YouSaid · the spoken record

Erin Wade

lines on the record: 76
first: 2024-09-17
most recent: 2024-09-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Success for me is, I think just having meaningful relationships in my life, whether it's with work, with family, and Creating ways for other people to do the same.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally. So, if you don't do it for a few weeks, it's going to matter to you. You know, you're going to be in better shape. You're going to have more pride in what you do. Your times are going to be better. Like that's a different thing.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A hundred percent, if you're a runner, you're going to create a training schedule for yourself. You're going to start like, you know.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're like someone who likes to ride bicycles versus you're a cyclist or like someone who likes dicks around in the ocean or a surfer, you know, I do think that there is tremendous power in saying something about yourself and saying, no, I am a surfer, I am a CEO, I am a chef. I just found that I felt a lot more pride in myself. You know, those identities meant something, not just to the external world, but to me. I found them personally empowering something that well like when I would get like a little lost I could come back to and think like what does it mean to be this you know”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Up, you know, everyone's titles, and there's so much pride associated with having a title that is more serious and you start, you know, acting like that. Like someone who cooks versus someone who's a chef, that is a very different level that you're going to think about cooking and food. Someone who is a leader and someone who is a CEO, same deal.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I thought of CEOs as like you needed to be the head of some gigantic company. You needed to have a full stack of people, you know, C-level titles beneath you. I just decided to start experimenting. I was like, you know, what is it going to sound like in that New York Times interview if I'm not a chef or I'm not a CEO? Like I think I'm not going to get taken as seriously for my food or for my business ideas. And so I just decided to actually just embrace those titles and see what happens. I started speaking at conferences for CEOs. There was like groups that I could not join previously because I did not consider myself a CEO that I now could be part of that created a lot of like, you know, mentorship opportunities for me. But it just really expanded my network. It expanded my reach. It really affected how seriously people took me. So I started encouraging everyone within the company. We started really just like.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I do think titles are incredibly important. I think like most things I've realized are important. I realized how important it was by sort of messing it up the first time and then learning over time sort of why it matters. I guess I can illustrate it best just with my own journey with it. I'm an owner of a small restaurant in the grand scheme of things as well as we do. It's, you know, still just a singular business. As I started gaining more prominence for our ideas about what we're doing in the workplace, our sexual harassment, you know.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So then I would say that we should then have a conversation about this concept of collective success. And when we think about like how to create the most good for the most number of employees, is that the right angle? And I would say probably not, because even if 49 love it and one hates it, my guess is 50 out of 50 will like it if you compliment their work.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I search for hours Your point, I mean, managing for impact is hard. You have to ask yourself that question if you have 50 people are most going to love it if you, you know, complement their shirt or their hat? Are they not going to care? Some percentage are going to get affected.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Restorative conversation about it and talked about it and talked about why the intent doesn't matter, but the impact does. And so then we just started talking about like, how could you have a better impact on people's work? It was to honestly not talk about their appearance. Like no one cares what your manager thinks about your shirt or your hat or a smile, right? Like they want to know what you think about their work. Tell them like you did an amazing job with that table. It helped him manage for like he had this really positive intent that he could channel into more positive impact for the team.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Them, or we had this awkward moment, we would teach that all throughout the organization because I think most people really want to do good, but sometimes we have a really negative impact. I had a manager, he would go around and compliment people on their clothing. He'd be like, cool hat, love your shirt. You know, like he was just this like very sort of enthusiastic, like puppy dog energy. I do think he had like really, really positive intent, but I had a staff member who came to me one day and was like, hey, this person told me that I have a nice smile and that like creep me out and made me feel uncomfortable. That makes sense. If a customer had said it would have, that would have been like an orange at that table, you know? But also like, that's a really common, like, you know, come on to women is like, oh, like nice smile. I believe that that, you know, manager had a really positive intent to try to make her feel good, but had a really negative impact where she felt like he was being creepy and like borderline, you know, using a line that someone else might use to hit on her. So we had.