05
Build a company your best people don’t leave.
A GM resigns on a Tuesday, and by Friday the founder is running the floor — for the next three months, because the bench behind that seat was one résumé deep. Most operators have lived some version of it. Turnover is expensive; a bad hire at the management level is catastrophic; and few groups have built the systems to hire deliberately, onboard effectively, or keep the people they worked hard to find. We build that infrastructure: a 30-60-90 onboarding cadence with a real check-in at each milestone instead of a first-day orientation, and turnover tracked by role and by manager, because a kitchen losing cooks and a floor losing servers are different problems with different fixes.
Hire for alignment with what you’re building. Train for skill. Culture doesn’t show up in the handbook. It shows up in what gets celebrated and what gets tolerated. A toxic culture will erode even the best business model. We define what operators are building, then build the systems to protect it.
Tell us what’s breaking.
Take the DiagnosticThirty to forty-five minutes, with the Straight Read back within 48 hours.
Scope of Work
- —Onboarding program design and 30-60-90 milestone structure
- —Job description development and compensation benchmarking
- —Culture definition: what gets celebrated, what gets tolerated
- —Retention strategy and stay-interview cadence
- —HR policy and handbook development
- —Performance management systems and review structures
Where turnover actually shows up on your P&L.
Nothing on the P&L is labeled turnover. It gets paid in fragments: a manager’s week spent interviewing instead of running the floor, overtime while a station sits open, a trainer pulled off their own job, a cook who needs months to work a station at the speed of the one who left. No piece is big enough to argue about, so the whole thing gets absorbed as the cost of doing business. What it buys is a payroll that never finishes learning the job.
That cost gets fixed at the front end, in how people are chosen and what happens to them after they say yes. The onboarding cadence is the easy part to write down and the first thing that quietly stops getting run. What holds it up is what sits on either side of it. Before the hire: structured, behavioral interviews scored against a defined scorecard instead of gut feel. After: stay interviews with your best people before they’re thinking about leaving, rather than exit interviews once the decision is already made.
And the turnover figure gets pulled apart — by role, by manager — because a blended number tells you the business has a problem without telling you where to stand. Full-service turnover runs near 80% annually as an industry norm. Yours will land somewhere against that, and the work starts with knowing which seats and which managers put it there.
The record is on Selected Outcomes.
How it works
| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| 01 | Pull turnover by role and by manager, not blended |
| 02 | Define the culture: what gets celebrated, what gets tolerated |
| 03 | Install the 30-60-90 onboarding cadence |
| 04 | Run stay interviews with the people you can’t lose |
| 05 | Track retention by manager, quarter over quarter |
Before
Hiring runs on gut feel and urgency, onboarding is a single orientation day, and the first sign of a retention problem is an exit interview.
After
Structured interviews and a 30-60-90 onboarding cadence catch fit and friction early, and stay interviews with key people surface problems while there’s still time to fix them.