Tim Kirkland

Over the past several years, the number and variety of restaurants in North America has exploded. As a result, the average guest dines out up to 3 times more often than they did just a few years ago. This huge increase in dining occasions has caused some service to become homogenized. In many cases, the dining experience has become a routine process.

Tim Kirkland’s acclaimed best-seller, The Renegade Server, helps restaurants and service teams stand out among the growing competition by turning dining back into an experience. Tim uses uncommon insights to identify and debunk outdated ideas regarding tips (no longer stands for “To Insure Prompt Service!”) and salesmanship (the up-sell is dead?!) and replaces them with fresh, immediately usable techniques for increasing tips by driving sales, creating devoted regulars, and and aligning the interests of the server, the Guest, and the restaurant.

The Renegade Restaurant presentation will focus on ways to engage your front-line teams and enlist them in the crucial tasks of growing sales, developing loyal regulars and creating genuine, personal and repeatable connections and dining experiences for your Guests.

Key Takeaways

T Treat me like a regular

•How to teach your crew to treat their section as their own start-up business and the value of finding and hanging on to their own loyal regular customers

•The 10 skills every Manager and Front-of-House team need to master in order to develop a fiercely loyal clientele 2

I Increase my check

•Find out why front-line employees dislike using conventional salesmanship training and how to overcome their resistance
•Release your teams from outdated, “pushy” sales tactics and equip them with genuine sales-driving behaviors that work
•Discover fresh, easy techniques that will allow your teams to double the number of premium drinks, appetizers, soups, salads and desserts sold in your restaurant

P Personalize my service

•Find out how connect with your Guests by becoming a restaurant that sells experiences, not just food
•Teach your teams innovative techniques for discovering, recognizing and responding to each Guest’s individual and unique expectations

S Stand out

•Discover the 10 scientifically proven ways to make genuine connections with your Guests and leave a lasting impression, making people your signature dish!

The most dangerous myth in business is that great leaders are born; that there is some innate, intangible quality to leadership. You either have it, or you don’t. In reality, quite the opposite is true. All members of a team possess the potential for leadership, in that leadership is an activity practiced by all, not simply a role granted to one. Leaders are made, not born, and truly great organizations prioritize the obligation to make them.

The quality and ability of managers in an organization are the most critical influencers of not just the “dollars-and-cents” performance of the business, but of the Customer Experience itself…and therefore the long-term success of the brand. The Team is where the company meets the customer. They handle every product and connect with each customer. There’s no such thing as a bad team in a great business (or vice versa). And there’s no such thing as a terrific team with an average Coach.

The COACH program focuses not just on the technical operational proficiencies that make good managers, but on the connective, developmental, and adaptive skills that build great Coaches. It focuses not just on the systems that deliver predictable service outcomes, but on adaptive leadership approaches that allow teams to evolve, improve, and craft unique, intricately customized Customer Experiences.

In this entertaining and informative session, best-selling author Tim Kirkland will discuss how to turn good ‘technical’ Managers into highly effective Leaders and Coaches. He details the philosophies from his best-selling book, and delivers immediately useable ‘next steps’ for attendees.

Tim will identify the 3 different types of Leader and detail the specific skills and behaviors that elevate the highest performers using the acronym COACH…

The first responsibility of a COACH is to collect, develop and maintain talent. Great leaders tend to share and prioritize the of Cultivation of their team. Cultivation is the ability to assemble, grow and keep a team filled with superior talent. Coaches and teams with the best players tend to win. In this portion, Tim will examine how exceptional Coaches cultivate and curate high-performing teams while improving their skills and keeping them motivated and engaged along the way.

Great leaders are able to see team challenges from a number of different angles and perspectives. However, our view can often be clouded be the complexity of the moment:
•A good Coach must be both a strategist and a tactician. Sometimes, when faced with a recurring challenge our
tendency is to “Zoom In” on it to solve it…when we should really “Zoom Out” to determine a need for broader,
systemic change.
•Leadership is about observing, interpreting and intervening… do your leaders know when to do which? Are they looking for the right things? Seeing the right things?

Great coaches know how important it is to keep a compelling scoreboard and exert constant, daily pressure on the team to improve. They bring accountability to the team by:
•Displaying performance for all to see (not just focusing on the top or bottom performers)
•Measuring behaviors, not just results. They understand the difference between “lead” and “lag” indicators and behaviors.
•Sharing the secrets of the business, so that everyone on the team has complete understanding of the specific “hows and why’s” of success.

Great leaders are great “connectors” not only in how they connect themselves with the team, but in how they connect the teams and customers to the brand, and connect goals to execution. Tim will teach leaders to look for and take advantage of connection opportunities that turn team members into “true believers” and customers into lifelong evangelists.

Effective leaders know that success doesn’t just come from everyone being good at their jobs. Leadership requires seeing the team from a “macro” point of view and helping the guest experience move fluidly from one well-executed point to another.
•Frequently, when customers become frustrated, it’s not so much because anyone performed a task wrong, but something happened during the “hand-of” between tasks and team members.
Tim will discuss how leaders can ensure smooth, successful relays on the team and help fill in the “Experience Gaps” in their business and exceed each customer’s unique expectations.