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This idea of impact and intent is, I guess, to my earlier point about the best lessons you learn in business you can take to like all of your you know relationships in your life I think intent and impact is huge a lot of people think intent is what matters but we would teach that actually it's impact an example would be let's say that I see someone walking down the street and they have you know like a big belly and I'm like oh my god congratulations like when are you do and they're like I'm not pregnant that is just so deeply embarrassing my intent might have been really positive I might be trying to like make them feel good about themselves congratulate them on something but the impact is super negative right like turns out they're not pregnant they now feel like embarrassed it's a totally awkward moment between us should i like not apologize to that person because i i meant something really positive with you know my compliment no like of course i should like i i either hurt”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is honestly one of the hardest times that I've seen in the restaurant industry in all the years I've been in it. I think we're sort of in a moment of reckoning and change. Costs have gone up. I think people are rethinking the meaning of work and what's worth their time. And most restaurants, like I said, are not inspiring places to work. And so I think a lot of people have said, I don't need to do this with my life. So restaurants nationally are having really hard time staffing, really hard time making money like the face of cities have changed in the face of like, you know, a lot of work going remote. So I think it's just a moment of like reconfiguration and change. And I think all industries go through it. And I think it's just being particularly hardfelt in the restaurant industry right now. There's a lot to be learned from the people who are like creative and trying new things and experimenting with new things. I think like the hardest moments are usually what”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did that. And I think, you know, everyone who worked there during the decade I was running it, you know, many of them are still there. Some have gone off to do their other things. I got to go and have the time to write a book about it. We're sitting here right now. I think that it was never about like calcifying that culture in one organization for the rest of time. It was how do we make work that's worth doing for more people? And I think to that end, I'm very proud to have sold and been able to write the book. be able to influence more people, I think.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, maybe this is like not a very inspirational answer, but it's a pragmatic and true one. I mean, I think, I guess what I'd advise anyone who's thinking of selling a company is I think I wanted to have the belief like I currently sit on the board of the company that purchased Homeroom. I got to advise their other brands. I get to like I think I was excited to have potentially a bigger impact. But I do think the truth is, you know, the person who's really on the ground running something is really the most deeply responsible for the culture and all the people who are working alongside them, right? Like that's what creates the culture of that organization. I think I wanted to believe that I could have a bigger impact from a different seat. And I do in some ways, but I think if you're going to sell your company, you have to feel pretty comfortable with knowing that that culture is going to change. When I think about, again, my original goal was starting home room. It was to create a job that I and many other people would love and that would create a positive impact. And we...”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh my God, yeah. I was a dark moment in my life, honestly. You know, for me, it felt like raising this child until they're like 10 years old and then giving it up for adoption to another family where I still get to like visit it, talk to them, but I don't get to be responsible for sort of what happens to them. It's really emotionally painful. It was also a time when it was like I think if the world had been normal since I sold when it was, you know, during the pandemic, you know, I would have traveled a lot. I would have just totally distracted myself. But there was nothing. You know, like the world was a bleak, dark place in general and I couldn't travel. I couldn't distract myself. So it was really this moment of like, oh my God, like who am I without my company, my work? Have I made a mistake? I think it was really, yeah, a sad, hard time.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like dreams should evolve and change. We don't talk that much about what happens when you actually get to achieve your dream. Do you just do that same thing forever? You know, no, like it grows and it changes as it should. I really think that that is what it was for me.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Already thinking, you know, what is this next chapter of my life going to look like? Because this company already has leaders that can really run it every day and systems that I'm proud of that I really want to spread into the world. That was sort of the broader vision and goal. Grow the impact of all the great ideas that we've done. But, you know, there was also really like personal parts of it that had nothing to do with all that. You know, I just, I was also getting divorced at the time. The pandemic had hit and it was so unclear, you know, what the industry was going to look like in the pandemic. Sort of like anything in life where just the like timing of a bunch of crucial pieces came together where I was like, you know what, this is the right time to write a new chapter. And it's tough. We don't have a lot of stories like that, right? Like when you think of a great movie or something, it's about this singular thing, like, oh, I just wanted to open a great restaurant. And they're supposed to do that and like be happy forever. But I think the truth is.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, like you're making. Part of it was I had already been thinking to myself. So I guess for one, I had received offers many, many, many times over the years to sell home room. And I never even took a meeting with anyone. Like I was just disinterested. I had been a CEO running it for a decade at that point. And I didn't personally aspire to like turn it into a gigantic chain. I wanted to create this beautiful place for people to work where we loved coming there, where it felt special, where it was having an impact on the world. And I think that original vision had been achieved. And I was actually itching a little bit to be able to do like new projects. Like I had wanted to write this book for a while. I wanted to start getting our ideas into the broader world because my dream wasn't just to keep growing homerom into oblivion. It was, I liked having this sort of single restaurant. So I think I had been.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going to depend right on the business, I'm sure. But for us, this is not like I'd say the system definitely gets used weekly, but not daily. You know, it's pretty low. I think when people hear about it, that's their biggest fear is like, oh, what happens if someone just reports every table is a yellow? But I find people don't do that right.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reason that I'm so proud of that system is that it really was developed because of all those other values and systems. And I think to me it really illustrates, like, I think we all have the ability and power to make tremendous difference truly like on a global scale if we want to. And I think it's just the power of getting groups of people together and creating the systems and structures that really allow them to get creative, to solve their own problems and to thrive. And I think if every small business implemented some of the things that I read about my book, I'm excited to see like what could we accomplish? What other things could we create change for?”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally, yeah, because it just changes the power dynamic at a really low level. And it was great because like customers don't know we're using it. They don't know we think that person's creepy. They just know they just got a new server. And staff member, you know, everyone's going to have a different definition of what feels threatening or bad to them. And they don't have to justify it. They can just get help. I wrote about it and it got picked up by the Washington Post and it became this like viral article. I testified about it in front of the United States EEOC in Washington and it became adopted as a best practice by them. So it is now currently used in like restaurants and bars literally all over the world. And started in our little restaurant.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Landed on something that did, and it was this color coded system that we call the color code of conduct. The idea was that what we were struggling with wasn't that no one was reporting this, but that actually it was being handled really differently by different kinds of managers. And particularly we had a lot of male managers that basically were thinking that certain things that were being reported didn't sound that threatening to them. You know, all of our experiences are different. And maybe if something like this had happened to you as a man, you wouldn't feel threatened by it. But as a woman, it feels quite scary. So what occurred to us is that we need to come up with a system because everyone really liked our management team. It wasn't like we have all these like, you know, insensitive men.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's really common and not just in restaurants. I mean, for lots of kinds of companies, but it's particularly bad in like, you know, customer service. I mean, it's surely like an epidemic and not just affecting, you know, women. So yeah, they all started talking about it. And I mean, I was pretty horrified because I thought, you know, here we are running this like utopian, beautiful place to work. And meanwhile, like people are having, you know, these like horrifying instance of sexual harassment that I didn't even know about. I mean, literally the first time hearing about it. True to our values of collaboration, we decided to try to brainstorm like, how are we going to solve this? Because interestingly, like I had actually kind of corporate law, I had practiced was labor and employment. So I had, I don't know, worked on these kinds of cases and stuff and I knew what was out there and there just really weren't great systems. We tried to, you know, a few different things that didn't work.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would love to. I think that's actually something I'm really, really proud of that our team has done. And I think honestly as a culmination of a lot of the systems and values that we've talked about here today, what happened is a number of years ago I started getting this barrage of emails from female employees saying like emergency need to talk to you. And I was terrified. I was like, what's happening? But to my point, we had a lot of systems of that allowed people to be more open and more transparent and not as hierarchical, right? We held a meeting and it turned out that what they wanted to talk about is that one of them had been sexually harassed in this really egregious way where a customer had stuck his hand up her shirt. And like while she was serving the table, it was just crazy, but it had sparked all the women to start sharing stories of like, oh, I have something like that. I have something like.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Performance, and so we're pretty clear that's really only about 25% of what we're evaluating on. And so we're also going to ask a lot about our values and how we think that you might be able to live them and looking for examples of where someone has or hasn't been able to do those things in former jobs.