With 25 units and hundreds of employees, Life’s Food operates Five Guys locations all around North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Although employees have long had access to robust corporate training to help them master the basics of frontline operations, leadership training was largely ad-hoc.
"Processes on how to make a good burger and fries were really well-documented on the corporate side, but management training on skills to run a restaurant were lacking,” shared Lauren Mendenhall, Director of Learning & Development at Life’s Food. “No matter what location you’re in, the expectations at any restaurant are the same, and we needed the experiences to match that.”
To tackle this problem, Life’s Food came up with a two-pronged goal: ensure rising leaders were set up for success in their new roles, and develop pathways to demonstrate that working in food service could be a career in itself rather than just a stopover. But to achieve it, they knew they’d need to overhaul their training program.
Challenge: Inconsistent Training Leading to Inconsistent Quality and Turnover
Prior to Opus, General Manager (GM) training at Life’s Food was led individually by District Managers (DMs).
“We had a couple of PDFs and Excel files floating around, but there was no measure of accountability,” Mendenhall added.
Moreover, the materials did not cover the ins and outs of how to operate the restaurant and be a true leader. As a result, Mendenhall said, skills and expectations varied greatly between their 25 locations — even among restaurants within the same DM’s territory.
“Everyone had a different version of training. Without a way to track across all 25 locations, we were experiencing a lot of inconsistency and high turnover,” Mendenhall shared.
When managers would leave, Life’s Food was “left scrambling to find someone who could fill that role,” Mendenhall said. “Without training, we could only guess who would be a good fit.”
And if that replacement didn’t work out, “it would throw stores into chaos,” Mendenhall added.
To bridge that training gap, Life’s Food decided to supplement their legacy corporate learning management system (LMS) with Opus.
Solution: Standardized, Trackable Training With Opus
Mendenhall and other Life’s Food leaders first learned of Opus after it came highly recommended by a number of members in their local Council of Hotel and Restaurant Trainers (CHART) chapter. They were immediately impressed by its mobile-first approach, ease of use, and instant translation abilities.
“We liked Opus’ ability to meet people where they are. With Opus, we didn’t have to worry about resetting login information — all you need is a phone number,” Mendenhall explained. “And as a department of one, I don’t have a big budget or lots of time to create content. We needed something that would help us build trainings and roll them out quickly.”
Mendenhall also liked Opus’ emphasis on microlearning. Employees tended to drop off in the middle of long training sessions. With bite-sized modules, however, she knew Life’s Food could keep their managers-in-training engaged.
“Employees like Opus for a lot of reasons,” Mendenhall said. It's convenient. It's fun. It's different. It gives them a sense of progress as they work their way through.”
Training Modeled After Top Performers
Mendenhall began by reaching out to the GMs who had been the most successful in their roles. After learning their best practices, Mendenhall created microlearning modules on Opus that drew inspiration from their conversations and built on their existing training materials and systems.
Close Up: Customer Service Certification
Recently, Life’s Food has been using Opus to roll out a major customer service training initiative that is mandatory for managers and optional for hourly employees. Through a combination of microlearning modules and mid-shift check-ins, this course shares best practices for things like register service, phone etiquette, and making things right when a customer is unhappy. Even teaching the small things — like the importance of answering phone calls within two rings — helps ensure a better, more consistent customer experience across locations. In this way, Life’s Food is able to convert expectations into SOPs. Those who complete the course receive a Customer Service Certification that will eventually result in career growth opportunities.
Critically, Life’s Food has begun implementing skills verification checks and tracking employee progress.
“We use a lot of the check-in functionalities in Opus, which they do really well,” Mendenhall said. “We also constantly reference the completion dashboard, which we’ve configured into a couple of different reports.”
Each month now, DMs come in to review the completion information with HR and operations leaders. If any of their GMs are behind, they develop an action plan to help them catch up. The program has been so successful with GMs that Life’s Food has even begun rolling out a similar program for Assistant Managers (AMs).
Results: 100% Adoption, Quicker Ramp Time, 50% Lower Turnover
Previously, underprepared GMs at Life’s Food were getting overwhelmed and burning out. With Opus, however, they can confidently master not only hard skills like inventory management, but also soft skills like communication and conflict resolution. On top of that, they have a clearly visible career path within Opus.
As a result, turnover has dropped by a whopping 50%. In fact, Life’s Food hasn’t seen any voluntary GM turnover for over 12 months. On top of that, Mendenhall says that managers are getting up to speed sooner than ever.
“Well-staffed stores lead to higher sales growth and a better customer experience. With Opus, we have well-trained managers and are continually lowering turnover, which lets us focus on other important initiatives like customer experience.”
- Lauren Mendenhall, Director of Learning & Development at Life’s Food
Now that Life’s Food can monitor and verify training progress with Opus, they can feel confident that rising leaders are prepared to excel in their roles.
“We didn’t have any stop gates before, so people could get prematurely promoted into a position they weren’t ready for. They may have been called an AM, but their performance wasn’t always living up to that job title and pay,” Mendenhall shared. “Opus helps ensure people are ready, willing, and capable of doing their job.”
With a reliable bench of high performers, Life’s Food can breathe easier when looking to the future.
“Now that we’re not fighting all these fires with training, we can run our business more effectively.”
- Lauren Mendenhall. Director of Learning & Development at Life’s Food
And with plans to roll out a training program for shift leaders, Life’s Food will be able to improve their succession planning even further. “There are always learning curves, but everything is a lot smoother than it had been,” Mendenhall added. “We're making really good strides in the right direction.”
