than hiring you’ve done in the past. We’re gong to be looking for someone who can fill those gaps, yes, but there are three other traits we’re going to be looking for that are just as necessary.

• Passion: you need to find someone who cares about the area you’re hiring them for. A clock-puncher is not going to take any load off of your shoulders. You need someone who reads about this area in their free time. Someone who notices what other restaurants are doing when they see it. Someone who has ideas and wants to implement, experiment. and optimize.

• Autonomy: remember, the main reason we’re making these hires is to free you up. That’s not going to happen if the person you hire isn’t comfortable making decisions and executing without running every little thing by you. They should have enough confidence in themselves and their own ability to make decisions, enact plans, and know when something is working and when it isn’t.

• Trust: you have to trust them. There has to be some vibe there. Handing over part of your restaurant, your baby, to someone else is no easy task. If you’re going to do it successfully, it has to be to someone you trust.

Don’t be afraid to be direct in the interview and ask them to prove these things. Show them your operation, ask them what changes they’d make just from a surface level. Ask what ideas they’ve been dying to try. Ask how they measure if an idea is working or if it isn’t. The best candidates will come in with this already prepared, but that’s extremely rare.

Third step: set up regular touch points. Once you’ve made your hire, keep the communication up. At the beginning, there’s a lot of work for the two of you to do to align on vision, expectations, and outcomes. You’ve hired them to handle a part of your business, but it is still your business. Let them have their space, but make sure you’re setting expectations and checking in regularly to ensure everything is heading in the right direction. The key to this phase is you must resist the urge to meddle. Keep your expectations and vision high level and make room for theirs - that’s why you hired them after all. Stay out of the day to day. You hired someone to take this off your plate, let them do it.

Fourth step: let go. Once its become clear that you made the right choice in hiring, reduce those touch points. Show them that they’ve earned your trust and let them do what they’re best at so you can focus on what you’re best at. That’s a winning formula that’ll produce a much better restaurant than you could ever produce on your own. And it’s what will finally start moving you to fewer hours, to less stress, and to more growth.

What items were you surprised to see on your list? What are the commonalities in the gaps you identified? Send me an email at Kris@GetAFreshPerspective.com and let me know - I read every one.