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Figure it out. Yeah. Think some are also like figuring out what are the things that are absolutely red flags that you just won't hire for. Like for me, if someone is going to speak negatively about a former employer, honestly, I mean, I talk about this in the book. I really think job interviewing is like so similar to dating in so many ways. And just like if you show up to a date and someone is like shit talking all their exes, you know, all I'm thinking is like, when am I going to be one of these people that they're, you know, saying negative things about? And so even though we all have employers or exes, we could say plenty of bad things about, I think it's just a really bad sign of someone is just saying that up front and being vocal about it. So that's like something that definitely a red flag I would never hire for. Something that we always try to be really clear about too. We're hiring for our values. We're also promoting based on our values. We're evaluating. And so the point is like many jobs, they're really only going to care about jobs.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can't say that I was like naturally good at hiring people is through a lot of trial and error that I've learned to get better at, you know, at it. The number one thing is really trying to have people actually do the position, whatever it is. If it's a managerial position or a ground level position, we will pay people to do like practice shifts or practice project because talking is its own skill that has literally nothing to do with most people's job performance. And so I think we recognize that pretty early. And the goal is to figure out what is it like, you know, to actually work with you as quickly as possible and as inexpensively as possible.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can say certainly on a personal level it's even changed the way I am with friends or family and I think people would say that a lot like this is a technique that they would bring not just into problems that we had within the company but that they'd bring home because I mean think about how many times like we fight with you know friends or partners over you know how big of a deal was this thing but when you take it out of like right and wrong and she be punished or how do you make it like but when's just like oh shoot like how do we do this better how do i help right or wrong it builds you know closeness and intimacy and accountability and i think that's something you can bring everywhere”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some people sometimes it takes a little while to get them to be in sort of a calm space to have that conversation. We found it was really effective because when most people reflect on the impact to other people that they hopefully care about, you know, they tend to create change. And when they don't, then it's also frankly an easier conversation to say, hey, you're not caring about the welfare of your fellow staff member or the customer or the company and that's our culture. And we're sorry, but you can't be a part of it.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going to depend on someone's workplace. For us, often it would be at the end of the shift because at the point they show up, we really just want them. Yeah, you need them on the floor, right?”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's the cooks that have to cook more stuff. It's the customer that has, you know. And then you ask them the question Well, what are you going to do to make it right? And I think that's like the most interesting part of it because it's not about punishment. It's literally, oh shoot, I think for many people, it's the first time they're realizing that they've actually caused harm versus that they're like in trouble. And we'd have people come up with all sorts of creative stuff. Honestly, they could go over the top, like things that once they'd realized that they had wronged their fellow staff members, they would try to like pick up their sidewalk or cover a future shift. They'd go apologize. They'd bring customers like, you know, little like gifts to say, sorry it took so much longer to get to your table today. It generated all these creative things and back to that point about empowerment. That person now feels like, oh, okay, I made a mistake, but I can make that thing better. That is so much more of a fun place to work, to be a part of when you see people actually making things better for each other rather than just getting in trouble and then, you know.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something really common in restaurants, in fact, probably many workplaces, people showing up late. If you work at a desk job, maybe it doesn't matter so much. If you work in a restaurant, if someone's late, again, you need people to actually physically be present. There's just less people to help customers to cook food. It makes the experience for the guests worse. And, you know, we have like 100 people. So it's a lot of people who could be running late at any given time. Traditionally, if someone was running late, you probably write them up. If they do it a few times, maybe they lose their job, right? I had found it was not effective at all with a restorative discipline approach. What you do is you sit down for a conversation. You basically are like, hey, you know, what happened? Someone says, I was late. And then you talk about who is affected. Well, turns out, you know, you sort of walk them through like who was affected. It's the, you know, servers that have to cover more tables.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is not about punishing something, it's about trying to fix a wrong or make it right. And it's a really interesting system. And so we started trying to use that in our discipline at home room. It was incredibly transformative and really effective.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was a big shift. So I think in that way my legal background gave me something to overcome. But a way that it really helped me was I was really struggling to understand how to do punishment for like lack of a better word every company or organization has the issue of people misbehaving. I've been the person misbehaving at various jobs. I mean, that's, you know, why I got fired from being a lawyer. I just wasn't really doing my stuff. I have empathy for both sides. I feel like I hadn't really seen a system that worked very well, like places I had worked if you weren't doing well, you'd get a write up or some kind of punishment. Maybe you'd be, you know, like doc shift sent home. You won't get a raise. Like there wasn't something that felt like it was going to meaningfully change behavior except with punishment, which just didn't feel effective to me, to be honest. So I actually did draw on my legal background for that. I had had some exposure to a system called restorative justice.