Jim Toth

[Jim Toth @tothjames]

Every operator I talk to is obsessed with labor percentage.

Wrong metric.

Labor percentage is a lagging indicator. By the time you're measuring it, the damage is done.

I measure labor efficiency per shift — transactions per labor hour, consistency of that ratio, and trend. That is productivity

If efficiency is up and consistency is tight, labor percentage takes care of itself.

Operators chasing the number chase their tail. Operators chasing the system win.

[Jim Toth @tothjames]

I built 50+ workflows in the first three months.

Half of them solved problems that didn't exist.

Turned out I didn't know my own business as well as I thought. So I stopped building and went back to the floor. Just watched. No fixing.

Once I actually understood the friction, the automations that mattered became obvious.

Genius has the fewest moving parts. But you can't find those parts until you stop pretending you already know the system.

[Jim Toth @tothjames]

Either Oili works everywhere or nowhere. There's no middle ground.

Spiffy's proving there's room. But here's what matters: Colton.

He's smart, humble, confident in the business, and actually listens when he's wrong. That's rarer than you'd think.

The market doesn't care about the idea. It cares about who's driving it.

[Jim Toth @tothjames]

When radio came out, parents said it would ruin brains.

When TV came out, same panic.

Internet? End of civilization.

AI is the same conversation with better PR.

It's not gonna destroy anything. It'll have a good side and a bad side, like everything else.

The operators who win aren't the ones who panic. They're the ones who pick one thing, build it, and move on.

[Jim Toth @tothjames]

Claude Projects keep context. You drop data into a folder, it remembers everything. Ask it the same question tomorrow and it knows exactly what you mean.

I use this for CEM analysis. Every email gets copy-pasted in. Every month I ask it the same thing: 'What's trending?' It gets smarter because it never forgets.

Most people ask Claude the same question 10 times and wonder why it gives different answers.

Context window is the difference.

[Jim Toth @tothjames]

Black clouds not welcome here.

But here's what I notice: the people on my team who stay optimistically warm have endured just as much adversity as anyone else.

They're not ignoring the hard stuff. They're choosing not to rain on everyone around them.

I cannot be around people with black clouds over their head. Makes me sick to my stomach.

So optimistic warmth is not number one value because it's nice. It's number one because I can't function around its absence.

[Jim Toth @tothjames]

DoorDash drivers parking in our guest spots during lunch isn't a guest problem. It's a leadership problem.

My team doesn't confront guests they're unsure about. They extend charitable assumption first.

If it's clearly a third-party driver? "Excuse me, these spaces are for our dining and curbside." Same dignity, same respect.

We don't start with no. We start with grace.

[Jim Toth @tothjames]

It's not magic. It's systematized.

I design the hiring system to bring in people who already align with hospitality and generosity. Then I train leaders to do the same without me in the room.

That's why the staff is engaged. We picked the right people and built a process to keep doing it.

[Jim Toth @tothjames]

I changed how I interview people after listening to The Ideal Team Player.

Used to ask about skills. Now I ask questions that informs a rubric we created to grade our values alignments.

People think it's a dumb question. But their answer tells me everything. Values misalignment means you just won't like it here.

I hire 51% character. 49% skills. You can train the skills. You can't train optimistic warmth, curiosity, empathy, work ethic, self-awareness.

Value misalignment doesn't mean you're bad. It means we are bad for each other.

[Jim Toth @tothjames]

Hit 118% of target three years running.

By year three, the team stopped asking 'what could break us?' and started asking 'how do we protect this?'

Charlie Munger: 'The way to get what you want is to be deserving of what you want.'

I wasn't deserving of growth anymore. I was deserving of more of the same.

So I voluntarily broke things. Competitor analysis. Tech refresh. Data analysis, leadership training.

Creating problems that didn't exist yet.

That's how you become deserving of the next level instead of imprisoned by the current one.

[Jim Toth @tothjames]

When a location is missing targets, the instinct is to optimize harder.

We did the opposite.

Reframed from 'hit our numbers' to 'serve the customer better.' Service first.

Throughput went up. Turnover went down. Culture shifted.

You don't automate to escape work. You automate so your team can do what matters.

[Jim Toth @tothjames]

I came in with zero restaurant experience. One pizza place my senior year of college. That was it.

