Transitioning a Legacy Brand: Chris Rockwood’s Vision for On The Border

Welcome

Anthony Codispoti: to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Cotespote and today’s guest is Chris Rockwood. He serves as the chief operating officer at On the Border Mexican Grill in Cantina, the world’s largest Mexican casual dining brand founded in 1982 and headquartered in Irving, Texas.

On the border delivers authentic Tex-Mex specialties and a vibrant atmosphere with a mission to bring the bold flavors of the Texas-Mexico border to guests worldwide. Chris brings over 25 years of experience in the hospitality industry having previously held leadership roles at Putchak, Alamo Draft House, and Del Frisco’s restaurant group. He earned an executive certificate from MIT Sloan in artificial intelligence for business strategy, led operational enhancements at Alamo Draft House, managing $185 million in annual revenue, and facilitated successful ownership transitions at Del Frisco’s. Now at On the Border, Chris continues to elevate guest experiences and drive innovation in casual dining. His passion for teamwork and operational excellence has helped On the Border stay ahead in a competitive dining market. Now before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Add Back Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. One recent client was able to add over $900 per employee per year in extra cash flow by implementing one of our innovative programs. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible.

To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at addbackbenefitsagency.com. Now back to our guest today, the COO of On the Border, Chris Rockwood. I appreciate you making the time to share your story today. And thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here. All right, Chris. So how did you first get started in the hospitality industry? What drove you into that?

Chris Rockwood: That is a quite an interesting story. So growing up, the second oldest and a family of five children in central Pennsylvania, a little town, Carlisle, PA, probably middle of nowhere, you know, at best, if you’ve been to cars, they have an amazing car show that’s pretty nationally recognized or the Army War College is also there.

The small town of about 18,000 people, I grew up in a Catholic family. You know, for us, going out to dinner was a panorosa. That was an exciting event. That was a birthday celebration. That was a, I’ll take the number 14 and all you can eat salad bar.

And we thought that was just really tops. I grew up in the Catholic schooling system, grade school through high school. It went out to 10 St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, where I got a couple degrees in business management and psychology, and really anticipated getting into the business world and going and just conquering, you know, young, energetic, competitive, plays a lot of sports in high school, going out there and just conquering the world. And the true story I think is when I was graduating senior year back in the early, early 90s, they had this program where you went and you sat down and you punched in all your data into a computer.

This is old school computers. And it kicked out what they thought you would be really good at. And I can’t make this up. But, you know, I sat there for an hour and a half and working hard and I decided it’s really concentrate on studies. And I got through four years of school with a couple degrees and I’m like, let’s go. And it kicked out this little piece of paper at the bottom that said, you’d be a really good restaurant manager. And I went, you got to be kidding me, restaurant manager, I’m going to be a restaurant manager at Ponderosa?

But there’s no way. Like, I spent four years working hard and really trying to do well. So fast forward, I went and did a couple of businesses after school with some friends. I found myself, funny enough, back in Pennsylvania after living in a couple of different states. And I was looking for something to fill some time. And I went into a restaurant concept in Xton, Pennsylvania, my older brother had lived out there and I say, I’m going to move back from Florida.

I seem to stopping off point. I’m going to go, you know, find something in the back in the Philadelphia area. He said, yeah, I got the extra room.

Come stay with me. So I got a part-time job waiting tables because I’m like, that’s easy. Who, you know, serving tables is easy. Let’s go just, you know, make some quick money. So I went and I got a job this place called East Side Mario’s. And like, this is kind of fun. You know, it’s full, fast paced and it’s interacting with people and it was, you know, super busy place.

And I had a lot of fun doing it. And then one day the, the director of operation came by and said, you should be a manager. I’m like, oh, no, I don’t be a manager.

No, I’m just here part-time, man. This is, this is beneath me, this restaurant stuff. I’m not going to be a, you know, master restaurant manager.

Well, fast forward there. Eight months later, I was the general manager of the Xton location of East Side Mario’s quickly became a director of operation. This was back when, you know, a hundred hour workweek were typical and just grinded it out. And I was young and energetic and single.

And this is okay. I just work hard and get it done. But realized that this probably wasn’t the right path for me. I started another business with some friends, believe it, I got into the cigar business for a little bit back in the mid 90s when that was real hot and did some real entrepreneurial things with that. And then, you know, I found myself, well, I just fell back into the need to find a little part-time job as I was building my business, because that’s my business degree. I was going to go and conquer the world. And I found myself in this place called Sullivan Steakhouse looking for a bartending job in the weekends.

A couple, you know, I’ve done this before. I’m going to go wait some tables and I got a job at Sullivan Steakhouse to realize, hey, this isn’t Ponderosa. This is, this is kind of big business. This is, these people are coming and spending real money and they’re enjoying themselves and they’re leaving a lot of, you know, gratuities.

And this is, this is kind of interesting to me. So fast forward, then I became a manager with Sullivan’s. I became a director of operation, regional vice president of operations, running the brand and helping build all of the concepts under Del Frisco’s restaurant group, which are Del Frisco’s double eagle, the Sullivan Steakhouse concept, Del Frisco’s grill, Frankie’s Italian grill actually. So multiple concepts under that umbrella, even Lone Star Steakhouse and Saloon, believe it or not, back in the day was part of that group had gone from a publicly treated company to private public. And I spent a good more portion of my career at Del Frisco’s restaurant group, which it ended up becoming called after a couple of some sales and going public and then private and had a real good history and a real run and realized that the restaurant industry is real big business. It utilized every single thing that I learned in school from marketing to finance to how to deal with people actually use my psychology degree, which is kind of fun.

And realized that this was, you know, it was fun. It wasn’t sitting behind a desk. I’m not a static person. It’s hard for me to kind of sit still.

So I’m like, I can be up and mobile and move around and really learn how to influence in groups of people to get results. I’m like, okay, this is whole different idea of what I thought the restaurant industry was going to be. And I laugh because, you know, 20 years after doing that, I look back and think about that day when I was graduating from St. Joseph University and said, you’d be a really good restaurant manager. I’m like, here I am running a, you know, $100 million brand and really kind of deep into this.

So my love of it became kind of solidified during my course with Del Frisco’s Restaurant Group. I left them after 19 years because I figured that was time. It was a long time to be with a company. And I moved to Alamo, Jaffa House Cinemas, which was completely different. Like I went from serving $85 long bone steaks and $1,000 of wine all across the country to $15 burgers in the dark in a movie theater watching, you know, the Star Wars, you know, the sequel.

So it’s been quite a journey. I spent two and a half years at Alamo, Jaffa House, which was amazing. I got an opportunity to kind of move on and I worked for a company here in Dallas called, for Royce Hawaiian Fusion Restaurants. I was a Chief Operating Officer for that concept for a little bit of time.

And that was fun. And the opportunity came along to work at Putchak, which is this really kind of fun, you know, new concept of the eater team at space, brand new, came over from England, high tech, took it from two locations here in the United States up to 14 locations, which was amazing. You know, it’s a startup opportunity, work with some amazing people and high tech environment with food and beverage. So I kind of, you know, found some really amazing companies to work for and work with and learned everything along the way from how the movie industry works to the technology behind that to high tech industry like Putchak. Then I found an opportunity with On the Border. Here’s a legacy brand, been around for 42 years, that has kind of found itself in the mix of all the other casual dining spaces and an opportunity to come in and really transform this brand after a long time of kind of just being, you know, stagnant to flat sales. Kind of just like, Hey, nothing’s really happening here.