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll give you one way that my legal background helped and one way that it hurt. And I guess we'll start with the hurt one because I had to overcome it for sync something we're thinking about, whatever your job is, is, you know, what is the worldview of this profession? The legal worldview is, at least in America, it's an adversarial system. Two people take very extreme positions. You're, in fact, duty-bound to take only that side. And they duke it out and someone wins at the end. So there's no gray, there's no meaning in the middle. It's very destructive, honestly. You're literally fighting. I found that quite demoralizing to do over time. It's certainly not a good way to run a company. I think that's something I love about business is that it's like literally and figuratively creative. Like you make something, but you also to make something, you can't be fighting people you have to be generative. You have to create something with them moving from this destructive mindset to this creative mindset.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All have an innate drive to have some kind of impact that's bigger than ourselves. And for some people, that comes through children and for some people that comes through how we spend our days, you know, maybe at work. I prefer to do both, you know. I love my kids and I love my work and I want.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the beauty of having been quite unhappy in my work before doing Home Room is I think I knew what the alternative looked like. My worst days at home room were still better than my best days as a lawyer. I think it helped give me perspective that like everything is hard, you know, and what kind of hard do you want? And I'll pick meaningful hard any day over meaningless hard. Most things in life worth doing are hard. You know, I know you have kids as well. Like that's hard. It is really hard to be a parent. Studies on human happiness like show that people who choose not to have children are on average happier because they can just like do whatever they want all the time. For me, my kids are also one of the most meaningful parts of my life. So I think things that are hard often accompany things that are meaningful. And if something's hard and meaningless, like that's the worst thing. And I think for many people, unfortunately, work falls into that category.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Could start really small, you know, you don't necessarily have to start by opening up everything all at once. Maybe you just pick something that you really want people to work on. I would say pick a number that you care about improving that is dynamic and is that employees can make a difference on. Start measuring it and then set a benchmark, you know, like that you'd like to reach and share the success. I mean, that is part of it is if you're going to do this, if you think that improving that number could make a difference to the tune of, I don't know, $10,000 that year, share $1,000 of that with the folks who helped make it happen. You'll still be $9,000 richer at the end of the day. So you do have to teach it, involve people, but also, you know, share in the success.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think we don't tend to think about a lot of things that we maybe don't measure. And how much does having that conversation contribute to someone's sense of satisfaction, which contributes to their longevity? And how much money do we spend on things like turnover? Like all those things add up to make a huge difference over time.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally. And I think, you know, sometimes when I tell people about these various management practices, they'll be like, oh, it sounds really time consuming. And I'm like, well, that conversation I just described took maybe five or ten minutes. And yes, that's more time consuming than saying, no, I'm just going to not do it. But you know, it would have happened if like I hadn't, if we hadn't had that conversation is they would have spent months complaining, like hurting morale, being like, this is wrong. It's really.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That are perhaps self serving, and your job as a manager is to be like, no, or maybe to explain why. And it creates like a pretty divisive dynamic where you're at odds with each other. But having people walk through this for themselves and understand, hey, okay, I might want this thing for myself, but I can see how this is not good for a system that's bigger than me that I care about and decide for themselves that this is actually not the right choice. I think that was really powerful.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, oh no, we don't want to, you know, no one had to be like, no, I don't want to do that. It didn't become a battle. We actually just walked through the analysis. We were like, okay, if we're going to make this change, what is the impact on the employees? And they were like, well, it'll be great for servers because we'll make more money. And then we're like, okay, well, great. How about the folks in the kitchen who are not going to see a part of those tips? You know, what do you think that's going to feel like to them? And they had to be like, oh yeah, I guess maybe that won't feel great. We walked through and looked at the customer. Okay, how's this going to feel for the customer who's now paying more money? And they're like, oh, I guess that's maybe not actually of a benefit. And then we're like, all right, well, so for the company, you know, what's the impact there? And they were like, oh, well, I guess if the kitchen is disgruntled and the customers are paying more, maybe we won't ultimately make more money. If you run things traditionally and hierarchically, people bring suggestions.