Lone Star Steakhouse

I consulted directly with Jamie Coulter, CEO, directly on this project. He was the largest franchiser of Pizza Huts at the time and used his Pizza Hut franchises to recruit for Lonestar Steakhouse positions.

He adopted a service leadership development process that was customized for all his leaders at each of his restaurants starting with corporate staff, regional managers, store managers, assistant store managers.

In addition to the leadership development process, an inside-out service improvement implementation was simultaneously conducted. The home office became obsessed with providing legendary service to each and every regional operator and each store, thus removing obstacles. A companywide recovery and empowerment process was instituted, pushing autonomy down to the front line staff, both front of the house and heart of the house.

This mirrored the process we used at Ritz-Carlton to help them win a Malcom Baldridge award two times as the only service company to do so.

One of the learning I had from this project was the importance of CEO involvement for velocity of change. After this project, I requested to always partner with the C-Suite.