Fill in the gaps
Once he got to know the people, he recognized what internal moves were needed and which positions he needed to fill from the outside.
When he’s interviewing, he says one of the keys is to first make people feel comfortable talking with you. So for the first 15 minutes of any interview, before he asks any questions, he talks about Moe’s. Because he has a high level of passion for the brand, he allows that passion to come through in the way he speaks about it, which gets the interviewees excited. He also talks about his personal life to make them more inclined to speak about theirs.
“It gives them some time to get comfortable and relax and want to open up because I do it in my opening remarks,” he says. “I talk about my wife and my children and not only my management style but also my parenting style, and I may draw some correlations between the two.”
Once he starts asking questions, Damico has a specific approach to hiring that he takes because he knows what he’s looking for — I″E4L″. The I’s stand for integrity and intelligence, while the E’s represent energy, energize, edge and execute. Then the L’s reference loyalty and leadership attributes. To learn if potential candidates embody these characteristics, he uses specific questions to get to the heart of their personality.
“A lot of things you can see in the body language when you’re talking to them — energy and asking questions,” he says. “How do you energize? When you walk into a room, does the room light up or do people not even recognize you’re there? That’s an energizing factor, which brings a whole different level of excitement to a conversation.”
When interviewees respond, watch their body language to see if it matches their words.
“If somebody sits there, and I’m having a conversation, and I say, ‘How would you energize your team to accomplish a goal?’ and their hands are folded and in their lap, I’m not sensing they can energize the situation,” Damico says. “What can you do to take the flag and run up the hill, and when you get to the top, you’re not there by yourself — that’s a lonely place. When I turn around, I want to see the Moe’s team standing there with me. That’s energizing a group of people.”
He says to also ask questions that get to the heart of these attributes.
“Always ask question that are tied to real-life experiences, and those real-life experiences I like to tie to [are] personal or family experiences,” he says. “Everybody that goes through an interview can recite the local buzzword, what the nomenclature is of the year, the things that let the interviewer know that you’ve got the business sense.
“But when you try to ground people and talk to them and ask them specific examples about how you raise your children in an environment where they felt comfortable to tell you what it is they’re doing in their life, you have to dig pretty deep,” he says. “So tailor the questions toward personal and life experiences rather than just the corporate buzzword and what you did in your last job.”
Overall, it took him about three weeks to conduct one-on-ones and a year to make all of the moves and hires to have the best team in place, but the time was well worth it. With the right people, he was able to then go on to make process changes and strengthen elements of the business that had been neglected or underutilized. As a result of his efforts, Moe’s had $323 million in net revenue last year, sold more deals in the first quarter this year than all of last year combined and is poised to add 100 restaurants next year to it’s already more than 400 locations.
“Today, as we sit here two years from when I started, we have all the right people, and they’re clearly all in the right seats, and if you look at what’s happening with what we’re doing from a marketing perspective, a culinary perspective, you look at our sales … there aren’t many companies that are doing that right now,” Damico says. “… There’s so many positive indicators of what’s happening with the brand.”
How to reach: Moe’s Southwest Grill, (404) 255-3250 or www.moes.com
