How do you get five years' worth of insight in five minutes?
This piece was originally shared on LinkedIn in response to recurring conversations with founders and leadership teams around this topic.
I’m publishing it here as part of an ongoing body of thinking around restaurant strategy, market entry, and operational decision-making.
When something in a venue isn't working, we can spend hours digging through reports trying to understand what's happening.
There's a much faster way.
The people serving guests every day already know:
- Was the training used, or just a box ticked?
- What are guests really saying about the new menu?
- Why are mistakes happening - is it capacity, capability or something else?
The challenge is that people filter what they tell you. Especially upwards. Building that trust takes time, but once it's there, you get unfiltered information that no report can replicate.
I've walked into venues where a five-minute conversation with the team told me more than a month of data. The patterns they see every service are the ones that matter most.
Visit your sites. Talk to the team.
The answers are usually already in the building.
Since first sharing this, I’ve seen the same issue surface repeatedly — particularly with businesses entering new markets or scaling too quickly. The underlying challenge is rarely strategy itself, but how early decisions constrain execution later.