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the huge benefits of running a company that's very employee centric and really empowers its people is that you have all these empowered people. And one of the downsides is like you have all these empowered people, you know. So you have a lot of folks who have a lot of opinions and are very vocal. One example is we used to have a language on our menus. We had a surface charge and they could leave an additional tip. And a number of servers came in and wanted to speak at one of the open book meetings because they wanted to propose a change to that language because they felt if there was different language on the menu, people would leave far bigger tips for them. Good suggestion, but the problem is this group of people, servers within most restaurants are actually the people already making the most amount of money. And so having this language is actually really helpful because we didn't have to say.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we started making decisions by needing to maximize the largest degree of overlap for benefit to those three parties. And I think that has been really, really helpful. Giving people like data and ability to improve it is really helpful, but also giving everyone a framework for like, how are we going to set aside what we're going to maximize is so important.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Say, sort of building on it, like how I was saying that we started out figuring how do we create sort of the structures upon which people can be successful and then sort of built upon that like open book management. I think when you start having a lot more transparency and a lot more collaboration, you also start to need, honestly, structures to sort of help you, you know, think about how to make good decisions. And so we started to use, I call it collective success, but it's basically just like a stakeholder analysis. And we would start measuring decisions that we were making through how is this going to benefit the customer or the community? How is this going to benefit the employees? And how is this going to benefit the company because we're measuring all of these different things all that the time? It's pretty easy for us to tell. You know, like biometrics, what are the effects going to be?”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out, but it would have taken a lot of time, a lot of effort. And I think what's more is all the people on the ground were able to feel empowered because they were like, oh, I just made a difference. Like I caught this problem. I just saved us, you know, tens of thousands of dollars for the year. And I think that is really empowering.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally, but there shouldn't have been like we're paying people to sit there and like literally weigh out cheese portions so that everyone gets consistent food, but also so that our food costs remain stable. And they were just not really doing it. So that became something that we then started tracking and we started like pulling baggies out randomly every week and measuring them. And sure enough, when you start measuring it, that number magically improves. We never had to like go talk to people and discipline them. We were like, hey, these are not coming out the same and we're going to start looking at it. And like magically the problem solves itself. If we have each single mac and cheese that we sell being over by even like a tenth of an ounce of cheese over the course of a year, we would have given away a ton of free cheese, like literally a ton. We've figured that out, solved that problem, saved ourselves all of that money. I don't know how that would have gotten solved in a bigger company. I think it would have been figured, or not in a bigger company, but one which works more hierarchically. It would have been figured.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, you know, most companies, you'd have someone sitting in an office looking at that. Like, I'm honestly not super sure how they would have gotten to the bottom of it because they're not there on the ground. But because we're looking at it in the context of these meetings every week and having people who are on the ground and working seeing this stuff, you know, someone at the meeting suggested they were like, hey, I've been noticing, you know, we portion out the cheese in every single mac and cheese. So each one gets exactly a quarter pound of cheese, which is a rather insane amount of cheese. And they were noticing that there had been some really like sloppy work on the part of folks who were coming in early in the morning to do this that it didn't look like they were actually measuring it to the ounce as they're supposed to be. They're just sort of throwing it in there. And so we went down, we started measuring out like we pulled some of these, you know, baggies of cheese out of a fridge and started measuring that. Or weighing them. And sure enough, they are off by like some pretty large amounts. Honestly, sometimes less than they're supposed to be.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think actually the thing with the food cost is so great. Like, if you think about the way even the public companies run, you're right. Certain numbers might be public or all staff members could know them, but there's a difference between that information coming from the top and maybe trickling down. Maybe not, you know, like I don't know how many like Chipotle employees or like, you know reviewing their financials on a weekly basis, you know, but I think something that is really magical about this way of operating is that it's much more flat. It's not hierarchical. And so, you know, everyone is involved. To your point about the food cost, that is actually an issue that we did have happen. We watch not just our food costs, but we line item our dairy costs because the biggest part of running a mac and cheese restaurant. They were skyrocketing one year and we could not figure out why our costs of like cheese and milk had not gone up substantially. We were just running through stuff really, really quickly.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT