Change Your Mindset

“Cost structure is a process; it’s about applying managerial cost concepts to the restaurant industry.” Mark Kelnhofer

My guest is Mark Kelnhofer, president and CEO of  Return on Ingredients LLC. Mark is an international speaker and author on recipe costing and menu Engineering. He has more than 25 years of experience in bottom line, boosting accounting. After graduating from Ohio Dominican University with his undergraduate degree, he immediately went into manufacturing Academy. He spent eight years in various industries including plastic injection molding, lighting equipment, transit buses, and tire repair products. Mark incorporates his extensive background throughout the episode as he discusses his entrepreneurial mindset.

Mark takes time to talk about cost structure and what it entails in a restaurant business. Giving practical examples from his own brush with the restaurant industry. His ability to make, the lessons he has gotten from the diverse industries that he has been in and put them all in his company Return on Ingredients LLC.

In the restaurant industry different things can lead to the cost implications and lack of instructions on cost controls can have a huge impact in improving efficiency, measuring out waste and profit. The data being gathered everyday helps an organization respond to a situation not only then but also on how to respond to the situation quickly. You may have the mechanism in place but if you do not understand how to make decisions and proper decisions at that, then you are able to make a bad decision very easily.

To learn more visit: petermargaritis.com

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“Improv is not about being a solo performer. It’s about relationships.” Peter Margaritis

Leaders who lead with an Improv Leadership Style have a foundation of respect, trust, and support for their organization and people. These leaders know how to prepare in advance and, at the same time, empower the people who are under them to shine. These leaders understand that it is not only about themselves and what they bring to the table; it’s also about their leadership in delegation and listening to their teams’ suggestions and opinions.

Peter gives us amazing insight into how a leader can make himself valuable to his team and those he leads. He also puts into perspective through his demonstrations of the effects a leader can have if not taking the chance to listen to their subordinate staff.

Individuals require a leader who will act as a unifier and believe in individual contributions. Trust is the virtue required to achieve this kind of respect and unity. And when it comes right down to it, it’s up to the leader to create that environment of mutual trust and respect.

To learn more visit: petermargaritis.com

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“If I can attract people because they feel I’m serving their needs, confirming their dreams, and helping them get there, that actually makes more money for my shareholders.” David Savage

What does collaboration mean to you? David Savage believes that most people use the term without really fully understanding it and therefore aren’t able to access the full potential of true collaboration. Our guest today, David Savage, is the author of several books, including Breakthrough to Yes.

Over a ten-year period, David and his partners collaborated to develop five companies and four not-for-profits. Since 2007, his company, Savage Management, has focused on building capacity, innovation, and accountability in people and in and between organizations and communities. David works with leaders and organizations to advance their success through collaboration, negotiation, conflict resolution, and business development. In this interview, David shares his 10 Essential Steps of Collaboration. Collaboration is possible if one identifies the collaboration’s intention and goal. It also means being accountable to your team.

Listen to his advice on how to embrace conflict, the importance of not being a sideliner, how ego is the enemy of progress, and much more in today’s episode.   

To learn more and for the complete show visit: petermargaritis.com as well as David’s website: https://www.davidbsavage.com/. 

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“Ego leadership is outdated because it generates behaviors that are no longer tolerated in today’s workplace.” Peter Margaritis

Vulnerability, empathy, and the willingness to let go of our ego matter when it comes to developing the kind of leadership capacity our employees, peers, and other stakeholders deserve from us. Crucial to the development of dynamic, admirable leadership is learning to communicate in a way that doesn’t negate the experiences of others.

Listening and presence exercises can kick your leadership into hyperdrive when added to the ‘yes..and’ collaborative approach. The sense of not knowing when someone is looking intently at us for an answer is hard for all of us, but it’s especially difficult for leaders with overdeveloped egos. One of the biggest challenges in leadership is, by and large, the perception that not knowing is a sign of weakness. Instead of driving their egos crazy during these moments of ignorance, leaders should lean into the not knowing, stop talking, and listen to their team for direction and vision.

Exercise two is talking without ‘I’, an Improv exercise demonstrating how to park your ego. Each player tries not to use the words ‘I’, ‘me’, or ‘my’, and instead responds to the other person using ‘we’ or ‘us’. This exercise aims to help us park our ego, so we can collaborate with our partner using the general philosophy ‘Yes… and.’ The idea is to develop stronger self-awareness about the degree to which your everyday language and decision-making might be, by default, a little bit more self-centered than you realize.

Exercise three is ‘thank you’, which demonstrates how to park your ego and show gratitude. This exercise aims to show gratitude to the other person for the information they are providing. The more we offer appreciation, the more the other person appreciates our efforts. Learning to accept praise with a ‘thank you is also valuable and can be a sign of humility.

Sometimes good people with decision-making authority just make bad decisions. When difficult situations arise, the ego can take center stage, but doing the work to minimize the role of your ego when we lead will ultimately take us to a place of more effective leadership.

To learn more, and for the complete show notes, visit: petermargaritis.com

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“People who want to help people further their business and solve their problems.” Stacey Rodgers

In today’s episode, we welcome Stacey Rodgers to the podcast. Stacey is the executive director of people and culture at Cohen & Company CPA firm based in Cleveland, Ohio. Stacey offers a unique perspective when it comes to helping the firm to develop and maintain outstanding client service teams. As a former auditor who built her career within Cohen & Company, she has a dual understanding of what clients need and expect from their accountants and how to help the firm train and develop employees to be successful.

Being at the center of the firm’s goal of employing the best and the brightest, Stacey oversees the execution of all people and culture initiatives, including performance management, employee engagement, employee development, and recruiting. In addition, with a focus on attracting, developing, and retaining talent, she works to ensure the firm exemplifies its foundational principles. Stacey is also very passionate and very knowledgeable about the accounting profession’s challenges.

Over time, three things have remained the same: first, hiring the right talent; second, training that talent; and third, keeping that talent engaged and excited about their careers. That is the three-legged stool that is critically important to any organization. So it does boil down to the people and ensuring that you have all of those things working together, despite what’s happening around you, within and outside your organization.

The pandemic has helped organizations to learn that they need to be more open to the different working styles of their people and become much more people-centric in their decision-making. A lot of the research shows that during this time of the pandemic, people had the opportunity to step back and reflect on what they wanted. Similarly, opportunities opened up in a way they’ve never been available before because of the changing market in that dynamic.

Leaders have stronger and better relationships today because of the adoption of technology and its capacity to enhance what they do daily. If leaders find the right way to use it going forward and take all the lessons they’ve gained due to this pandemic, they can come out in a much stronger position than they did going into it.

New hires need to learn how to communicate, both internally and externally. They also have to learn how to manage their time. So, for example, there is a difference when someone comes in with the ability to navigate a client problem without having someone to teach them how to do that, as compared to doing that through instinct.

At the end of the day, people who want to help people further their business and solve their problems. However, people underestimate the power of communication and building relationships and the importance of everything we do. Public accounting enables people to acquire these networking skills, which translate to success no matter where your career takes you.

Once you surround yourself with people who are experts in their fields, you will build a relationship and network that will last you a lifetime that goes beyond the purpose of building a business. The most successful people are those who recognize that they can’t do it alone. If you think you can accomplish all your goals on your own, you will only go as far as your ego and head can go. It is only when you start to understand who are the right people you need to surround yourself with that your business can begin to be successful.

To learn more and for the complete show notes, visit: petermargaritis.com

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“The collective knowledge outside your office far exceeds the collective knowledge inside your office.” Peter Margaritis

We all have an ego. Some egos are underdeveloped, others are well developed, and yet others are overdeveloped. Overdeveloped egos can, in some cases, ultimately transform into full-blown narcissism. Conversely, when a person’s ego becomes overdeveloped, they can begin to operate from the perspective that the world revolves around them.

More often than not, narcissistic leaders stop listening to those around them, which ends up creating toxic cultures. CEOs who make everything about them and disregard the advice from their teams are doomed for failure. Listening to understand is one of the critical components of leadership, yet it’s just on the side because of an overdeveloped ego.

Leaders who lead with an improv leadership style have a foundation of respect, trust, and support for their organization and people. These leaders know how to suspend their judgment, be active listeners, and be present and adaptable. They also believe and ultimately understand that leadership is the positive effect you have on another person. In improv leadership, you praise a teammate in public and only criticize them when appropriate and in private.

To learn more and for the complete show notes, visit: petermargaritis.com

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“Accounting is all about how hard one works at it, and it is a skill more than it is something that someone is born with.” Anne Gannon

In today’s episode, I welcome Anne Gannon. Anne is a certified public accountant who specializes in providing a monthly accounting and tax service that works for the business owner, not just the accountant. What makes Anne unique is that she is anything but your stereotypical accountant. After all, she spent her earlier years chasing the dream of professional golf. The time spent traveling the country playing golf had an impact on Anne, but she quickly realized that all the entrepreneurs and members of the hospitality industry she had met along the way were being underserved by their accountants. In 2016, she founded the Largo group, a firm specializing in over-delivering for entrepreneurs and business owners.

There are a lot of similarities between sports and being an entrepreneur or business owner. You have to keep looking forward, not dwell on the past. The one good thing in business as an owner is that you can control your business and improve it daily. If you can see a path forward, then you can make it happen.

When the pandemic happened, things were not very clear for a large number of businesses. The business owners that made it through had to change their mindset because some models just didn’t work anymore. Businesses had to listen and pay attention to their customers. They had to be more data-driven and not so bottlenecked into thinking they know what their customers want but realize they had all this data where they could find out what their customers wanted and answer.

Everyone in accounting should try to teach accounting as it makes you look at it differently when trying to communicate to people who don’t understand it. When you have to teach accounting, you realize that not everybody speaks that same language. It’s taught well in school, but there are a lot of things that they leave, and also, it is taught by a lot of people who haven’t failed in the public accounting world.

Accounting is all about how hard one works at it, and it is a skill more than it is something that someone is born with. If you really work hard and train yourself, you can teach yourself accounting. A lot of times, when people don’t get it right away, they get discouraged.

Accounting is not an option. If you’re going to run a successful business, you have to understand the fundamentals. When training non-accountants, it’s good to start slowly and then get people to open up about how much they understand.

With technology, providing that extra level of customer service to clients is important. To improve your communication, start with your favorite clients so as to focus on what it is that these clients love about you.

To learn more, and for the complete show notes, visit: petermargaritis.com

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“Great leaders inspire and motivate through empathy, not ego, agenda, and emotion.” Peter Margaritis

It can be hard to teach leaders to flip the script when it comes to being more empathetic and even vulnerable if those leaders are wearing thick protective armor over their humanity in the workplace. Two-face, empathy-devoid leaders take pride in their distance. But unfortunately, their aloof and impersonal workplace behavior starts degrading relationships, and then projects begin to fail.

Self-absorption creates a toxic work environment. Empathetic leadership creates an empowered workplace, and one person’s behaviors and attitudes can impact many. A very effective way to increase empathy is by replacing assumptions with a sense of curiosity that opens us up to empathy. You achieve this through conversation and questioning to reveal what lies beneath the surface of the other person’s issue or perspective. Curiosity is a good thing. It helps us ask questions and gather more facts and information, which eliminates unfounded assumptions. The more questions we ask, the closer we get to the root of any issue, and once discovered, we can help devise a plan to help solve the problem at hand.

The word improv looks a lot like the word improve. It’s a powerful reminder that when we master improv, we improve relationships, teams, organizations, products, and careers. Improvisation is all about empathy for business leaders and provides an excellent foundation to empathize with others. First, as a leader, you must be a great listener and fully present during every conversation. When ego, agenda, and emotion are infused too strongly in a conversation, the conversation halts and negativity is nearly always an immediate result.

