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

“What are the numbers, but why are they getting better or worse? They see that the things that they suggest can become enacted. Staff members that aren't even attending that meeting but are just, you know, filling out forms every day to sort of report back or seeing suggestions that they make be enacted. I mean, we saw not just huge financial gains. I mean, we were always in the sort of the top 1% of performance for the industry, but we saw that number go up and up and up and up every single year for the decade that I was a CEO. We also saw huge movements in staff happiness in restaurants in America anyway, the average tenure of an employee is 90 days. Our average tenure was two and a half years. The work we do is monotonous. We're making mac and cheese every day. But when you get to be part of something that is bigger than yourself and like see changes that you suggest happening and see a place get better and better and better every week, every day, like that's something.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Within the company, or watching those numbers. So instead of me as the CEO or a CFO running through those numbers, different people are responsible for tracking them. So, you know, we would watch things like our food costs, but we would also measure things that normally people only measure maybe once a year, like our employee happiness. We measured literally daily and weekly, and we'd report on those numbers too and have people tracking them and talking about not just the number, but what's behind it. Why were those sales up this week? What did people notice? Why was our employee happiness or satisfaction low or high? What's going on? What could we change? And then we'd send out like a little newsletter that would come out once a week being like, here's the suggestions we saw, here's the trends we're seeing, here's the ways we're going to improve, here's the things we're doing, here's the things we're actually also not going to act on. And what's amazing is that then everyone is engaged. They start knowing not just like.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, started using it a few years into the business, I think first I had to figure out some foundational things, you know, to my point about like creating some really basic rules and structures. And I really wanted a way to engage people with growth, not just in the financial sense, but of all the things that we cared about, finding ways to measure it and improve on them. I studied up took my team to take a lot of classes on how you do open book management and we just started using it sort of roughly the way you do it is like we would have a meeting every week where managers were required to attend but they were open to all staff members so any staff member would be paid to come and just sit there and eat snacks and you know learn about numbers and what you have is it's basically a P&L meeting but different people”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, maybe they'll just want more for themselves, but I think it's hard for them to be a part of something bigger than themselves. And I think that's much more important than the risk you take by sharing information.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I knew that I wanted us to have a really collaborative work culture, which is, again, a really fabulous ideal, but can be harder to pull off in reality. Something I ended up learning about, which I thought was really fabulous, was open book management, which is, you know, basically where you open up your financials to your team and you teach financial literacy and then you engage people in improving those numbers. And then you share the results with the team. And that was really such a game changer because, you know, business is really just like a sport. But the way that most companies are run is that no one is really sharing with you how you're doing. It's such an odd way to run a team or a company when you think about it, but I think we're always afraid like, oh, if people know too much.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A workplace, you don't ever really feel like you have complete freedom. To my point about the vacation policy, if you tell people they can take however much they want, like studies have shown they actually take less than at companies where there's just a set amount of weeks and it's because people are actually afraid, like even though in theory they can take as much as they want, they're afraid that maybe they'll take too much. So I think in a workplace having some like guidelines and structures, the right ones, the coloring book is has the most freedom.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You just give someone a blank piece of paper, everyone's going to create art that's totally different. If you give people, you know, a paint by number, everyone's going to create something that is exactly the same. And I think my goal is actually to be like a coloring book where it's like here are the outlines of what I expect from you. But within that, you have complete creativity and freedom. So everyone's page of a coloring book is going to look different, but you're going to have the same structures. And I think that's actually really the key to creating great culture within an organization is like, am I handing someone a coloring book? Because I think that's what you should be doing.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And leave being like, this was the most magical experience of my life. And it's so cool because within that, I've seen so much creativity, anything from, you know, drying art that they send home with people to singing them a song to, you know, comping their meal, to, you know, doing some really over-the-top birthday celebration, spelling out a special message with condiments on their mac and cheese. I mean, all sorts of funny stuff that I never could have come up with in a million years that's really their own mark of individuality. There is a boundary and an expectation with which they are allowed to express that.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“within which people have freedom. For instance, you know, if it's something as silly as like in terms of guidance for what people can wear, have some structure around like, here's what you need for safety, here's what you need to not offend customers, you know, here's the basic rules, but within that, you know, assert your own independence. We didn't have uniforms and things like that for people who are out on the floor. And they love being able to express themselves, but knowing, oh, if I wear this kind of thing, it's not going to offend people. My boss isn't going to, you know, be upset. And there's so much more freedom within the right kind of boundaries. I found time and time again that actually that was really my goal as a leader was just what kind of boundary should we create? Something I'm really proud of is actually how we do customer service or like one of our sort of customer service roles.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To serve customers. And what was interesting is I was creating all this freedom, but it was actually like just moving from one dystopia, which is, you know, so many rules that people can't be themselves to a very different dystopia, which is like no one knows what to do. There's so much freedom that it's actually constricting in its own way. You know, people didn't know, is it okay for me to wear this shirt? Is this going to offend somebody? Are these the kind of shoes that are acceptable? Am I taking too much vacation? Like, am I people secretly resentful? Like it really created a lot of chaos and confusion. And, you know, I was not more beloved for it. People were actually looking to me for guidance. I sort of have had this, you know, after much trial and error breakthrough that actually I think the right kind of freedom for people is, I think it's your job as a leader to create the structures and boundaries that”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Trying to run a restaurant, and while there's people I just kept thinking, okay, what are the values that I want to live here? And I would try to take a stab at what I thought it meant to live those values at work. So, I mean, an example would be I felt like a lot of jobs I had had don't give you a lot of autonomy. And it's something I had really dreamt of. I wanted to have a lot more trust in the system and I wanted to be able to, you know, be myself at work. I thought, okay, let's do away with so many of the rules and structures that I had found so confining. We had no dress code, no vacation policy. It was very much like wear what you want, like take a vacation when you need to. And these ideas, like, honestly, a lot of tech companies run that way, but a restaurant is not a tech company. Like you actually can't have people gone just whenever they want all the time. It's a disaster. Like you need people physically there every day.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Having an ideal of wanting to create an incredible workplace, an incredible restaurant, yet having never run one and also never worked in one that I'd want to emulate meant that everything I learned was really through trial and error. And so it means that the first couple years, if I'm honest, were like a bit of a shit show, you know?”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, pretty much right away. I decided to start homeroom. And it was not just because I had this love of food and cooking, but I honestly looked back at that earlier time that I had been cooking in restaurants and thought, you know, what would it be like to create the kind of place I wish I had been able to work where I could, you know, see a future for myself, where I would love coming to work every day. It was really sort of this personal odyssey to create the job that I had wanted to have, but also where other people would feel a similar like passion that I did. I don't know about you, but I had, I mean, I'd worked many jobs and not had that experience of being excited to wake up in the morning and go to work. And that feels like a sad way to live life. So I really, really wanted that for myself, but I also really wanted that for other people because it felt pretty empty if I created my dream job, but then other people felt like it was a slug.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It or were The moment I was fired, I was like, oh God. I mean, I'm sort of embarrassed to say this because I really hated what I was doing. But I mean, I think I start crying. You know, I just, yeah, I felt lost. I think that the deepest part of that moment of failure wasn't so much losing the job. I think it was realizing that I was doing something that I didn't care about, that I wasn't good at it because I didn't care about and that I was spending sort of precious years of my life doing something that I hated. Also, frankly, that I had had to rely on someone else to tell me that. I think that felt bad. Like I knew it already for myself and I didn't at the time have the courage to act on it.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back to what I was already doing, which is, you know, have to sell my soul to make a lot of money working as a lawyer. I realize that my worst case scenario was basically the life I was already living. So what did I have to lose?”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was just like a big bowl of mac and cheese. But I realized that there was no place I could go to get really good mac and cheese, which is sort of nuts. I mean, I live in Oakland, California. It's a major city. It seems like someplace that you should be able to, you know, get a good bull mac and cheese. But there wasn't one. I pulled out the recipe that I had grown up making with my dad and went shopping and got the ingredients and made this delicious bowl of mac and cheese. And I'm sitting on my couch and eating it. When I sort of have this aha moment thinking, huh, there was no restaurant I could go to get this. This restaurant should exist and I think I should open it. I had been sitting on that idea and sort of thinking about it. And so when I got fired, I was like, you know, I think this is my moment. Like I think this is the moment to try this bizarre idea of opening a mac and cheese restaurant. And the truth is if I fail, I'll just be.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh my God. I mean, it sounds so basic, but I think a lot of us don't pay attention to that. You know, we're taught to, you know, do the thing that's going to, you know, pay the bills or look good or that feels safe, but not necessarily to my earlier point about like what makes you feel good in your body. We're not trained to be like, oh, like what makes me feel, you know, real joy inside every day. Or at least that was not what I was trained to, you know, to pay attention to. So when I got fired, it was like I had this moment of, you know, asking myself, am I going to keep doing this because I could have easily been hired, you know, somewhere else doing the same thing? Like, am I going to choose to get back on this wheel or am I going to choose to do something else? A few months before that moment, I had been coming home on a day that was just super depressing. Like I just had hated my workday. It's raining outside. And all I wanted to do is curl up in front of the television.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, very respectable. Like, I looked good at cocktail parties, but I really hated going to work every day. So I was fired. And it was a real wake-up call for me because I had always been just a super overachiever. It was the first time that I was like, well, I can't say the first time, but it was probably the biggest time where I was like, wow, I am not doing well at this. And it's not even because I couldn't do well. It's because I don't want to. I don't care enough to be good at this.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I had a very circuitous route to becoming a lawyer in the first place that had actually taken a detour in food first. I had actually really tried. I wanted to be a chef and I learned how to cook when I was an undergrad. And I worked in restaurants in New York. But honestly, it was a really dead-end job. I was making minimum wage. I really could barely afford to pay my rent. I looked around me and I just didn't see a future in the industry. And so I did what I think plenty of smart people with a complete lack of direction choose to do. And I decided to go to law school. It seemed like a prudent choice on the surface, but it was really not something that I felt passionate about. So I was working as a corporate attorney, so I'm getting paid, you know, really an obscene amount of money, like an amount that seemed crazy when I had been cooking in restaurants, like 10 times what I would have made in a year, working in a beautiful high ride.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, my mom is actually physically disabled. She had polio as a kid, and so she couldn't really do much cooking. So my dad was really the big cook of the house. And like I said, he only made sort of five things. But one of them was chocolate chip cookies, which he made just all the damn time. Like I feel like there was like always cookies or brownies in my house growing up. And so, yeah, I have a really deep nostalgia for sort of these like American, you know, desserts and the smell of them wafting through the house is definitely like the smell of my childhood.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My family really loves food. Actually, me and both of my siblings we all own restaurants or bars, which is so funny because I think to like my parents' deep disappointment, that's true. But it was we're also different, but the one thread that really held my family together. My parents were very obsessed. They both actually were entrepreneurs and had their own businesses. But every single night we would have dinner together as a family. And so I think cooking and food was a very like central part of my youth and certainly is something I still do with my kids today. I'd learned how to make things mostly from my dad who actually would only cook like five things. One of those things was macaroni and cheese. So it ended up serving me very well later in life. So I've always felt like a deep connection to food as a source of, you know, not just like nourishment from a physical perspective, but also from an emotional perspective as like a way to bring like diverse family members together or a community together. I think it's.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, God. I mean, I think that's probably why I'm obsessed with surfing. I don't have a lot of ways. I've definitely tried all the things that people tell you to do. Like I've tried meditating many times. Yeah, I feel like I really am able to lose myself and things that encompass all my senses surfing, cooking, you know, is one of them. I think it's just such a creative practice.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm in food. I'm in restaurants. So I think I'm really motivated by things that my body responds to really positively that could be a delicious taste, that could be a beautiful, you know, space that you're sitting in. The ocean was really something that just engaged all my senses. We're taught to do so much in our minds. And I'm a pretty thoughtful person that can get lost there. So I tend to try to pay attention to my body and see, you know, what feels good. And I think we know on some primal level the things that feel right and the things that don't and learning to follow the things that feel right has been pretty valuable for me.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What it did to my life. Honestly, it really changed my life. It was just this sort of magic time that was just for me. It was really meditative. And the following year, I sort of challenged myself like, okay, I'm going to try this twice a week. The year after that, I was like, I'm going to do this three times a week. So I'm a full-on obsessive surfer today. Yeah, it's just my favorite thing. It consumes my vacations, my free time, just was, yeah, I love watching it.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Always loved the ocean ever since I was a little kid. After my son was born, he's currently about to turn 10, but my second child and at the time I was running my company, so really busy, have like 100 people reporting to me. I have two little kids and I'm just not really sleeping. You know, I just, I feel like I'm just consumed by other people's needs. So I was a bit desperate to find something for myself. It's something that could be just mine. And I realized that I had always loved the ocean. I had always wanted to learn how to surf. I set up a surf lesson in this town that's like a half hour from where I live and got in the ocean. And honestly, I wasn't really very good at it, but I just felt so happy the whole time. And I made this promise to myself that I was going to make time for that once a week for a year and just sort of see.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had been coming home on a day that was just super depressing. And all I wanted to do was curl up in front of the television with just like a big bowl of mac and cheese. But I realized that there was no place I could go to get really good mac and cheese, which is sort of nuts. I pulled out the recipe that I had grown up making with my dad. I made this delicious bowl of mac and cheese. And I'm sitting on my couch and eating it when I sort of have this aha moment thinking, ha, there was no restaurant I could go to get this. This restaurant should exist. I think I should open it. And so when I got fired, I was like, this is my moment to try this bizarre idea of opening a mac and cheese restaurant. If I fail, I'll just be back to what I was already doing, which is, you know, to sell my soul to make a lot of money working as a lawyer. I realize that my worst case scenario was basically the life I was already living.”
2024-09-17 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Erin Wade: The Mac and Cheese Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT