The Art (and Science) of Multi-Unit Leadership in 21st Century Foodservice

By Jim Sullivan Graphic Image - Cover of book - Multi Unit Leadership
Copyright 2007 www.sullivision.com

The Multi Unit Manager is hidden to the guest and invisible to most of their hourly staff. Yet they keenly shape and orchestrate the experience of both customers and crew. Without multi unit managers, VPs and CEOs would stagger and fall, systems would crumble, and yet stockholders rarely know them by name.

They are fast-thinking, numbers-crunching, paper-pushing, service-driven mobile leaders on the battlefield with a brain and a Blackberry as weapons of choice. They embrace technology, drive profitability, foster change, build teams, unify standards, and mentor Generation Next. They influence and shape the experience of dozens of managers, thousands of team members and hundreds of thousands of customers. And they do so by indirect influence, not hands-on control, a fantastical skill usually reserved for CEOs, which in a way, they are. These “managers of managers” supervise anywhere from 6 to 12 stores in a territory, effectively serving as “Area CEOs” over units that can generate as much as $25 to $50 million dollars annually. Most have mastered their role the hard way—trial by fire—because their companies invest more time and money training their cooks and servers than they do their Multi Unit Managers. All of this is about to change.

Our company, Sullivision.com, has just finished a benchmarking 18-month-long industry-wide survey of 482 Multi-Unit Managers (MUMs) across 21 different foodservice brands in North America. MUMs who participated work for companies like Starbucks, Golden Corral, Pizza Hut, Panera Bread, Burger King, KFC, Texas Roadhouse, Denny’s, Sodexho, Jack in the Box, Wendy’s, Walt Disney Company and others. Our research and insight into their best practices has just been published in a brand new book called Multi Unit Leadership: The 7 Stages of Building High-Performing Partnerships & Teams. We will be presenting our research for the first time at the People Report’s QSR conference in June.

Multi-Unit Leadership willfocus on best practices related to:

-The 7 Growth Stages and Competencies of High-Performing Multi-Unit Leaders.
-Better ways to select and grooming newMulti-Unit Managers.
-Creative coaching and development for the veteran MUM.
-Planning and executing effective quarterly business plans that align with period -goals and shift execution.
-Evolving MUM store visits from “inspect-and-correct” to collaboration and development via a 5-stage process that gets guaranteed results.
-Building and sustaining bench strength among management and hourly teams.
-The art of situational leadership related unit manager coaching
-How to best manage multiple priorities and time in a 24/7 world.
-Building teams among diverse franchisee personalities and objectives
-The 10 do’s and don’ts of conducting revenue-generating store visit.

Whether you or your company operate two units or two hundred or two thousand, this presentation will show you and your multi-unit leaders or franchise business consultants how to unify brand standards, maximize sales across regions, build bench strength and beat the competition every shift.