Here’s something I learnt recently about maintaining brand standards across multiple sites. I ordered the same coffee from the same international café brand in two different places recently, and honestly, the two cups told me most of what I needed to know about how each site was being run.
One arrived with the coffee slopped into the saucer and the latte art little more than a smudge, the sort of cup you take one sip from and quietly lower your expectations for the rest of the visit. The other came out clean, nothing spilled, the brand’s crest stencilled dead centre in the foam, looking exactly the way the person who created that brand would have wanted it to look. It was the same company, the same standards on paper, and almost certainly the same stencil sitting somewhere in both kitchens.
The only reason I can tell you any of that is because I saw both. The person who made the first cup almost certainly thinks it is absolutely fine, and not because they are careless, but because it is the only cup they see, day after day, and nothing inside their own four walls is telling them otherwise.
The easy read, of course, is that whoever made the messy cup simply couldn’t be bothered, and if we are feeling generous, we soften that to they probably haven’t been trained. Both might be true, but they are also the first two places our minds jump to, the will and the skill of the person holding the jug, and they are rarely the whole story. The template existed in both places and the intention was identical, so the more honest question isn’t really about that individual at all, it’s whether everything around them was actually set up to help them get it right.
Seeing the pattern
I saw the same story on a plate on the same trip. A signature sandwich, built beautifully to spec in one city, and in another so overloaded it barely resembled the thing it was meant to be. One example on its own is just a bad morning, but two of them from the same brand, in two different cities, tells you less about one person having an off day and more about how consistently the standard is set across the business.
That comparison is worth dwelling on, because it is one of the genuine advantages of leading more than one site. A single site manager can only ever see their own cup, and however good they are, they have no reliable way of knowing whether what they are looking at is the brand at its best or the brand quietly drifting. Walk into four or five sites in a fortnight and the picture changes entirely, because you stop looking at individual cups and start seeing a pattern, and a pattern is a far more useful thing to lead from than an incident.
You are often the only person in the business who gets to compare one site with another, and that comparison is worth far more than any single visit.
Setting and maintaining brand standards across multiple sites
This is the part I think we get wrong, and I include myself in that!
When something falls short for a customer, we reach for a people explanation first, they weren’t bothered, they weren’t paying attention, they need a quiet word, and from experience that is almost never where the real answer sits. But I would be just as wary of swinging the other way and deciding there must be no standard, no documents and no training, because in a business like this there almost certainly is all three. It wasn’t luck that the other city got it right.
A standard existing is not the same as a standard being lived.
There are some difficult questions to answer here, and they are worth carrying into a site visit rather than saving for a conference room. Do the managers themselves know the standard well enough to coach it, or have we quietly assumed that the trainer knows what they are doing, that the manager is carrying it all in their head, and that the person on shift knows exactly what good looks like? Has anyone made the purpose clear, so the team understand why the standard matters and not simply that it exists? Has that person ever been shown what good looks like and told honestly when it wasn’t? Feedback they never received is not a shortcoming you can put on them, and sometimes there is just something going on for someone that day, which is not an excuse, but it is often the explanation.
The temptation on a visit, and I have certainly done this, is to fix the cup that is in front of you. You show someone how it should be poured, they get it right while you are standing there, everyone feels better about the morning, and then you drive on to the next site. If the same thing is showing up across three of your sites, though, the cup was never really the problem, and putting it right one site at a time is just a slower way of not putting it right at all.
This is an excerpt from an original LinkedIn article. You can read the full article here: If you’re not serving the customer, make it easier for whoever is. In the article, I also talk about how to remove the friction – not just for customers, but also for our own people.