Great leaders inspire and motivate through empathy, not ego, agenda, and emotion. Developing the kind of empathy to improve your leadership in this way can start with an improviser mindset. People still find it difficult to understand that a leader’s emotional intelligence, of which empathy is a crucial component, is more critical to the organization than the leader’s technical knowledge. The truth is that technical skills are more accessible to learn than soft skills. To get promoted in today’s business world, you must master your interpersonal skills, which are hard to master. Mastering the soft skills is easier, thankfully, with an improviser mindset. The better you treat and understand the people you serve, the more empowered and loyal the stakeholders become.

To learn more, and for the complete show notes, visit: petermargaritis.com

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“As a leader, you have to know your people and be aware when their behavior changes.” Karl Ahlrichs

In today’s episode, we are joined by Karl Ahlrichs. Karl specializes in helping professionals make order from chaos. He’s a national speaker, author, and consultant presenting on people issues in all industries and is often quoted in the local and national media. Karl’s experience is ideally suited for times of organizational change, as he pulls up on risk management and organizational development theories to replace best practices with next practices. He owes much of his communication mastery to working as a writer and editor in daily media, to the on-the-job writing experience, and to the process of becoming a published author.

Karl Joined Gregory and Appel insurance in 2010 after serving as the founding partner of Exact Hire, bringing his HR operations diversity and belonging in learning and development skills. Karl’s affinity for design, composition, and learning started at a very young age by taking and examining 1000s of boring pictures with the goal of improving his craft. In 2003, he was named the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) Human Resource Professional of the Year for the state of Indiana. He is also on boards of several organizations, including the Maryland Society of CPAs.

What motivates high performers only comes from a quality relationship with a boss they respect, and that only comes from intentional conversation where the boss appears to listen to them. Money is a very small part of why employees quit.

Leadership requires somebody with communication skills. However, there is a heightened hunger for empathy, where the leader shows their team that they’re invested in them as people, not just employees. Empathy goes beyond attention and means being willing to say, ‘I feel your pain without being judged or called out.’

The topic that is never discussed enough is mental health. When a person is in pain, all they can think of is the pain. When the person is not in pain, they can think about anything and everything. As a leader, you have to know your people and be aware of when their behavior changes. When someone has a mental health issue, they exaggerate their core behaviors and become more of what they are.

When your people exhibit extreme behavior, pull them into privacy, make good eye contact and ask if there is anything you should know. Leaders should also ensure that they look after their own mental health so that they can be prepared and tuned in to their teams’ mental health.

To learn more, and for the complete show notes, visit: petermargaritis.com

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“Every single day in our role as leaders, we encounter situations where empathy would serve us and others well.” Peter Margaritis

There are dozens of remarkable leaders and scholars singing the praises of empathy in the workplace. For example, in his book, Geoff Colvin, the Fortune Magazine Senior Editor, argues that as workplaces evolve and leadership models change, the most important skill that leaders must possess is empathy. Similarly, an article published in the Harvard Business Review after a survey of 6000 leaders, Jack Singer and Joseph Folkman, revealed that women leaders were more decisive as compared to their male counterparts when it came to empathy.

People use the terms sympathy and empathy in overlapping and interchangeable ways, but there’s a distinct difference. Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and feel what they feel, not what you think they feel. It involves grief and pain when and because someone else is feeling it. Every single day in our role as leaders, we encounter situations where empathy would serve us and others well. Sympathy, on the other hand, means understanding someone else’s suffering. It is more cognitive and keeps a certain distance.

Even if it is hard to show empathy, you must be vulnerable and authentic and put your ego aside. It’s about making a human connection and not just pushing the conversation to a conclusion so you can get on with your day and get back to work. Being vulnerable is putting yourself out there for others to see. It takes courage, and it takes time. Being vulnerable is a sign of being human, authentic, genuine, and honest, and by being vulnerable, you create a stronger human connection. 

To learn more and for the complete show notes, visit: petermargaritis.com

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