Why the Middle of Hospitality Has Disappeared, and What Emmy Squared Did About It
There's a split happening across hospitality right now that doesn't get talked about enough. The restaurant groups that opened after Covid built their operations for a world we're actually in. Leaner teams, faster decisions, tighter margins, all from day one. The groups that existed before and survived Covid are often still running on assumptions from a different era. Surviving the pandemic and surviving what came after, as Topher Bertone-Ledford puts it, are two very different problems.
Topher is VP of Operations at Emmy Squared Pizza, a fast-casual pizza brand of around 26 restaurants across the US. Two years ago, he took over the group's New York region in a challenging state. Deferred maintenance. Engagement issues. Operational drift. The team he inherited had, in his framing, stopped seeing what was actually in front of them.
His starting move was disarmingly simple: walk restaurants with his current GMs and ask, are we seeing the same restaurant? The leaders who couldn't see it moved on. The ones who did rebuild from cleanliness up.
In this conversation with Conor Sheridan, Topher walks through the operational reality of that rebuild. The tiered standards approach that let him move from cleanliness to punctuality to engagement to recipes to guest connection over months rather than weeks. The three-month 12 Steps of Service campaign the New York team rolled out. Why the middle of hospitality has disappeared, and operators have to run to the edges to be successful. The labour acquisition speed problem no one has solved. The staffing matrix Emmy Squared updates monthly, grading current leadership on performance and flight risk while also tracking the next-in-line bench. The total-experience math the guest is actually doing at the end of a meal. And a closing take that has already prompted internal Slack quotes: the hospitality industry needs to stop pretending it's like any other industry.
New York is now the group's top-performing region on profitability. This episode is the story of how.
If you're running multi-site hospitality, joining an operational leadership team, or trying to figure out how to turn around a struggling region, this is an hour well spent.
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