About

I have worked in many different fields in my time here on earth, from farms to door to door sales to newspaper delivery, construction, restaurants,  retail,  recreation, and education.

I love to teach and I have taught piano, guitar, sailing, I even taught Disco dancing in my youth ; ) I taught disco for Michale David, Tim Welsh and From there I was introduced to the late, Great Benny Smith where I studied performing arts like Dance, Voice and Drama.

I was doing really well when, I began a family and my priorities had to change dramatically. I had to find a way to support a family, and being a dancer or performer of any kind was going to be tough.

At the time I had just been promoted from Graveyard gas station attendant to Gas station manager and I was making good money, but the company didn’t offer any benefits other than a check, so when they shut down my location and fired my whole crew, I knew that management was going to pay the bills and restaurants were going to be my ticket.

There was a Denny’s down the street from where we were living so I applied to be a manager there, but they wanted RESTAURANT management experience, even though I had been a cook, busboy, dishwasher and waiter before. Wow. Denny’s has high standards. I didn’t know. I thought they were highly “accessible” to new inexperienced people. They were accessible, but they also knew the difference between an employee and a manager. 

So, I made them a deal. Hire me as a cook and I’ll show you my work ethic and you can promote me to manager. That was probably music to their ears. Who wouldn’t want an employee with upward mobility in his sights?

So I cooked for them for a year, as well as cooked for the Peppermill for over a year, when I was tired of commuting 4 hours a day by bus between two 8 hour shifts at two different restaurants on opposite sides of town. I told Denny’s to make me a manager, or I go to Peppermill full time.

They bit and I began my management journey.

I have led a full life, but during my last tenure at Applebees I heard rumblings of a worker revolt. I began hearing terms like, “quiet quitting” and “ghosting” and the turmoil I was hearing about was in my own industry, but I wasn’t seeing much of that at all.  I decided that becoming an employee would be a great way to find out just exactly is going on and how bad was it really.

I quit Applebees with no more of a plan than to work at some of the largest companies in America and see if this worker moral crisis was real or just something bored journalists or angry ex-employees came up with.

This turned out to be quite an educational experiment. It also cost me (and my family) tens of thousands of dollars personally, but I really got the picture of what is so wrong in our industry today.

Training

After working as an employee at three of the largest companies in America it was obvious nobody was being trained how to manage people any more. All the anxiety and depression, laziness and the soul crushing lackadaisical approach to business has killed the frontline workplace.

A large and universal attribute of corporate culture these days seems to be:

Nobody seems to care if anything gets done as long as I can hit the exit before anyone finds out how little I did today.

Since I have been trained how to actually get people to do what they are supposed to do, I can show you what you should do to make your workplace hum like a fine-tuned machine as well as be a happy and fun place to spend much of your life in. If people just knew how fun working on the frontlines can be, nobody would be putting up with this crap, but unfortunately, if you’ve never worked in a fun and profitable job before, it seems like an impossible idea today. 

An Example of how Management Training can cut years off of your management journey.  One of the worst things about working on the Frontlines today is the lack of management skills being taught today. From what I have seen working as an employee for some of the largest companies in America, Nobody is managing the business. Employees often go the whole day without getting much done at all and when your teammates leave, you often have to finish their job for them ON TOP of finishing your own duties. This makes people angry. Especially when this happens again and again and again and nothing ever changes. This is because There are hundreds and hundreds of management skills and tools that are not being handed out to the people that need them most (managers) and they are left to figure things out on their own. 

Let me introduce you to the “F” word in management:

Followup 

If a manager asks someone to do something, but never returns to see if it got completed or not, people will catch on quickly that nobody is watching, and they will not bother to do just about anything. A manager needs to return to that employee they delegated to before they go home and see if the job got done. If it didn’t get done, the teammate needs to explain why, and then they need to be told to do it before they leave.

This is called followup and it tells your team that if you get asked to do something, you will be back to make sure it got done and you will have questions if it isn’t. This ensures more people will do what you asked them to do, and the other people on the team will not have to do other people’s jobs and have less resentments at the end of the day.

How long do you think it will take you to figure this out on your own? I have seen people who have been in management for decades and they fail to do this one simple BASIC thing. Some things you may never find out on your own and you will pay the price for that by having a job that is confusing, difficult, frustrating and just generally horrible. Ive seen it play out over and over again.  Many people demote themselves back to employees after failing at managing. I know Several managers that became bartenders after being disillusioned at managing because they were never given the tools to be successful. 

I offer this humble training program to those who really want to be a frontline manager and reap the benefits of a higher salary, medical, dental, life insurance, and 401k programs and more.

Being a frontline manager can be a great career for hardworking people, and I hope to provide many tips on how to do this job correctly and have a fun and fantastic career.

 

Let’s get started!