There hasn’t really a kickstart. And I saw it as a huge opportunity for me. I was brought in with three other people, the rest of the C suite to kind of come in and say, listen, shake this up. We’ve had some amazing leaders come through On the Border, but none that have really kind of given it the pop that it needed and needs to kind of transform the organization.

So we definitely came in as a turnaround group. We’re, you know, still in the first year of what that looks like. And we’re still kind of working through some of those nuances and some of those things as we kind of transform On the Border. But the best days of On the Border definitely had for us.

And we’re excited to kind of where we’re sitting right now and kind of the things we’ve done and changed in really to kind of get this thing moving in 2025.

Anthony Codispoti: So before we hear about some of the exciting things that are coming for On the Border, I want to go back to a little bit of your beginning because it’s, to me, it’s a little bit amusing that it seemed like for so long, there was this magnet almost that kept trying to pull Chris into the restaurant space. And you kept saying, no, no, no, no, no, like, you know, I went through all this business education, I got, you know, college degrees, like there are much more important things for me to do, right? Like, I’m a serious business guy. And, you know, so you take this test.

And I think, you know, we’re kind of a similar age bracket. I remember some of these tests. And I don’t, you know, did they work?

Did they not? Well, in your case, you know, now that we can look in the rearview mirror, clearly it was on to something. But I’m, I’m curious to hear your perception of this now that you have sort of that benefit of looking in the rearview mirror. And, you know, you saw that test results, you resisted, you resisted, you resisted, but now you found a ton of success in this industry. What is it about your personality that you think has made you such a good fit and allowed you to kind of move up so quickly through the ranks?

Chris Rockwood: That’s a really good question. I feel that there’s a, there’s a switch where kinetic energy is definitely something that’s needed in this industry, in the hospitality industry. The nine to four, nine to five hour lunch break, you know, commute to work, sitting behind a desk, leave at 435 o’clock and clock out and go home and do something else is not a mindset that works very well in this industry, because the majority of our business is done during the dinner hour. If you think about meal periods, whether it be breakfast, lunch or dinner, a lot of our, you know, full service establishments are lunch and dinner primarily, the majority of the business is at dinner. So you have to have the kind of the inclination to, hey, you’re here to term night out, I work at nights because I’m in the hospitality industry because I’m in that, you know, the night club and all that.

And I think that there’s a kinetic energy and a kinetic de-force that will get you to a certain point that you can just work hard. You can come in and you can put in the extra hours. If you’re able to and want to work more than a typical, you know, everyone talks about a 40 hour work week. If you don’t mind working 50 hours, 60 hours back in the day, which admittedly now it was way too much, but working those 65, 70 hour work weeks, just because you could just work hard and get it done, got you to a certain point that could get you to the point where you were successful at maybe running a unit or running two units, because you could just work hard and get the work done. And maybe you wanted to work harder than the next person.

I think there becomes a point where you have to realize that the kinetic energy is not going to get it all done. You have to think of the business differently. And you have to think about how you start motivating other people, other groups of people to start getting some of that work done. I think the switch for me, you know, 15, 17 years ago was like, Hey, I can get only so much done working 70 hours a week, 60 hours a week, whatever it was, whatever it took, whether it was a holiday week or whether it was Valentine’s Day weekend, I can only get so far by doing it all myself. And I think it also has a little bit to do with some of my challenges in this industry, because I just wanted to work harder than everyone. I was a competitor, I was big into support, sports.

I figured if I just work harder, not work them, then I would be more successful than them. And I think that works well again, when you’re very kind of in a box, and you can have a very finite sphere of influence. But if you want to influence hundreds or even thousands of people, you got to realize that you’re start influencing, motivating other people to get the same work done and to really start energizing the base and form your guiding coalition. Then you can have people say, Come on, we’re going to run up this hill. And you turn around and there’s 50, 100, 1000 people behind you running up the hill. That’s when you start really making some headway. That’s when you really start moving things forward. Initiatives, strategic planning, that’s where you can really start getting the momentum of a group or organization. And you can get outside of just being successful in a small group.

And you really start driving things forward. So I really think that my success and part of it was, I realized maybe earlier on that I can’t do it all myself, which was also part of my problem, because I wanted to do all myself. I wanted to fix everything. I wanted to just work harder than the next person. But over the course of time, I also being a competitor didn’t want to fail.

And I was failing. Like, why can’t I get the results I want? Why can’t I make this move forward? What is it that I’m not doing to get the results that I want to go? Because I want to grow. I want to become the executive, the business leader that I wanted to be.

And I finally realized it was me holding myself back. I need to let other people in. I need to let other people in and start motivating and driving them forward. And then as a group, we can start moving a whole bunch of things together. And the success came rather quickly.

Anthony Codispoti: I was going to say, was this kind of a slow transition for you? Or was it like building, building, building, and then more of like a light switch kind of a thing?

Chris Rockwood: I think it was. I think during my time, probably, you know, my 19 years at Del Frisco’s restaurant group, I got to a point where I’m like, okay, I’m here, but I’m not, I’m not seeing the four momentum. What am I missing? And I, you know, had probably one of my biggest followers. I got it, I got it. I got this. Just tell me what to do, coach. I’ll get it done.

Right. And I think that became a point where I had to be humble and say, I don’t have this. What am I missing? And you start asking for advice, you start talking to people like, hey, maybe you could get some input from other people, maybe you could start listening to peers around you, maybe you could start asking people, hey, what they want, rather than telling them what they think they need. And I think that’s been a huge kind of a turning point for me was realizing that if you just ask people truly what they want and have human conversations with people, they’ll tell you what they need. And then our job is to support them and see if we can give it to them. And if we can find that crossroads where what I’m providing you is exactly what you’re looking for, and you’re giving me what I need to drive the business forward, then it’s a very good symbiotic relationship. At that point, then things really start moving forward.

Anthony Codispoti: Can you give maybe a concrete or specific example of a time you went to somebody and asked, hey, what is it that you need to be successful in your job? And they gave you some feedback and you were able to sort of connect the dots and everybody wins.

Chris Rockwood: Yeah, I think that I’ll give you one that’s pretty interesting is that we had in every single playbook I’ve ever seen, I’ve always taken this page and ripped it out going back 20 years ago. And that’s the one where you can’t have your cell phone, these crazy things we’re all attached to, and we all have our hands probably 20 hours a day while we’re awake, you can’t have your cell phone on you, you can’t do these things. It’s against company policy. If we see with your cell phone, we’re going to write you up and fire you and terminate you and all these horrible things. And I would take that page of every single manual, I was a part of any company and throw it away.

Because I asked our employees, I said, hey, tell me, tell me what, why do you need that? Like, what’s going on with that? Well, I have something outside going on. I have, you know, my daughter or son or sick at home, and I want to make sure I have access to them to reach out and call me. My mom is sick, or it could be just something as simple as, well, I use my, I use the computer on my phone to just bring up my tips and make sure the check is accurate. So you start talking to people and say, why do you need your phone? And then the other thing would we would tell them, we’ll put it in your car, put it in your locker, you know, lock it up before you come to work. You can’t have it on you. All these rules and stipulations that big company telling people what to do. And I just asked people like, what are you doing with your phone and how do you need it?