How to Create Raving Regulars and Make Them Return Soon and Often
In these highly competitive times, it is more important than ever not only to attract new customers, but to hold on to and drive loyalty and frequency among those you already have. While first-time, ‘trial’ visits can be driven by anything from advertising to location, there are certain effective, tested tools and tactics that can be used to encourage customers to return to your business soon and often and forsake your competition. Attendees will learn how to connect in a way that creates value for the customer and forges a strong bond to your brand… effectively turning customers into evangelists along the way. Ideal for managers, owners and franchisees looking for ways to develop high-value, regular customers in their business.

How to Recruit, Engage and Retain Today’s Emerging Workforce
Particularly today, good help is hard to find… and even harder to keep! Fact is, the secret to superior performance, and profits is a superior team. There is no such thing as a great business with a third-rate team. If you truly want to improve your business, you must begin by improving your people. In this idea-packed session, Tim Kirkland shares dozens of ideas on how to find, interview, train, motivate and retain top-level, high-performing management and crew teams. We also examine the specific challenges of team development from a multi-cultural and multi-generational perspective and in tight employment markets. This presentation is ideal for leaders who want to improve their results by getting and keeping the right people on their teams.

Since the 1950’s, traditional marketing has been conducted using the “4 P’s” every marketer is taught in school – Product, Placement, Pricing and Promotion – a system that puts the Product at the center and essentially wraps a marketing process around its surface in an effort to define it for the consumer.

This dated, top-down marketing approach basically attempts to “tell” the consumer what to think about or how to value a particular product or company.

In today’s instant-information, social-networked world, it is no longer good enough (or possible) to “tell” a consumer how to feel about or connect with a product. And even if you could, they wouldn’t believe you.

More and more, consumers understand that it is they that define a brand and their friends, networks, and communities that inform them of its value.

Today’s smart operators and marketers know that they must “show” rather than “tell” the value of their products by building a unique experience around them.

In this highly engaging, information-packed session best-selling author and consultant Tim Kirkland delivers real, immediately usable tactics that will help franchisees, managers and independent operators move local marketing efforts into the new millennium.

Rather than the same old list of promotional gimmicks and discounts, Tim will share how operators can impact the very foundations of what customers value in a way that will support and defend an established national brand or build and define an emerging one.

Tim focuses not just on the traditional tools of advertising and promotions, but on how to effectively convert the awareness generated by those tactics into higher sales, loyalty, and evangelism by focusing on Social Networking and the Customer Experience.

Key Takeaways

• Market like a hunter, not like a “trapper” by knowing who your ideal loyal customer
  is in microscopic detail, finding them and engaging them where they are rather than hoping they come to you.
• Engage prospective customers not just through your branding and ads, but through their own networks and communities.
• Find out what is important to each of your customers and customize their experience in a way that will take your competitors out of the game. For good.
• Establish long-term relationships with your customers while attracting new ones.

This is by far Tim Kirkland’s most popular, in-demand workshop for Leaders. When asked, over 90% of restaurant managers and owners say that “finding and keeping good people” is their #1 day-to-day business challenge. And they’re right. In these highly competitive times, good help is hard to find…and even harder to keep! Moreover, the quality of team you employ is the single most impactful influencer on the overall success of your business!

The first responsibility of a leader is to collect, develop and maintain talent.

To build a superior team, you must be a superior recruiter. Be thoughtful and intentional about hiring…don’t just let it “happen” to you. Hiring is a skill…not a circumstance.

Your job as a Coach is to constantly upgrade the quality of your talent; whether through recruiting, training or retention.

With this program, attendees will learn how to actively attract and acquire the best talent, develop them daily, and keep star players in place.

In this idea-packed session, best-selling author Tim Kirkland will share dozens of impactful suggestions on how to recruit, interview, onboard, train, motivate and KEEP top-level talent. Attendees will learn how to:

•Understand generational differences between candidates and how they view the value of work, learning and loyalty.
•Identify the traits that determine success (or failure) on your team, then use those qualities to hunt for talent (rather than waiting for talent to come to you).
•Make hiring the most important work for any manager (not an interruption of their work) and how it drives profits.
•Incorporate recruiting and interviewing into your regular workweek and stop hiring from a place of weakness, panic, and need.
•Deploy interview questions and techniques that will identify potential high-performers and help weed out bad hires before they become costly mistakes. Learn to hire for your customers, not just yourself.
•Train and engage your team members so that they are fully bought-into and aligned with the core purpose and long-term goals of your brand. Give them purpose, not just tasks.
•Reward and recognize high-performers so that they are happier, work harder and stay longer.
•Reduce costly turnover by taking time to ‘inventory’ your talent and team engagement… not just your products.
•Determine when and how to either invest time and resources into making a low-performer better or making them ‘history.’
•Learn and grow from each hiring decision and team member departure…and become the best team-builder in your market.