Building a Better Table

This week, I’m heading to Orlando for Prosper Forum at The Ritz-Carlton Grande Lakes, where leaders from some of the most recognizable brands in foodservice and hospitality will gather for a few days of conversation, learning and, hopefully, the kind of unexpected encounters that tend to matter long after everyone has misplaced their conference badge.

There will be CEOs, presidents, founders, operators, people leaders and executives there. That’s impressive, but it’s not really why I’m going.

I’m going because I’ve always believed business has to be about people first. Not people first when it’s convenient, and not people first because it looks good on a values poster next to a photograph of six suspiciously happy coworkers pointing at a laptop. People first because I don’t know another way to build something worth building.

Every business eventually comes down to a human being deciding whether to care: about the customer, the shift, the person working beside them, the problem nobody told them to solve, or the company they represent when nobody from corporate is standing nearby. We spend enormous amounts of money trying to manufacture outcomes that people create naturally when they believe they matter.

That’s why Prosper got my attention, and more importantly, why it kept it.

I’ve gotten to know members of Prosper’s leadership, including David Jobe , Hattie Hill, Luke Kircher, Meredith James and Jeremiah Wynn . What has stayed with me isn’t their titles or résumés. It’s their kindness and generosity, and the way those things show up in ordinary interactions.

They make introductions. They open doors. They share ideas and spend time with people without first calculating what might come back across the table. That matters more than we admit because business has become extraordinarily sophisticated at measuring value and occasionally hilariously bad at recognizing it.

We measure clicks, conversions, labor, traffic, EBITDA, retention, acquisition costs and approximately 4,700 other things that eventually become a dashboard somebody promises we’ll all start looking at on Monday. What we struggle to measure are some of the things that change careers: who made someone feel welcome, who introduced two people who needed to know each other, who recognized potential before there was an impressive title attached to it, and who gave somebody their shot.

That’s leadership, too.

It’s also a large part of what my business partner and ChaGTM co-host Chad Horn and I recognized in Prosper. Our relationship didn’t come from some magnificent strategic plan scribbled across a whiteboard. Our values recognized each other before our businesses figured out what to do about it.

We believe people matter. We believe their stories matter. We believe opportunity matters. Most of all, we believe you can build an exceptional business without treating the human beings responsible for building it like interchangeable parts.

That alignment is what brought us together.

One of my favorite things about Prosper may actually be what doesn’t happen there. I’ve come to think of Prosper as a no-pitch event, and if you’ve spent enough time at traditional trade shows, you probably understand exactly why that feels refreshing.

You’ve likely had the experience of talking with an overly enthusiastic sales rep and suddenly wanting to say, “Hey, buddy, my eyes are up here,” because they aren’t actually looking at you. They’re squinting at your badge, trying to read your title and company while maintaining just enough eye contact to technically remain members of civilized society.

You can almost hear the machinery running behind their eyes. Are they in our ICP? Decision maker? Budget authority? Is this conversation worth another seven minutes?

It’s speed dating with a CRM.

I say that with affection because I love salespeople. I am one. We just occasionally develop the social grace of a Labrador who has discovered somebody at the barbecue is holding a hamburger. Our intentions may be noble, but suddenly all we can see is the hamburger.

Prosper feels different.

Last year I found myself sitting on a bench in a hallway and struck up a conversation with another attendee. There was no pitch, no agenda and no qualifying sequence cleverly disguised as curiosity. We talked about business, leadership, people and life. The conversation wandered around the way good conversations do when nobody is desperately trying to steer it toward a demo or a calendar link.

Nearly an hour into that conversation, I discovered the woman sitting beside me was the CEO of A&W.

What I loved about that moment wasn’t discovering that I’d been talking to a CEO. It was realizing that for the previous hour, it hadn’t mattered. We got to meet each other before our titles had a chance to introduce themselves.

We spend so much time trying to get into rooms with “important people” that we sometimes forget the whole damn room is full of them. That’s what Prosper gets right. The magic wasn’t that I happened to sit on a bench with a CEO. The magic was being in a place where neither of us needed to know the other person’s title for the conversation to be worth having.

That same curiosity is a big part of why Chad and I love doing The ChaGTM Podcast. We love real people’s stories, particularly the parts that tend to disappear once somebody becomes successful.

Give us the polished version of somebody’s career and we immediately want to find the hood release, because success always looks easier from the curb. You see the company, title, promotion, stage and LinkedIn announcement. You don’t see the Tuesday night three years earlier when everything looked like it might fall apart.

You don’t see the rejection that changed the direction, the bad boss who accidentally taught someone how to lead, the good boss who saw something nobody else did, or the risk that looked irresponsible right up until everyone started calling it visionary. You almost never see the person who opened the door at exactly the right moment.

That’s the part we’re interested in.

Our conversations with people like Jazmine Charles are about getting underneath the professional biography and meeting the human being who actually lived it. We felt that same thing with Andrea Hill when we were together in Arizona at the RLC. Once people stop presenting the finished product and start talking about what it cost to become who they are, the conversation changes. You stop interviewing a résumé and start understanding a person.

There’s another reason those stories matter. When successful people are willing to talk about the parts that weren’t successful, somebody listening begins to see their own struggle differently. The road stops looking like evidence that they don’t belong and starts looking like, well, a road.

Success is rarely the straight line we draw afterward. Most of the time it looks more like somebody spilled spaghetti on a map and eventually found a destination.

One of the things Prosper consistently gets right is the quality of its speakers and the substance they bring into the room. I can go to almost any industry event and come home with a tote bag, three pens and a vague sense that somebody somewhere is disrupting something.

Prosper is different. The ideas tend to follow me home.

Liz Bohannon is one of my favorite examples. She spoke about the epidemic of loneliness among high performers and the importance of building and belonging to real communities. That landed with me because success can be oddly isolating. The higher people climb, the more we assume they have everything figured out, which is usually about as accurate as assuming the pilot never checks the instruments because they have a nice uniform.

High performers are often surrounded by people and still starved for connection. They carry expectations, responsibility and pressure, and because they look capable, people forget to ask whether they are connected. Liz’s message was a reminder that achievement without community can become a very polished form of loneliness.

We are not built to do meaningful work alone, and we certainly are not built to sustain it that way.

That idea fits Prosper perfectly. The event is not just a place to collect ideas. It is a place to build the kind of relationships that make those ideas useful.

Then there is Andrew “Drew” Davis, who is a favorite of mine for a ridiculous number of reasons. First, he used to work with Jim Henson, which immediately earns you a permanent place in my mental hall of fame. Anyone who has spent time around the world of the Muppets has already been professionally trained in the fine art of making very serious points with felt.

Second, Drew taught me something I actually use: how to build an AI that carries my voice, understands how I think and can act as a sidekick and digital doppelgänger. That was not a theoretical exercise for me. It changed the way I think about creativity, scale and what happens when technology is used to extend a human voice instead of sanding it down into beige paste.

That is another thing I appreciate about Prosper. The content is not limited to one flavor of leadership conversation. You can hear someone talk about loneliness and community, then learn how to build a digital version of yourself, then sit down with an operator and talk about retention, culture or growth. Somehow it all fits because the common thread is not the topic.

It is the human being trying to become better at the work.

Hands down, Prosper events have some of the best speaker lineups and most useful content I have experienced anywhere in the hospitality industry. The names are strong, but what matters more is that the ideas are memorable, practical and often a little uncomfortable in the way good ideas should be.

You leave with something to think about, something to try and, if the event has done its job, somebody new to call when the trying gets hard.

That brings me to something I believe our industry needs to keep talking about: culture.

Culture has somehow acquired a reputation as the warm and fuzzy part of business, the “soft stuff” HR talks about while Finance waits patiently for everyone to return to the numbers. I think we’ve got that backward because culture is already in the numbers. Retention is culture with a dollar sign attached. Turnover is culture sending you an invoice. Customer experience is often employee experience wearing a different shirt.

A manager who doesn’t know how to lead people doesn’t simply create an HR problem. That manager creates an operational problem, a recruiting problem, a training problem, a customer problem and eventually a financial problem. The P&L doesn’t care whether you call something culture. It keeps the receipt.

My belief in this goes deeper than retention or performance, though. I believe employers have a fundamental responsibility to make people better off for having worked for them.

That should be part of the bargain.

A paycheck matters. Benefits matter. Fair scheduling and safe working conditions matter. But employment should be more than renting somebody’s time until one of you decides the arrangement is over. If someone gives a company years of their life, that company should give them something that lasts beyond the final paycheck.

Teach them. Develop them. Give them a career path they can actually see and learning opportunities that prepare them to walk it. Help them discover what they’re good at, then give them opportunities to try things they aren’t good at yet. Put people around them who will challenge them, encourage them and occasionally tell them something they don’t particularly want to hear but desperately need to know.

Give them access to knowledge and relationships they didn’t have when they walked through the door. Let them leave with skills, confidence and possibilities they didn't arrive with.

Maybe they stay for 30 years. Fantastic. Maybe they stay for three. That’s okay, too, because I think one of the measures of a good employer should be remarkably simple: Are people better off because they worked here?

Not just the company. The person.

Did they leave more capable than when they arrived? Are they more confident and more valuable in the marketplace? Did they learn how to lead, communicate, solve problems, manage conflict and make decisions? Did somebody see potential in them before they could see it themselves?

If the answer is yes, you built something bigger than a workforce. You helped build people.

Of course, there’s a part of this that makes some employers nervous. If you develop people, some of them will leave. Of course they will. People have dreams, families, opportunities and occasionally weird ideas about moving to Colorado and making artisanal goat cheese. They’re people.

The goal shouldn’t be to make leaving impossible. The goal should be to make staying worthwhile and leaving valuable.

If somebody spends five years with your company and leaves for an opportunity you couldn’t provide, they shouldn’t walk away exactly as they arrived except five years older and in possession of several branded polo shirts. They should be better because they knew you.

I believe that is a fundamental responsibility of leadership, but I also believe it’s damn good business. When people know you are investing in their future rather than merely extracting from their present, they behave differently. They learn, contribute and take ownership. They tell other talented people about you, and sometimes they become ambassadors for your organization long after they stop appearing on your payroll.

You don’t have to trap good people to build loyalty. Help them become who they’re capable of becoming, and you’ll build the kind of culture people remember.

One reason Prosper carries weight is the caliber of leaders and brands willing to participate. Last year’s speakers included leaders from Chipotle Mexican Grill, Dutch Bros, Pizza Hut, Shake Shack, Dine Brands Global, Henny Penny and others.

Those logos are impressive, but the logos aren’t the point. Think about how many human lives sit underneath them. There are managers getting their first real leadership opportunity, franchisees betting years of their lives on a business, young employees receiving their first paycheck, parents working a second shift, and people discovering for the first time that they might actually be good at leading others.

Somewhere in one of those businesses there may be somebody washing dishes tonight who will run 200 restaurants someday. They probably don’t know it yet. Their manager may not know it either.

That’s why these conversations matter.

When leaders from organizations of this scale make decisions about development, opportunity, culture and leadership, those decisions travel. Something discussed by a handful of people in a conference room can eventually reach tens of thousands of employees who will never know the meeting happened.

That’s an extraordinary privilege, and it carries an equally large responsibility.

The question can’t only be, “How much value can this person create for our company?” We should also be willing to ask, “How much value can this company create in this person’s life?”

The best businesses figure out how to do both.

Prosper talks about Building a Better Table, and I love that language because a table is one of the oldest pieces of human technology. We eat there, argue there, make deals there, celebrate there, tell stories there and make decisions there. Occasionally we sit through meetings that should have been emails there.

Tables aren’t complicated. Who gets invited to them is.

Building a better table doesn’t mean dragging in a few extra chairs, taking a photograph and congratulating ourselves for being enlightened. It means asking harder questions about who’s missing, who hasn’t been seen yet, who has the ability but hasn’t had the opportunity, and who keeps doing exceptional work without getting the introduction.

Who needs training? Who needs a mentor? Who needs a career path? Who needs somebody to look beyond what they can do today and imagine what they might become tomorrow? Who needs someone to say, “Come sit over here”?

Then comes the part we sometimes forget: you have to move over.

That’s where purpose becomes behavior. It’s easy to believe in opportunity when you’re the person receiving it. The better test is what you do once you have enough influence to create opportunity for somebody else.

That’s what I’m looking forward to this week. There will be remarkable leaders in Orlando and iconic brands represented throughout the room. Chad and I will undoubtedly find people whose stories make us forget whatever question we originally intended to ask.

But I’m most excited about the conversations nobody can schedule: the hallway, the bench, the dinner table, the introduction that doesn’t make obvious sense yet, and the person whose badge I don’t need to read before deciding they’re worth knowing.

Because the best thing Prosper can produce isn’t another successful conference. It’s people leaving Orlando determined to lead differently when they get home.

Maybe somebody notices an employee they’ve been overlooking. Maybe they create a career path where one didn’t exist, make an introduction, become a mentor or give someone responsibility before that person has the perfect title. Maybe they take the employee who thinks they’re “just” doing a job and help them see that this could be the beginning of something much larger.

That’s how a conference becomes consequential. Not because of what happened inside the ballroom, but because of what happens when everybody goes back to work.

And then we get to keep going. Prosper Accelerate is coming to Dallas October 28–30, and if the purpose behind Prosper speaks to you, I hope you’ll join us.

Accelerate’s focus on emerging leaders across foodservice and hospitality matters enormously to me because we spend a lot of time celebrating leaders after they’ve succeeded. I’m much more interested in what happens when we find them before everybody knows their name.

Before the big title, before the keynote and before the article explaining how obvious their success was all along, give them access. Give them relationships and knowledge. Give them opportunities to learn. Let them sit across from somebody who has already walked part of the road they’re staring down, and then get out of the way and see what they do with it.

So come to Dallas. Bring your experience, your questions, your ambition and the lessons you learned the expensive way. Maybe leave the pitch deck in your room for a minute and meet somebody first.

Somewhere in this industry right now, a future CEO is working a shift. A future founder is trying to figure out payroll. A future president is learning how to manage three people and wondering why all three apparently woke up Tuesday determined to test the limits of human civilization. A future leader is wondering whether they’re ready, and somebody is capable of far more than their current circumstances suggest.

They don’t need us to rescue them. They need someone to see them, teach them, challenge them and give them access to opportunities they may not be able to create alone. Sometimes they simply need a door opened at exactly the right moment.

They need their shot.

That’s what Building a Better Table means to me. It isn’t charity or optics, and it certainly isn’t collecting impressive people in an impressive room so we can admire one another’s badges. It’s recognizing that talent is everywhere while opportunity has never been distributed nearly as evenly.

If we’re fortunate enough to employ people, lead people, teach people or open doors for people, I believe we inherit a responsibility along with that privilege. When people eventually leave our companies, whether that’s 30 years from now or next Tuesday, they should be better off for having been there. They should be more capable, more confident and more prepared for whatever comes next.

I want people to be able to look back and say, “I grew there. Somebody believed in me there. I learned things there that changed what I thought was possible for my life.”

That’s a legacy worth measuring.

Chad and I are committed to doing our part. We’ll tell the stories and ask what happened before the success became obvious. We’ll celebrate the people who opened doors and challenge those of us fortunate enough to be in a position to open the next one. We’ll keep looking under the hood, choosing humans before titles and pulling up chairs wherever people are willing to gather, learn, work and fight for their shot.

Because Prosper’s idea of Building a Better Table only becomes real when the people already sitting there decide somebody else belongs.

That’s the table I want to help build, and if we’re doing it right, we’re going to need a lot more chairs.

Which brings me back to one of the oldest clichés in business. Maybe it became a cliché because we’ve said it a million times. The sobering part is how often companies manage to say it without actually building their businesses around it.

Take care of your people, and your people will take care of the business.

No complicated leadership framework is required to understand that. Teach people. Challenge them. Believe in them. Give them opportunities. Help them build careers and lives they’re proud of. Whether they spend three years with you or thirty, make damn sure they leave better than they arrived.

For me, Prosper is a sobering reminder that we already know this. The real question is whether we have the courage to run our businesses like we believe it.