And what do you use it for? And I, and they told me, why? And I said, okay, I’m fine with that. And I would take that page out of every playbook and throw it away. Cause to me, it didn’t make sense.

How could you have someone who that’s their connection to the outside world? Just be the company that said, because it says so, because I told you, you can’t have your cell phone. And we actually flipped it around. I remember the day when I was sitting at one of our locations, our state houses in Denver, Colorado, this is probably 2004, 2005. And we had 20 some people we call pre-shift where you sit before and chef comes out and shows you what their feature is for the day and tells you about all the amazing things. And the chef had stood up there and he was all proud of this amazing sea bass feature he had. And I said, okay, hang on chef, everyone take out their phones and the look of the spare in the entire room was like, Oh my God, he’s going to make us put our phones away and take them. And I said, no, no, take your phones out.

They’re like, Oh no, we’re all in trouble. And I went around the room and I had someone write down for every single person the number of Facebook friends or likes or people they had on their Facebook page. This is Facebook back in the day. And then we went around the room and with the 23, I think there’s 23 servers there, we had over like 197,000 people that were connected to the 23 people inside that room. I said, great, that’s an amazing opportunity. Now what I want you to do is every single person come up here and take out your phone and snap a picture of this amazing sea bass feature that the chef just put together and post it on your Facebook page.

And people are like, that’s kind of interesting. I said, so why are we fighting the machine rather than just enhancing it and go, no, so that point we had everyone in every single day. I mean, it’s been something I’ve leaned into a lot like we need to use the technology we have. We have to leverage the things that our teams are telling us and lean into those things rather than being like, no, we’re the boss, you’re the subordinate, we tell you what to do, you have to listen to us, I’m your manager, I say so.

All those things are really counterproductive, particularly to the way that teams work today. Like tell me why you need this, tell me what’s going on, tell me how I can help enhance you. And at the end result was, well, one, we had 197,000 people that knew about the seafood feature and it drove sales one for the business. And it also drove sales for them because people would come in and spend more money because they want to come in for the seafood feature. So kind of a fun little story I’ve told multiple times, but just talking to your team and asking them what they want and what you need from us and how we can all work together. So here’s something we turned into instead of a negative, we turned the cell phones into a huge positive. We then had them marketing machines out there and imagine the across the company of 100 locations, if you had three or 4,000 people with all their connections talking about the product that they’re selling every single day, I mean, those marketing dollars, you can’t buy. It’s just doesn’t, it’s not, it’s not conceivable.

So that’s just one example, but I have a million more. I think that listening to people has been kind of a fire starter for me going, Hey, what exactly, why do we do this? I do believe that management styles are very important when you think about the hospitality industry.

I like the Toyota lean management. If I ask why five times and you don’t give me an answer to make sense, then maybe we need to change it. Maybe it’s something that needs to go away. Maybe it’s something that we shouldn’t be doing.

And I’ve asked a lot and every time I’ve started with a company, I tell people, I’m going to ask why a thousand times and I apologize, but I really want to learn. I want to learn what you believe helps us move forward and how it can support you. And if there’s things that we’re doing that doesn’t support the mission, doesn’t support our teammates, doesn’t support our guest experience, then we get rid of them. So we just make them go away and figure out what we need to do to support those things.

Anthony Codispoti: And so even today, if we were to go into an on the border location, our employees sometimes taking pictures of the specials and posting them on their social channels.

Chris Rockwood: We hope so. Yeah, that’s the goal. And again, you have to change a little bit of the mindset of the manager is going, what are they wants to do? They want their cell phones out. That’s against our company policy. I’m like, well, the fortunate thing is we can just change the company policy. So we can just kind of think that and just cross the line right through that in the playbook. But that’s the things where we have this archaic mentality and philosophy of like, we’re just going to tell them what to do and they’re going to do it. That’s not how it works anymore.

You have to be a partner with your teams and you have to make sure that they know what the expectations are. And I think that also gets in the slippery slope of some of the stuff we saw after 2019, 2020, where everyone kind of threw their hands up and went completely the other way. They completely went the other way like, whatever we need to do, keep our employees happy, whatever they show up late, who cares?

Call out sick, it doesn’t make a difference. And I believe that the industry had a big kind of awakening and they gave we gave in a little bit and it was frustrating for a time there because it was hard to staff the hospitality industry was hard to staff bartenders and servers, when everyone’s, you know, driving for Ubers and Lyfts and going around the country doing other stuff, there was, you know, maybe easier money for them in their mind. But once you find and get past the mental block and the thinking error, there are great people out there that want to come in and do a good job. And as long as you can find those people and you can nurture those people and you can show them that this is a place where there’s accountability, where you can be very successful and we’re not going to let people come in and just kind of skate by. I think that that switch a lot of companies have realized after, you know, 2020, 2021, where kind of the industry went through a big shake up, and a lot of people left the industry go out and find those good people, but don’t don’t acquiesce to them and don’t don’t allow them to be mediocre. I think is the the charge and the the direction I give is we don’t allow mediocrity. Like if there’s a reason why you’re late or reason why you can’t show up and I’m concerned and I care for you as a human being.

But the end of the day, we’re running a business and the expectation is that you’re helping us run the business and we’re going to provide a real safe environment for you to make some really good money.

Anthony Codispoti: So as I hear you sort of talk about how things have shifted, the the visual that pops into my head is a rubber band. Like it’s sort of got pulled back really far in one direction. And then it sounds to me like the the trigger the let go of that rubber that very tight rubber band was COVID. And that caused this rubber band to snap back really far in the opposite direction to where I’m hearing you say, oh, you know, hey, if you’re late, no problem, we just want you to show up at some point, right? Yeah, you know, just, you know, you’re not going to show up today. Hey, that’s fine.

Please just show up tomorrow. So it went a little bit too far this direction. And now it’s coming back. Is this sort of visual that I’ve got in my head? Is this sort of accurate?

Chris Rockwood: I think it is. I think it is. And I think the big rub there, Anthony, is that you’d have young men and women who were servers and bartenders before who are now managers and we have not given them the full skill set on how to manage that situation, right? Because they were hourly team members six months ago, a year ago, whatever, and now their managers expected to manage those people and to hold the standards. And we have to make sure we’re giving them the skills to do that.

And I think that that’s the big gap I was talking about earlier with you is that we haven’t shown our young men and women how to manage people. We’ve told them how to shake a martini. We’ve told them how to surf on the left and race from the right. We’ve told them how to make sure that the fork is set this way and the nice fork this way. But we haven’t really done a good job, I feel, as an industry of taking these young men and women who are passionate about this industry and teach them how to manage the human side of it. And the people side.

Anthony Codispoti: That’s such a good point. In so many careers and so many businesses, it sounds like this is certainly the case in the hospitality industry, the people who are getting promoted to assistant manager and manager, they’re people who performed really well as hands-on operators. And they show themselves to be smart and capable, get at solving problems, very reliable. And then so you elevate them, you reward them, you give them more responsibility.

But you’re right. That’s the people component is the one that most of us never really got formal training on. Maybe we had a psychology class here or there, but applying that into a work environment and those soft skills of how to manage people and difficult situations. It’s something that I think really gets overlooked. I’m curious to hear what your approach is to that. How do you go about trying to teach those skills?

Chris Rockwood: It’s a really good question. And I think that’s part of the rubber band that you said that got stretched and kind of got snapped back. So in a previous company, in fact, in this one as well, I’ve worked with our learning and development team, our training team. It’s a new catchphrase for training, learning and development team. And we’re about to roll out a few management development program or MIT training, manager and training process. And right before about to get to roll this out, I went to our team and I said, I know this is going to throw you for a curveball, but I do not want managers and training ever working in hourly position. And they looked at me like, what are you talking about? How’s that going to work?

I said, listen to what I’m saying. I do not want you putting these managers into a prep position, a broiler position, a bartending position, a server position, because that’s typically how MIT training worked. That’s how the training was for it’s been that way for decades.

And I’m sure there’s companies out there that are still doing it that way. But they’re training you functional stuff. You have a person who’s probably been in that hourly position and you’re just going to take them and train them how to do it differently or better because that’s what the MIT book said.

So I went to the team and said, think about this and think about the people we have today in the industry. They know how to shake a martini. They know how to put a plate in front of a gas.

They know how to serve a drink. They know all the functional stuff, but they don’t have to manage people. So instead of them working specific functions inside of their training program, I want them managing those programs. So instead of doing the prep, I want them managing the prep team. So instead of them actually being a bartender for a busy Thursday, Friday, Saturday night to show them that they know how to bartend, I want them managing the bartenders.

And I want them back there in giving them instruction and managing through the process, the host to stand whatever it may be. And what it did is it did a couple of things. It shortened the training time, which from a financial aspect makes a lot of sense rather than spending two weeks as a server, two weeks as a host, two weeks as a bartender.

I mean, the training programs back when I went through training were 16 weeks long, four months to learn how to do what, to learn how to prep every single item, to learn how to peel shrimp, to learn how to make a drink. Like I can do that. Just give me a test. I can learn that.

Anthony Codispoti: In an environment with a lot of employee turnover, like you want to get them to the end result faster.

Chris Rockwood: So we shrunk the training. We made it more management based. And we had them really interact with the other people that they were going to be managing and taught them some soft skills and the management skills and allowed them to be managers and not that kinetic, I’m just going to work hard and get it done. And you know, because what we found also over the course of my career is when things got really, really busy, all those managers would jump back into hourly positions. We were so busy, I had to jump behind the bar. Oh, we were so busy, I had to jump behind the line. Oh, we were so busy.

And there’s going to be time when you have to do that. But that became their safety net. Well, I just couldn’t go back into that hourly position because everything got crazy.

And I don’t want to manage all the situation out here. So I’m just going to become an hourly teammate again, because that’s my muscle memory. That’s where my skills lie. So I think fundamentally, the industry needs to start doing a better job of training these men and women who are passionate about the industry and really kind of moving that forward and giving them the soft skills to get it done.

Anthony Codispoti: What does it look like from a practical point of view to introduce that kind of people training? Are you kind of doing some role playing in a difficult situation where maybe a customer is upset and you know, the server is upset and you know, how to sort of walk through that?

Chris Rockwood: For sure. I think that’s probably the best part about it. The way that people learn today is also much different as we know. The way that, you know, here’s a manual of 400 pages and read it all and do the checklist and take all the exams and take all the tests. That’s very old school and it’s not how people learn. Particularly now, since we’re so attached to all of our digital devices, we’re very much, you know, visually learners for sure with all the stuff out there. Our young men and women who went through, you know, social distancing learning have been taught to this is how we learn.

We learn on computers and tablets and iPhones and all those things. So I think it’s really important for them to give them very specific situations and to make sure that they are walking through that with someone who understands it. Which goes back to the point of having a certified training location rather than just, hey, I’m going to send you here because it’s cheaper for the company or hey, just training the same location where you’re going to work.

They have to have some places that you’ve certified as training locations that are going to be your North Star. This is how we operate. This is how it’s done. And if you have the right leadership in that location, Anthony, the not leadership there can try to transfer that information down and work through those situations. But it has to be hands-on. You know, the school work and learning all the recipes can be done in an afternoon. And you can give somebody a test.

And there’s a lot of amazing technology that will allow you to do that. But unless they’re getting hands-on people training, I think we’re doing them a disservice. And then throwing them into the fire, as they say, and going, hey, good luck. Go take care of that situation. It’s not a good recipe for success, I feel.

Anthony Codispoti: You know, I’m curious to get your perspective on something, Chris. I had the privilege and the honor to interview lots of people. And I hear a common refrain from folks that the workers, the employees of today, they’re different than they were five years ago, maybe 10 years ago, maybe 15 years ago. And I always wonder, like, how much of it is that the employees have truly changed? And how much of it is that, hey, now we’re the old people, we’re the old guard, right? Like, because from the time I was little, I remember hearing people say, oh, the generation today. And then as I got older, it was, you know, always the generation behind, you know, oh, they’re just not the same. They don’t appreciate this.

They don’t value that. And like, I think that’s just like a refrain that we repeat as we get older because we grew up hearing it. And because now we’re the old people that are set in our ways and we want the young people to do it the way we want them to do it.

But what’s your take on this? You know, you’ve worked at a lot of big restaurant groups, you work at a huge one now, you get to see like a lot of employees and you get to see the changes that have happened over the years. Is it more that, hey, we’re just the old guys now, now we’re stuck in our ways? Or have things truly evolved from an employee perspective?

Chris Rockwood: I think it was probably somewhere in the middle without Anthony. I think that there is a breakdown in maybe some of our hiring practices. I think that the pool of talent, when you think about the full service industry, right? I’ll speak about that, because that’s probably most of my knowledge is full service, polished casual, casual dining.

Is it the cash of employees that you’re looking to hire from? There was a lot of professional servers. There were servers that were just really, really good. This is what they did.

Bartenders were really, really good. This is what they did. And they could just walk into any system, any company, no matter, just plug them right in, because that’s what they did. They choose this as a career.

They chose this as, this is what I’m gonna do. And they really were really good at it and had all the skills to really be effective as an hourly team member. But I think during the last probably three or four or five years, maybe even longer, I think that some of the novelty of being a full-time server or bartender has worn off and it’s now a temporary position. I feel that people are like, I’m just gonna go make some money. I’m just gonna go work for a couple months.

I have a summer off or whatever. So the pool of talent out there is still good, but you have to be a little more discerning. And I think that some of the effects of just getting people to work after COVID, getting people to come in and just please show up for your shift so we can have bodies to be able to take care of our guests, combined with the fact that maybe we were just too quick to put people in those places, hire a warm body rather than the right warm body and spend the time to train them, has kind of fueled this idea that maybe we just hired some of the wrong people and maybe we just did it because it was easy for us because it was a path of least resistance and not because we took the time and energy to say, know what, I know I’m gonna be short one or two servers for the weekend, but I’m gonna wait for the right person rather than just hiring that warm body that, hey, I need somebody, come on, let’s go. And I think that there is a bigger emphasis needs to be put on the training because we don’t, I have not found that we have the superstar cash of talent pull out there for employees that are walking in with wine knowledge or food knowledge and the seriousness, I think, of the kind of the career mentality that we had previous, I think is not there.

