Rethinking March Madness
🏀 March Madness: Flip the Bracket
As an owner or operator, the list never ends.
Service.
Cleanliness.
Food cost.
Staffing.
Training.
Vendors.
Reviews.
Equipment.
Payroll.
Marketing.
If everything rolls up to you, it feels impossible.
So let’s flip the bracket.
Instead of everything stacking on top of you, you’re in the center.
Four brackets cascade outward:
- Guest Experience
- Cleanliness
- Cost Controls
- Your People
You don’t manage everything.
You choose what gets your attention.
And here’s why that matters.
The Hawthorne Effect (In Plain English)
The Hawthorne Effect is simple:
People improve performance when they know something is being observed.
Not because they’re afraid.
Because attention signals importance.
When you focus on something consistently, your team naturally begins to focus on it too.
What leadership pays attention to becomes important.
🏆 Bracket 1: Guest Experience
Easy Starter: Curb Appeal
Walk into your building like it’s your first time.
Park.
Get out.
Pause.
Ask yourself:
- What do I see?
- What do I smell?
- What do I feel?
Recently, I visited a restaurant where the outside ashtray was so overwhelmingly full it was painfully obvious:
The owner doesn’t see it anymore.
And if they don’t see it… you know the staff doesn’t either.
Not the best first impression.
Now here’s the power move.
Don’t do this alone.
Bring a staff member with you.
Walk the entrance together.
Say what you see.
Ask them what they see.
Then fix it together.
You just taught someone how to observe like an owner.
That’s the Hawthorne Effect in action.
You gave attention to curb appeal.
Now they will too.
And they’ll start teaching the next person.
🏆 Bracket 2: Your People
Easy Starter: Audit Your Onboarding (Not Orientation)
It’s March.
Which means hiring season is either here… or about to hit hard.
It’s reasonable to assume you’re going to bring on new people this year.
When was the last time you took a hard look at your onboarding process?
Not orientation. Orientation is paperwork, uniforms, and a tour.
Onboarding is different.
Onboarding answers:
- Do they understand our standards?
- Do they know what “great” looks like here?
- Do they feel like they belong?
- Do they know how we win?
Orientation gets them in the building.
Onboarding aligns them with your culture.
Pick one onboarding touchpoint and give it your attention:
- The first five shifts structure
- A training checklist that hasn’t been updated
- Who is assigned as trainer
- The end-of-week feedback conversation
Bring a manager with you. Review it together.
When leadership visibly cares about onboarding, managers care.
When managers care, trainers care.
When trainers care, new hires succeed.
That’s operational stability.
🏆 Bracket 3: Cleanliness
Easy Starter: Change the Angle
I was meeting someone for a business lunch one time.
We were seated at a window table with big, wide windowsills.
Bright afternoon sun pouring in.
At one point the light hit just right… and I saw it.
Footprints.
On the windowsill.
Someone had stood up there to clean the glass.
Which made me tilt my head slightly.
And then I saw it again.
Footprints.
On the table.
Where my food goes.
Now, logically, I know what happened.
They cleaned the windows.
They got the job done.
But in that moment, I stopped seeing the place as clean.
I started scanning. Everyone does this when they start to question the space. They have a list.
Mine is:
Ceiling vents. -Are they dusty? What am I breathing?
Menus. -Are they scratch and sniff? Ohh.. yesterday’s soup, right here. Eww.
S&P shakers. -Are they textured with sauce from someone else’s messy hands?
Doorknobs. -Everyone touches them. Is anyone cleaning them?
Once your guest starts scanning, you’ve already lost a little bit of trust.
Cleanliness is a marketing message.
What are we paying attention to?
“Did we clean the windows?”
Yes.
But what did we communicate in the process?
The cleanliness power move-
Sit somewhere you don’t normally sit.
Walk the dining room at a different time of day.
Let the sunlight show you what fluorescent lights hide.
When you pay attention to detail, your managers do too.
And cleaning becomes ownership, not a checklist.
🏆 Bracket 4: Cost Controls
Easy Starter: Know Your Players. Know Your Products.
In February, we talked about knowing the details.
March is where you use them.
Cost control isn’t just about cutting.
It’s about positioning.
Two major levers:
- Labor
- Food Cost
Labor: Put Your Aces in Places
Not all shifts are equal.
Not all sections are equal.
Not all servers are equal.
If 20 percent of your team drives 80 percent of your sales, why wouldn’t you align:
- Your strongest sellers
- With your highest volume shifts
- In your most visible sections
Who are your top sellers?
What nights are they working?
Are they in the right spots?
When performance is visible and intentional, the Hawthorne Effect kicks in again.
People perform better when they know performance matters.
Food Cost: Are Your Top Sellers Dialed In?
What are your top five sellers?
- Are those recipes tight?
- Are portions consistent?
- Are they engineered for profit?
- Are they efficient to execute?
If your best-selling item is under-costed or inefficient, you’re scaling a leak.
A small handful of items likely drives a large portion of your revenue.
Are those items built to win?
Right people.
Right products.
Right places.
Right support.
Alignment spreads.
🏀 The Final Buzzer: You Can’t Manage Everything
No, you can’t manage it all.
But you can choose what gets your attention.
And what you consistently pay attention to- your team will too.
Not micromanaging.
Not policing.
Just visible leadership.
Pick one thing in each bracket this month:
- One guest experience detail
- One cleanliness standard
- One onboarding improvement
- One cost control alignment
You don’t need a full overhaul.
You need focused attention.
March Madness isn’t about playing every position.
It’s about advancing the right teams.
📦 The Navigator March Challenge
“Flip the Bracket”
This week:
- Put yourself at the center.
- Choose one priority from each bracket.
- Walk it. Observe it. Teach it.
Then ask:
- What changed because I paid attention?
- Who started noticing what I notice?
- Where did momentum build?
Leadership isn’t doing everything.
It’s deciding what matters — and making it visible.