How I built the number one new restaurant in America | Aaron Silverman | TEDxMidAtlantic

about four years ago I decided to open a restaurant I had no idea what I was doing or where to begin all I knew was that I was going to need help and a lot of it in fact that was my biggest concern at the time how would I ever convince anyone to come work with me and with the restaurant industries notorious turnover rate how would I get them to stay for my own personal experience I'd seen restaurants turnover staff anywhere from two to five times in as little as the first six months so I

reached out to one of my oldest and closest friends and asked for help he wasn't in the restaurant business at the time but I knew he was the right man for the job when it came to restaurants we share the same ideas and beliefs but more importantly the same was true when it came to people so back in 2011 we set out and began to build our team one by one we found 25 other people willing to join us many of whom are still with us today four years later and if you've ever worked in

the restaurant industry you know restaurant years are like dog years every everyone feels like seven so fast forward to today we're about to turn two years old we've gone from 27 to 64 staff members in our first year both bone Appetit and GQ magazine named us best new restaurant in America and to this day and to this day people still line up outside the restaurant before we open hoping to get a seat so how did we get here and how did we do so in such a short period of time I can honestly say that

it is 100% due to our employees our talented ambitious caring passionate and well-dressed employees that was New Year's Eve as a chef it's strange to say this but I often remind our staff that our food only accounts for 40% of what we do sure we have to nail 39 and a half percent of it but at the end of the day our success is dependent upon our people if there's one thing that I've learned over the past four years it's that we're not in the restaurant business we're in the people business so let's go back

to when we opened I thought we had a pretty good chance that we'd be at least somewhat successful I mean we had good food good service good atmosphere and we were charging a pretty fair price and when we opened we were a hit we even made a profit in our first month mind you it was only about $750 but for restaurants that's actually pretty good but as time went on I started to think maybe we weren't really in the restaurant industry I started to think maybe we were in the hospitality industry I mean our end

goal was not to serve good food or provide good service our end goal was to make guests feel good our food our service those were just the tools we use to make the people happy they were the means to our end so as the praise in the awards continued I started to wonder was there something more that was helping us achieve such success I mean other people had obviously figured out that the restaurant industry wasn't about serving food it was about hospitality Danny Meyer even wrote a New York Times bestseller about it so why were

we receiving such unusually large bounce of praise after asking myself what made us different I realized it wasn't our food or our service it wasn't even our hospitality it was our people our people were the reason we had been so successful think about it what makes a business great very simply it's the quality of the product or the service they provide but who creates those products and services it's the people who work there it's the housekeeper who cleans the house it's the designer who creates the logo and it's the coffee roaster who roast the beans

it's those people that make a business great it's those people that make a business a product or service what it is and the same is true for a restaurant the food the service the decor those are just the products that our restaurant sells but it's the people who work there that create and deliver those products a restaurant needs good chefs to conceptualise create and execute its dishes it needs good bartenders to create delicious cocktails in these gracious hosts to welcome the guests and it needs friendly servers to take care of them throughout the night so

the question becomes how do you find these people and once you do how do you keep them first have really great hiring practices it doesn't matter what business you're in you need to know exactly what you're looking for but more importantly you need to know what you're not looking for for example when we're hiring we always keep in mind that we're looking for people not positions we're looking for great people to join our team not great people to complete a specific task we don't look for people who have the necessary skills we look for people

who have the necessary desire and what I mean by that is we look for people who have a strong desire to work with us anyone can be taught a skill or a task but not just anyone can be inspired to care we don't hire people because they can do a job we hire people because they want to do a job and those people are always worth ten times more than someone with solely great experience we don't look at resumes we listen to references a resume can tell you where someone's worked and how long they've worked

there but what it can't tell you is what kind of person they are to be honest we don't we haven't really looked at a resume in almost two years and so far we haven't regret that decision once in fact quite the opposite some of our most successful staff members had whittled to no restaurant experience when they started for example one of our front-of-the-house managers started as an unpaid intern almost a year ago with no restaurant experience and today she's second-in-command of the restaurant and a huge part of managing our daily operations we look for people

not positions we look for incredible people from all walks of life we look for great personalities and attitudes but in order to get these people you have to create an environment that they want to be in an environment that they're attracted to a place that they want to go every day we always put our people first they are your main stakeholders they are the core of your business more so than your customers or even your investors and in fact if ever there was a secret to attracting and retaining great people that's it we all know

the expression a good help is hard to find but it's just not true in fact it's easy to find what's hard to find is a good environment and I like to think of our business as proof we no longer have to go out looking for these incredible people anymore they come looking for us turnover is no longer an issue yeah in our first year we lost like three to five of our opening staff but we also gained 37 new team members in fact today we have the opposite problem we have too many people that we

want to hire so every once in a while I find myself in this funny situation where I'll have a guest come up to me and say thank you so much for an incredible meal and I always say no thank you for coming that I'll often respond I don't know why you're thanking me I didn't do anything I didn't take your order I didn't greet you at the door I didn't cook your steak and I didn't pour your wine in fact I had nothing to do with your meal and every time I say that it reminds

me that we that our business is nothing without the great people that we've collected it reminds me that these people are the key to our success so if you asked me two years ago what industry I'm in I tell you the restaurant industry but if you ask me today I tell you I'm in the people industry it just so happens I work in a restaurant thank you