I think like, oh, I can just become a server and they just wanna do the least possible work because I have technology now that tells me everything I need. I can just ask Google or chat me to you or I can just ask, my son who’s 13, love him. This is last year, I say, he was writing something down and solving with some homework and say, hey, buddy, you spelled that wrong. He goes, well, so what? I said, Ethan, yeah, it wasn’t a super hard word, but it wasn’t easy. I said, you need to make sure we spell that. Can we check the spelling? He said, daddy, I don’t need to know how to spell.

I can just ask Google. Like, I just, right? And I said, come on, you still have to learn. You have to know how to spell all the words. You have to go through the work. You have to do the work to be able to be successful.

So I think a little bit of combination of one, being a little bit more discerning and teaching our managers how to hire the right people for those positions and also making sure we’re providing them with the right training. I think that the people want everything they’ve always wanted. They want a great environment to work. They wanna come to work in a place that’s safe, that’s fun to work, especially in this industry.

They wanna make some good money in a short amount of time, and they wanna be able to go home and come back to work the next day. So I think that part of it hasn’t changed, but we just have to do a better job of being a little bit more careful or set the expectations up front with who we’re looking to hire and then make sure you give them the training in the right format so that they can be good employees for us, Googleport.

Anthony Codispoti: So let’s talk a little bit about on the border itself and sort of the dining experience. You guys have lots of locations around the country, but there are probably some folks listening that haven’t had the opportunity to dine at one. What can they expect to experience today in one of your locations?

Chris Rockwood: Yeah, it’s a, you know, it’s the Mexican food genre is definitely taken off. It’s one of the highest, you know, chosen cuisines when people go out. It’s, I think about it like a comfort food almost, you know, think about something that makes you feel good. It’s very filling, you know, when you go out and you get the chips and the salsa and the tanginess from the salsa and the hot warm chips with the salt on it, and you order a margarita. It’s just, it’s an escape from maybe a little bit what they’re normally used to, but you get that environment where the music’s fun and the people are fun and it seems like you’re just kind of taking back a little bit and we call it a flavorful escape from the everyday. Right, you sit at the table and people are having a good time and drinking margaritas and the flavors in the Mexican cuisine are amazing, right?

From chipotle’s to the salt on the rim of a, you know, strawberry margarita. Everything we have is just in your face. It’s fun, it’s exciting. It’s a little bit like, where am I? So you can come spend, you know, 40 minutes with us or an hour or sit at the bar for a couple hours and when you leave, you can go back to the rest of your life. You can go back to everything that’s out there. You can go back to all your bills and the work and everything, but inside of one of our cantinas, it’s meant to be fun. It’s meant to be a lively. The food is flavorful, you know, scratch kitchens still and everyone uses the word scratch kitchens.

What does that mean? Yes, we still make the salsa. We still make guacamole fresh every single day. We’re still making stuff fresh in the kitchen.

We’re still hand pressing tortillas in front of the gas. So just an experience. And I feel that, you know, 42 year old brand, it’s like, what are you doing different than over the last 42 years?

How have you evolved? I think we’ve listened to our consumers and we’ve said that they want more flavor, that they want more spice, they want more excitement. They wanna make sure that when they come in, they feel that they’re getting a value. I think that word means a lot of different things to different people and I think that to me, value can be driven by the experience.

Doesn’t really have to be a price point. You know, we’re not an expensive evening out. You can go out to on the border, family of four. We have a family feast, it’s, you know, $59.95. You can basically $15 a person come out and have an amazing proteins and chips and salsa and everything that comes with it. So I think there’s the approachability of the Mexican cuisine and the approachability and the value you leave when you leave, you’re like, I’m full, I feel great. I had a Margarita or two, I had some chips and salsa, I had some amazing fajitas and you leave there and you go, that was a really good experience. And even if you don’t remember the next day and what you had, I tell people, I hope they leave in the next day, people say, where did you go? I went on the border. Oh, what’d you have? I don’t, let me think about that. I’m not really quite sure what I have, but it was amazing.

Anthony Codispoti: Did you have a good time? We had such an amazing time. Did you have a good time? It was a blast. Okay, then we win, right? So on the borders, a brand that’s been around for a long time, we’re not going anywhere. We’re excited where it’s going, moving forward. We’ve had some really smart people come through and we have some, a team now that’s really kind of super engaged back on the hospitality side, really engaged with the guests. We want them to walk in, we want them to know our guests and to feel like, hey, this is my go-to spot for Tuesday night at the bar.

I’m gonna come in for a Friday night dinner with the family, Sunday afternoon, hang out. There’s just a whole bunch of different uses that on the border provides for our guests. So, there’s one thing that’s constant in life, right? And that’s change. Change always happens. And so I imagine it’s been difficult for on the border to, I don’t know, sort of stay attached to its legacy and its roots of what has made it successful over the years while at the same time embracing the inevitable change that comes from what consumers expect. And from what you’ve described, it sounds like there was a little bit of a wall in that, right? Things kind of got stagnant for a while. And so you as well as a few others have been brought in to kind of shake things up. What does that look like? How do you balance that? And what are some of the exciting changes that you hope to bring in?

Chris Rockwood: Yeah, I think there has been a renewed focus on inside the four walls and the actual experience, right? I think that for a time there, it was really financially driven based upon, well, what can we do to make sure we’re driving profitability, which is very important always in the business, but really what are we doing to make sure that the guest leaves and goes, holy crap, that was fun.

That was a great experience. And not necessarily concerned about, oh, was that the best price point? Could I’ve gotten this cheaper someplace else?

Did I spend too much money, not enough money? I think that there’s a lot of stuff that the atmosphere of a restaurant will dictate a lot of that. The music level, the temperature, the lighting are very important when thinking about the atmosphere of an environment. If you walk into someplace, you know, like, oh, it just feels off. It doesn’t feel right. Like this doesn’t feel comfortable. It doesn’t feel like I’m in someone’s home.

It feels like I’m in, you know, is this a hospital room or this just doesn’t feel like it’s a place I wanna kind of hang out and have some margaritas? So we’ve done a lot of work with some assets that are decades old, refreshing some of that, some of the lighting and the music and the atmosphere and the temperature and some of the interior decorations and some of the stuff that just maybe a little neglected over the course of time because it really wasn’t something that felt it was important. And I think it’s very important.

I think the experience is what people come back for. I’ve said this and I’ve worked with some of the most amazing chefs in the country. And I’ve said this to them privately and publicly is that they’re not coming for the food. And they said, what do you mean? I told somebody, I said, do you, if you think that they’re coming down the border because we have the most amazing margaritas or the best margaritas in the world or the best fajitas or the best chips and salsa, I said, they’re not, they’re coming for the experience. Is our food amazing?

100%. Our outside skirt, fresh juice margaritas, chicken, seasoning, it’s amazing. But if you feel and believe in your soul that they’re coming because we have the best chicken fajitas in the planet, then you’re a little misguided. They’re coming for the experience. They’re coming for you, they’re coming for the music, the atmosphere, the flavors of the whole experience. And if we give them amazing food, amazing service, hospitality, welcome them when they walk in the front door, say goodbye when they leave, they’ll come back. And they may not know what they had from day to day, from trip to trip to visit, but they’ll come back because the experience is what they were looking for.

And that’s what I think people want. They want an escape. They want to, you know, turn off for a minute. They want to put their phones down.