First year I was on waffle fries because I didn't know what I was doing.

But I knew systems. I knew people. And if you're good at those two things, you can make it work.

The how-to you learn on the fly. Kaizen

[Jim Toth @tothjames]

Corrected a Leader's service failure in front of the team. Impact—necessary, immediate.

Three days later, over coffee, I asked what happened and listened.

She told me later: the correction got her attention. The conversation changed how she leads.

Stephen Covey: 'We judge ourselves by our intentions, but others by their actions.'

I intended both. She felt the gap between them.

That gap is leadership.

[Jim Toth @tothjames]

Those who are consistently unhappy believe the world owes them equity because they exist.

I see this with business owners who fail. Waiting for someone or the universe to fix costs and people. Waiting for the system to level the field. Waiting for their turn.

Meanwhile, the business three stores over are building.

In the Marine Corps, you don't earn rank by showing up. You earn it by solving problems no one asked you to solve yet.

Equity comes from contribution velocity, not tenure.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

Stateside, a gas station. I drank a frozen blue beverage too quickly, and was struck down by a punishment this entire nation knows, and accepts, and has named.

The drink is called a slush. Ice, sweetness, and a blue that does not occur in nature. The day was hot. I was thirsty. I drank like a soldier at a river.

The pain arrived in my skull like a war horn.

Behind the eyes. Above everything. Total. I gripped the roof of my car. I may have made a sound.

"Brain freeze," said the cashier through the door, with no urgency whatsoever.

It has a NAME. The affliction is so common it has a household name, like a cousin.

"Tongue on the roof of your mouth," called a man at the pumps. He did not look over. He prescribed the remedy mid-pump, casually, the way one mentions weather.

I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth. The war horn faded. The healer nodded at his pump, finished, and was gone in a Chevrolet.

In my land, punishment follows crime by way of courts and seasons. Here, the sentence is instant. Drink with greed, and the ice strikes the mind directly. No trial. No appeal. Perfectly fair.

And here is what moves me. EVERYONE has felt it. The cashier. The healer. Children. Elders. An entire nation united by the same small lightning, all taught the same cure, all passing it on to strangers at gas stations, free of charge.

You cannot fully distrust a country once you know it shares one pain.

The freeze does not punish thirst. It punishes haste.

I finished the slush slowly, like a scholar. Blue tongue. Clear mind.

Then at the door I forgot everything, drank deeply, and was struck down again.

"Tongue, hon," said the cashier, without looking up.

Discipline is a journey.

[Jim Toth @tothjames]

Killed a project at Phase 9 yesterday.

Three of my AI reviewers — the systems engineer, the CFO, the skeptical PM — flagged the same fatal flaw. The economics worked. The execution plan was tight. But the assumption that operators would pay $X/mo for this didn't survive adversarial scrutiny.

I spent two hours planning it. My AI agents saved me dozens of hours building it.

That's the best thing we did all month.

[Jim Toth @tothjames]

We used to put guest phones in a little "chicken coop" at guest tables. Free ice cream if nobody touched them for 40 minutes.

Killed that tradition years ago.

Bringing it back. Kids haven't sat without their phones in their entire lives. The conversation that happens when you force it is the actual meal.

[Jim Toth @tothjames]

I can unplug pretty quick. I just don't want to.

I'm in Rome for a week. Still seeing everything through Slack. Still watching the channels. Not interjecting.

I hate not knowing what's going. So I'm the fly on the wall.

Being unavailable and being disconnected are different things. I'm choosing the first one.

[Jim Toth @tothjames]

You don't have to like everybody on your team.

But you have to serve them.

There's a difference.

You can respect their dignity, treat them well, and still say it's not working out. Both things are true at the same time.

While they're with you, they're helping you do what needs to get done. Otherwise you can't do your job.

That's the deal.

[Jim Toth @tothjames]

I watched a team member pack fries today. Way over portion weight. But half the box was broken pieces that sank to the bottom.

Guests are happy. Food cost isn't.

When you have 50% fragments instead of whole fries, you need twice as many pieces to hit the make it look full. The box looks full. But you're paying for invisible scraps.

One variable: how hard those bags get handled in the kitchen.

Small thing. Compounds. What I love about this business. Strategy AND tactics