They want to come and listen to some music and have some chips and salsa and really enjoy themselves. So I think that we’re providing that now more so than we ever have. And the funny thing is, Anthony, when I talked to people who’ve been with the brand for a long time, I said, 20 years ago, described on the border, oh my gosh, three deep at the bar and people doing, you know, shocked and just, it was amazing. I said, okay, what’s changed? And like, huh, we changed.

We gave in to our guests who maybe have been around for a long time, who’ve been coming in for a decade or two or longer and say, hey, listen, I’m a little bit older now. Can you turn the music down? Can you turn the lights up? Can you, this is different.

Can you, and we awkwardly asked them because we were so afraid to lose those guests that we forgot what our brand DNA was, which is exciting, vibrant, flavorful place to come and have a little bit of escape. So we’re getting back to that. It’s been quite a transformation over the last probably six months or so. I did feel that taking the first couple of months to understand that brand was important. Over the last six months, we’ve made a lot of exciting changes. We’ve put some amazing people in place where they can drive those changes and get excited about the brand again. And we’re really starting to see some very nice momentum with what’s going on.

Anthony Codispoti: So people who maybe have experienced on the border in the past coming into a location now or a few months from now, depending on, you know, how these changes are being rolled out throughout the country, they may experience a little bit more of a lively atmosphere than what they’ve seen in maybe the last few years.

Chris Rockwood: I think that’s very exciting. They’re gonna see excitement. They’re gonna walk in their front door and they’re gonna go, wow, this is amazing. This is fun. This is what we want it to be. This is the escape we’re looking for. This is the flavor.

Not only flavor in the food, but the flavor in the atmosphere, the flavor with the smile, the flavor with the feeling of hospitality when they walk in the front door. So that’s the goal. And that’s what most restaurant companies have. That’s the magic sauce. Everyone thinks that there’s some magic sauce or some magic thing that’s gonna, you know, that’s the one deal. I think that the overall experience and the way that people leave and how we make them feel, that’s the true magic sauce.

Anthony Codispoti: But it sounds like it’s still very family friendly, right? Like it’s not like I’m going on spring break and, you know, people are doing keg stands at the bar. I mean, you mentioned your, oh, was it $50 or $60, you know, family pack, you know, everybody gets to eat. So it sounds like there’s something for everybody here. Is that right?

Chris Rockwood: There is. There is absolutely something for the entire family. Again, people use on the border for a bunch of different stuff. They use it for a Tuesday night escape because I don’t feel like cooking at home. They use it for a date night, come sit at the bar and have some margaritas and just unwind with either family, friends or significant other. We have a lot of families that come in all the time because you know what?

We’re approachable. It’s a, you know, it’s not a lengthy dining experience. You can come in and out in, you know, 40 minutes and sit on the border and have an amazing meal and feed your family.

And the other thing is because of the environment, you don’t feel awkward if you bring kids in, like, oh my gosh, be quiet. You have to simmer down and you can’t have fun. We want them to have fun. Like we want them to come and, you know, the parents are like, oh my gosh, people are looking at us. Well, no, you’re fit right in. Like this is part of the deal. This is part of the fun, part of the excitement.

Anthony Codispoti: Well, it sounds like the place for us. My wife and I have two very lively boys who are eight and 10. And we have the exact same thought process when we’re going out to dinner. You know, where can we go that, you know, we won’t be a problem. And it sounds like sounds like on the border is the spot we should be trying.

Chris Rockwood: Oh, it’s a blast. Yeah, we have lots of families and they come in a lot and they on the way up to like, thank you, like what? Like, thank you for just giving us a break because mom can have a margarita. Dad can have a nice cold beer. The kids can have fun and not worry about being too quiet. And really enjoy themselves and leave. And it’s a it’s a great family experience for sure.

Anthony Codispoti: So, Chris, you’ve got an executive certificate in AI from MIT. Explain what that is and how you see kind of the role of this tech unfolding in the restaurant space.

Chris Rockwood: Yeah, I am pretty pragmatic when it comes to the business side of, you know, hospitality and what it means and what it drives forward. Realizing that things are changing and realizing that we have to be better at our jobs as executives.

We’ve got to take the resources and tools outside and bring them inside the four walls and figure out how we can give our teams the resources to do their jobs better. One of the things you hear from ages a lot is I have so much paperwork. I’m always stuck in the office. I have inventory and orders and all the things we have going on and scheduling. And we really, really want them as you want them in front of the gaps.

You want them out there creating the environment and throwing the party. So I’m a strong believer in technology and how we can leverage that inside of the four walls and how we use AI particularly with some of the stuff. I mean, it took that class, you know, five years ago, six years ago. And it’s even from five to six years until now it’s exponentially grown, you know, open AI and all the stuff that’s come out. I think that we have to embrace those things and we have to realize that that’s how most of our people are coming in with that knowledge already.

They’re coming in with some of that. Like how you guys don’t have this? Like this is I’m doing this in my elementary school, my high school.

Like what do you mean? How we utilize AI in guest recovery? How do we utilize AI and scheduling order? Procurements? There’s a lot of ways to leverage that technology. And the only thing that I see is the biggest benefit is it frees up your managers to do the things you really want them to do, which is to be on the floor interacting with those humans, team members, guests, making sure they’re having an unbelievable experience, because that’s why people are coming back. I’ve been in a lot of different price points.

I’ve been a lot of different stuff. It doesn’t matter what price point you’re sitting at. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing. People are coming in for the experience. They can stay home. There’s nothing forcing people to come into your establishment. There’s nothing forcing them to come into your establishment rather than another establishment, except how we make them feel when they leave. If they leave your establishment, go, that was a heck of a good time. Then they’re going to come back.

And that’s our goal, but they can’t do that if the managers are sitting in the office, if the teammates are not doing what they’re supposed to be doing. So I have some bigger, broad goals with the AI part of it, with machine learning and some things I can think you can really get into. If you have multiple concepts under one umbrella, you could definitely use some machine learning and start getting pretty myopic with it. And there’s some pretty fun stuff, but that’s probably a different conversation. The point is that we’re evolving, the world’s evolving. If we don’t keep up with it, we’re going to find ourselves way, way behind.

At the end of the day, it gives our team members their time back and our managers their time back to do what we really want them to do, which is interact with the guests.

Anthony Codispoti: Are you looking into industry specific off-the-shelf tools, or are you looking to sort of develop your own in-house tech?

Chris Rockwood: That’s a really good question. We don’t have the bandwidth or the amount of people that would take to create their own technology. I think there’s a lot of smart people out there that are building stuff that are off-the-shelf boxed components, which is amazing. So I have a firm believer that if there’s something off the shelf that provides what we’re looking for as far as the tool, I’d much rather use that than having to spend the time or the energy and the resources to do it ourselves. We’re not technology people. I’m a big believer in utilizing the technology, but I don’t think we have the bandwidth or even the abilities financially or time-wise to build something that’s probably already built.

I think that’s real important. Everybody wants to, we can do that when we build it ourselves. Like why would you? If you could buy something that’s not, why would you build it? Like it’s already there.

It’s all the stuff’s out there. I think just being open to it is probably one of the things that we’re going to do. Mental blocks from a lot of people is like, well, we don’t need that.

Okay. Well, what if it helped us do better? What if it helped us improve the experience for our teammates and also the experience for our guests? So I’m very open to those things. And I’m always looking for new ways to kind of incorporate it and see what’s out there, but I’m a big fan.

Anthony Codispoti: Yeah. Do you think that the tools are ready now? You guys have obviously been very focused on making a number of big changes, sort of inside the four walls, as you put it. This is probably next or somewhere on the priority list. Have you even had the opportunity to sort of take a look at the tools? And do you think that they’re in a ready to go state yet?

Chris Rockwood: They are for sure. We have implemented some of those already on our CRM site, the guest recovery site. We are going to be implementing a lot of those here in Q1 and Q2 for on the border, which is more on the ordering, scheduling, procurement side to help us kind of take those young men and women we talked about and give them the right tools to be able to be more effective inside the four walls. So some of that we’ve already deployed. Some of it will be deploying as we move into 2025 and then probably towards the end of the year, we’ll have a lot of those things already implemented and be ready to move forward at a pretty quick pace. So, danger of question, some of it’s already in place and then some of it’s actually being deployed here at the beginning of 2025.

Anthony Codispoti: Yeah. Here we are recording this on January 3rd, 2025. So when it talks about Q1, Q2, it is now basically that it’s unfolding. So it’ll be exciting to see how that actually shapes up. I want to shift gears on you for a moment, Chris, and invite you to talk about a serious challenge that you’ve overcome, whether it’s something personal or professional, what it was like getting through that and some lessons that you learned coming through the other side.

Chris Rockwood: Yeah. I think I touched on this a little bit earlier, Anthony, was the idea that I could just outwork the next person, that I can do it all myself. Growing up in a family of five children and the second oldest, it was always out do your older brother. Whatever he, Jim, my older brother, whatever he did, I would do better. And that was my marker for success.

As long as I beat the person and ran faster than the person in front of me and chased them down, and I could break through the tape first, then I would win. And I think there’s, there comes a point when most leaders and executives will say, I need some help. That doesn’t get it done. Like you have to go reach out across the aisle to people and say, listen, I have, one of the hardest things for me to say is that I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Right? And you have to be humble enough and say, listen, I screwed that up. Like that was not successful in doing that. What could I have done differently? What could I have done better?

And how can I make sure that I don’t mess it up in the future? I’ve told people probably some of my biggest learning points is all the failures I’ve had. Right? I think that not being afraid to fail is a very strong trait for people. Obviously, you can’t put the business in jeopardy, but being able to make decisions, go listen, if this doesn’t work, it doesn’t work and be able to own it and say, listen, I screwed that up. I think there’s a little bit of credibility, a lot of credibility that you get from your team when you say, listen, I don’t have all the answers. I’m going to ask you to be thoughtful and I’m going to ask you to give me your opinions. I tell my teams always that I reserve a 15% veto vote, meaning if you come up with something, I’m like, time out.

That’s going to be a brand killer. Like we can’t do this. But besides that, the majority of the stuff we come up with comes from the field. If you are not reaching out to your people and having the groundswell and kind of navigating the conversation where you kind of wanted to go and having, you know, kind of behind the scenes, but you still need to get these masses of people, whether it be hundreds or thousands of people to move the business forward. And you have to do that by getting them to buy, buy into you, buy into what you’re trying to do. And I think that if you put yourself out there was, I know everything and just listen to what I tell you and you’re going to be great, then you’ve already failed. Like you’ve already, you’re already behind. If you can’t say, listen, I feel in my heart with my experience, this is what’s going to work. And we’re going to think about the unintended consequences and we’re going to think about how we can deploy this and what tactics and strategies can use.

At the end of the day, if it doesn’t work, I’m the first person to take full responsibility. I tell the story. When I first joined on the border, I was in front of the, all the multi units, the vice presidents, the entire executive team. And I stood up in front of the room and I said, I’m real happy to be here. And they’d made some transition with some previous, you know, the whole leadership team. So here we are, the new leadership team. And I said, I’m real excited to be here.

My name is Chris Rockwood on the new chief operating officer from the border. And I want everyone to know that it’s my fault. And people, and people, and I tell the story and I tell it now and I’m out in the field. I said, what’s the first thing I said? Like, yeah, you said my fault. I go, it is, it’s all my fault because I don’t want you hung up on who did something wrong before, who’s fault it was, or who, who made the mistake? I said, it’s all my fault.

I take full responsibility for everything up to this point. Now what I’m asking is I need your help to get it, to get it right size. I need your help now to move this brand forward. I need your help to make sure we can all move forward together. And it is, you can see the relief in the room just kind of go, okay, who he’s not, he’s not going to start blaming us for all the stuff and all, and it’s all my fault, everything I’ll take for responsibility.

And I think as a leader, you have to take the responsibility, you know, share the praise, all the catch phrases and all the books you’ve read and, you know, share the praises with your team and take all the responsibility. But I think it’s important for people to have the psychological free space to make decisions and to speak up like, Hey, we’ve tried that before. And look, okay, I understand we may have tried that before, but let’s try it again. Maybe we think about it a little different way. Maybe we think about it differently. Do you think that could work?

Yeah, okay, well, let’s maybe do that. So I’m, very much try to be humble in how I approach things. At the end of the day, I have very little problems making those tough decisions, unfortunately, but sometimes you have to make the tough decisions. But I think really trying to get your guiding coalition and kind of getting them involved from the beginning is huge and saying, Listen, I don’t have all the answers.

If you’re, if you’re looking for me for all the answers, then this isn’t going to work very well, because I need you to help me through this and work together as a team. It’s the only way that I’ve seen to really get some success. I had a lot of success early on just telling people what to do. And that became, there was a ceiling to that. There was always a ceiling like, if I’m going to tell you what to do, they’re going to be like, Okay, what’s next?

And you don’t give them the ability to think for themselves. You don’t get them to ability to solve the problems, then you just become a, you become a teller. And I want to be more of a teacher rather than a teller.

Anthony Codispoti: You know, I’m really glad that you’re giving voice to this, Chris, because this is something that I certainly went through early on in my entrepreneurial career. I started my first business right out of college. And, you know, I had a small team of folks that I was wholly unqualified to lead. You know, I had a little bit of work experience in college, but I didn’t know what I was doing. But I thought part of my role was to have all the answers, to have the vision, to have the framework, to tell everybody what to do, and they would follow it. And it took me several years to realize exactly what, you know, you were just talking about, which is, man, everything became a lot better, more efficient, a lot more creative ideas. When I wasn’t bringing it from the top down, I was sort of saying, Hey, here’s the big picture.

First of all, what do you guys think of that? Like, help, help me fill in the blanks, you know, help me color in the spots that I missed. And then also, here’s the why. I think that was a huge thing for me in, you know, helping to the team understand the why we’re doing this. And then ask for their help in putting together the framework, because I didn’t have all the answers. And I, but I felt like it as a person in leadership that I was supposed to. So I’m so glad to hear, you know, you kind of give voice to having gone through that yourself on a much bigger stage.

And then what you did when you came into this very large, well known brand, you know, on the border was brilliant, in my opinion. You get everybody’s attention. You diffuse the situation by four words. It’s all my fault, right?

You just took the tension out of the room. Clearly, this guy’s going to come in here and he’s going to start kicking us in the gut and telling us all the things we’ve been doing wrong. But you’re like, Hey, nope, that’s not the approach. I’m not here to point fingers. Everything that happened in the past, it’s all my fault.

So let’s just look forward. It’s really refreshing. So I’m curious to hear how you got there. Was this something you read in a management book, or was this just something that kind of came to you?

Chris Rockwood: You know, I try to be a student of the business world. I try to be a student of people. I think no matter what the industry is, whether you’re selling tires or you’re in the hospitality industry or you’re building, you know, planes for Boeing, you still need people. My father was an executive for United Telephone Services in Pennsylvania, became Sprint Corporation. There’s a piece of advice that he gave me early on, amongst other stuff. He said, Chris, I gotta tell you, I’m in the finance world.

He was a controller or treasurer. He said, I’m in the finance world. I work with some of the smartest people you could ever imagine.

People can look at financial computations and before computers back in like the 60s and 70s, and just can come up with this amazing analysis looking at numbers, but they can’t deal with people. They have no social skills. They can’t have a conversation. They can’t go into a room and explain anything.

They’re the super analytical, you know, numbers people, but they don’t have any people skills. So in order to be successful in business, the one piece of advice I can give you is you have to learn how to deal with people. So I’ve always tried to take that piece of advice and the kind of quest for learning, well, how do you deal with people?

What’s the best way to do it? You know, am I the most wall-read person? No. Do I read a lot of books and kind of take little nuggets here and there, 100%? And there’s one thing I read one time that made sense to me and said, anytime you’re in a relationship, and I do feel that with your team members, you’re in a relationship, not a, you know, funny relationship, but you’re in a relationship with them. You definitely have a relationship inside the business.

If anytime you’re in a relationship and you’re worried about whose fault it is, the relationship’s already failed. You’re already done. And I was like, what? Explain that to me. And I might have been my, you know, someone I talked to or, you know, someone who has a much more of a psychology insight than I do.

And I said, so in business world, think about that and applying that. If we’re worried about whose fault it is, if we’re worried about who did something wrong, then this relationship’s never going to work because all you’re doing is building up barriers. You’re building up walls.

You’re building up, even to the point where, and I’ll just break it down, we’ll simply to the hospitality industry, managers a lot of times or multi-unit managers, when they see a bad guest complaint come through, we’ll call up and give the manager a hard time. How could you let this happen? What did you, how, why weren’t you on the floor? Why could you be, what were you doing?

And oh my gosh, and they’re, you know, email or they’re, they’re kind of using that, the, the, the communications to give them a hard time about this guest experience. And I’ve had always had a much different approach. I wasn’t there. Even I was multi-united. No sense of me calling you and blaming you for something. When I wasn’t even there to witness it, you were in the middle of the situation.

So my response to always was, okay, man, what happened? Okay, how could we have done that differently? Not whose fault it was not blaming the server or the bartender or whatever, not blaming people, but saying, how can we do better? I have run some of the busiest restaurants in the entire country, and I’ve crashed and burned on some of the biggest holidays you can ever possibly imagine because we overbooked because we ran out of food or whatever. And I’ve had some of the worst crazy shifts we were doing, you know, 60, 70, 80 thousand dollars a day. And you’re like, wow, that really wasn’t good.

And at the end of the shift, I would take the entire staff together and I ended up like, oh my gosh, he’s going to yell and scream at us. Here it comes. I’m like, wow, that really sucked. How do we not do that again? And they’re like, huh, I said, how do we, my fault, we overbooked it.

I took to me gas and we didn’t, you know, check the schedules, whatever. How do we as a team make sure that never happens again? Like, huh, that’s an interesting question.

And we would figure out the solution so that it never happened again. And I think that’s a part that people want to be right instead of rich. You want to be right, be right. You want to be rich, then there’s a different way to do it.

But if you just want to be the right person in the room all the time with all the answers, it’s going to be a real hard time getting people to do what you need them to do.

Anthony Codispoti: Chris, I just have one more question for you. But before I ask it, I want to do two things for everybody listening today. I know that you love today’s content. Chris is great. Please hit the share, like, subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And Chris, I also want to let people know the best way to get in touch with you. What would that be?

Chris Rockwood: Yeah, I think you reach out to me at Chris on theboarder.com. It’s probably the best way for sure. Love to hear from you. I’m LinkedIn as well. My LinkedIn profile is up there. But I think this is a great opportunity to share some insights my 25, 30 years of this business and kind of where we’ve been and where we’re going and where we’re headed. And hopefully a couple of little tactics or tools I’ve used have been successful over the last couple of decades, particularly to drive large organizations forward and really kind of have people say, yep, let’s go. And I, without telling them, I think that’s the magic of it all is that I haven’t told anyone what to do.

And the whole time I’ve been on the border or project, I didn’t hold them. I’ve guided them and showed them the tools and given them the tools and they figured out most of it themselves. And my job is to say, Hey, nice job. Or if we screw up, I go, Hey, it’s all my fault. How do we make sure we don’t do that again?

Anthony Codispoti: The last question for you, Chris. And first of all, that’s very generous of you to offer to be available to folks like that. You’ve got a lot of wisdom that, you know, very valuable to a lot of folks.

Last question for you. I’m kind of curious to get your perspective, whether you think about on the border, the business specifically, or the larger industry in general, what do you think the big changes are that are coming in the next couple of years?

Chris Rockwood: I think that the industry has definitely gone through some times over the last probably 36 months, right? Sales and you think about who the ownership groups are and what their objective is, whether it’s just profitability, make money on a publicly traded company or privately held or, you know, trying to grow or there’s some consolidation amongst companies going through there. There’s a lot of companies going through a hard time. I mean, we’re still, you know, struggling through and fighting through what we’re going through it on the border as a large, you know, legacy brand. I think most people are realizing that the experience is going to be really the driving force.

There’s some brands out there that really, truly have always leaned into the experience. And I think we put them on a pedestal like, oh my gosh, look what they’re doing. Okay, they’ve been doing that for decades. They just never changed. They never got away from their mission statement of taking care of the guests, providing the experience, providing a consistent quality message, providing value. And they’ve always done that.

And we’re now looking at them going, oh my gosh, they’re amazing. When you realize these businesses have been doing this for 20, 30, 40 years, it’s not new. And I think some of the legacy brands and some of the industry people have gotten away from that, whether it’s quality, they’ve gotten away from truly what the what the guest is looking for.

They want quality, they want value, they want an experience, they want to leave your place and go, wow, that was a lot of fun. Thank you. I got everything I need from nourishment to my soul, to my heart feels good.

And I’m going to come back next week. I think that that full package is going to be more of a focus over the next couple of years, because guests can go everywhere. There’s a lot of seats, there’s lots of doors and lots of cuisines and lots of things out there. And the competition is going to continue to grow. There was definitely some consolidation and probably some reduction in seats over the last three or four years.

Some companies have closed doors. But I think that we moving forward have to really lean back into the experience and make sure that the guests are taken care of. And whether you’re giving them a value meal, $6 quick service, fast food, or you’re serving them something at a higher price point, they’re still looking for the value. I think there’s a segment we all play in.

And as long as we know what our guest is looking for, we can give that to them. We’ll come out on the same side. And I think it’s all going to be very successful. It’s going to be exciting time for sure, especially as technology really gets its hands around this. And really see what we can do as far as efficiency goes and how we optimize a lot of the technology in our space.

Anthony Codispoti: Well, Chris, I want to be the first one to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Chris Rockwood: It was great, Anthony. Thanks for having me. Best of luck to you and thank you.

Anthony Codispoti: Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks you