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Maddy Shannon on 'the Anticipate and deliver' approach, the price of a restaurant meal, and the Ai paradigm

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About this episode

Josh sits down with Maddy Shannon, Head of Product Strategy at SpotOn, for a conversation about what a restaurant is really worth and why the best hospitality, like the best technology, tends to disappear. Maddy traces her unlikely path from a consulting offer at Bain to the dining rooms of acclaimed restaurants like Alinea and SingleThread, and explains how those years shaped the way she now builds software for independent operators. She and Josh dig into the idea that great hospitality and great product design are the same craft, most powerful when the work behind them stays invisible, and they explore why guests so often undervalue what a restaurant meal truly costs to deliver.

The conversation moves through the grind of leading a kitchen, the discipline of trusting and growing a team, and the surprisingly personal ways Maddy uses AI as a kind of second brain. It keeps returning to a theme at the center of her work: in restaurants, data has always been plentiful, but attention is scarce, and the promise of AI is helping operators focus on the few things that matter most. It's a warm, wide-ranging talk about mastery, profitability, and the enduring value of independent restaurants.

Links and resources 📌

Visit meez: https://www.getmeez.com

Follow meez on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/getmeez

Follow Josh on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joshlsharkey/?hl=en

Follow Josh on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-sharkey-406965b/

Visit SpotOn: https://www.spoton.com

Follow Maddy Shannon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maddyshannon

What We Cover

03:29 From a Bain Offer to a Life in Restaurants

13:37 Scaling Impact From Fine Dining to SpotOn

17:38 Jobs to Be Done and Building Profit AI

20:40 Why the Best Hospitality Is Invisible

27:56 Why Guests Undervalue Restaurants

34:58 Rethinking How Restaurants Price the Experience

38:39 Leadership and the Nightly Grind of the Kitchen

48:32 Journaling, Therapy, and Building a Second Brain

59:46 Data Is Plentiful, Attention Is Scarce

1:06:29 Mastery, Craft, and Going Against the Grain

Transcript

Maddy Shannon (00:00.224)
single thread actually they have a phrase that gets said at every lineup at the end of every lineup which is kaizen which means continuous improvement it's always taking one thing better and they kind of would use it as a verb so it would be like you know this person really kaizened you know the the way we fold the napkins when we prep the surface or something this small thing that actually is we're always trying to get better in every single thing you do and sometimes it is

You're gonna kaizen the walk-in and you know, the labels have always been on the front, but now they're gonna I'm making this up, but you know, now they're gonna be in the front left upper corner and it matters.

Joshua Sharkey (00:39.438)
Yeah, I am now envisioning my my wife saying, Josh, I really wish you would Kaizen that trash, take out like a little bit more than you did last week.

Maddy Shannon (00:48.43)
I mean it's worth it's worth thinking about. Like we can apply that in our own life. And it's there's something comforting about it's not an overnight transformation. It takes time. I and I think that's implied in the idea of continuous improvement. It's a little bit every day and that little bit compounds. And that is how great restaurants stay great.

Joshua Sharkey (01:08.77)
You're listening to the Mies Podcast. I'm your host, Josh Sharkey, the founder and CEO of Mies, a culinary operating system for food professionals. On the show, we're gonna talk to high performers in the food business, everything from chefs to CEOs, technologists, writers, investors, and more about how they innovate and operate and how they consistently execute at a high level, day after day. And I would really love it if you could drop us a five-star review anywhere that you listen to your podcast. That could be

Apple, that could be Spotify, could be Google. I'm not picky. Anywhere works, but I really appreciate the support and as always I hope you enjoy the show.

Hello by the way, nice to see you. I'm so stoked that you actually made this happen.

Maddy Shannon (01:49.918)
Hi, good to see you.

Maddy Shannon (01:54.486)
N thank you for asking me. I'm so excited. This is like an honor.

Joshua Sharkey (01:56.878)
Are you in San Francisco right now? that's right, you're in San Mateo, just like just I don't know anything about the geography, but it's in

Maddy Shannon (02:02.401)
I'm in Simdale.

Maddy Shannon (02:06.958)
I'm like twenty well, well, I'm twenty minutes sort of if you go at midnight, and I'm an hour if you go any other time, but I'm I'm close to the city.

Joshua Sharkey (02:16.684)
Yeah. Okay. I couldn't stop thinking about your talk that you gave at Boston University that we were had the pleasure of meeting there. I I wanna talk about a lot more than just that. Yeah. But I obviously wanna get into that a bunch 'cause it was amazing. but why don't we start for the audience that don't know a lot about you 'cause I think your your background's is really cool because you you had sort of the the consulting background, analytics, finance, and then you went to a little restaurant called Alinea. Right.

And then anyways, can you give me the like the fifty thousand foot background of of you and then we'll kinda jump in?

Maddy Shannon (02:50.478)
Sure. Sounds good. Yeah. So I have dedicated most of my career to making independent restaurants more profitable. but that's not how I started. I started at Bain. I was doing consulting and I actually told I actually told my dad, I was about to graduate college. I had my offer from Bain and I said, you know what, I'm actually gonna start a restaurant. And he being ever so wise was like, Why don't you just take your Bain offer, just do it for a year, learn some business stuff.

And then if you want to start a restaurant, go ahead. And so, you know, as it does, one year turned to two, turned to three at Bain. And then I set my sights on getting into the restaurant world. So I I went to Alinia. I was on their business team and I learned so much. I learned that wait a second, actually the businessy strategy, financy stuff I was learning at Bain is actually really helpful to restaurants. So two reasons. It was my first ever fine dining experience.

Joshua Sharkey (03:45.292)
Go to a linea.

Maddy Shannon (03:50.614)
My now husband and I went when we were seniors in college, we were I went to Northwestern. So I was in the Chicago area. That's right. It blew my mind, as it does for many people. And the other is they had a business team. And most restaurants, at least the groups I was aware of, didn't really have teams. What does that mean? Yeah.

Joshua Sharkey (04:10.03)
What does that mean, a business team? Hence the question. What is the business team in the restaurant? So

Maddy Shannon (04:16.458)
So it means different things in different places. had a linea. It was basically let's take all of the numbers, let's build budgets, and let's help the chefs and GMs, you know, running the restaurants also stay profitable. They also were doing in-house accounting at the time. So sometimes it means that. but it's being the numbers person. And so when I ended up doing that at single thread, there was no team. It was, you know, my boss, Tony, and me.

helping say, you know, there's food costs, there's labor costs that we have to pay attention to and that's gonna help us keep doing this restaurant thing for as long as possible. And so that was really the goal.

Joshua Sharkey (04:57.784)
So it was actually called the business team?

Maddy Shannon (05:00.416)
It was called Yeah, I

Joshua Sharkey (05:03.438)
It's so funny, right?

Maddy Shannon (05:04.782)
I I don't know what they I don't remember what they called it. I think the business team.

Joshua Sharkey (05:10.264)
Did you interact with and learn from Nick Kakonas? What did you take away from that?

Maddy Shannon (05:14.444)
I did. He's obviously super smart. He was they were building talk at the time. It was in its earlier stages. This was twenty eighteen. And the the Alinea Group business team and talk shared an office. So Nick was kind of moving between the two. So I also got to see him building talk early on, which was really interesting. But he's a he's a shrewd businessman. And you know, he's

He's a great negotiator. He he is really clear about what success looks like. And so watching him navigate both leading restaurants and leading talk was was fascinating.

Joshua Sharkey (05:56.734)
Yeah, he did a he had a really good interview on Tim Ferris actually a while back. I don't remember when it was, but he recommended a book that I recommend to other people all the time now, called Fooled by Randomness. And it's essentially like the premise of, you know, there's far less luck that we think. It's written by this guy, Nassim Taleb, I think is his name. Mm-hmm. And

Really, really, really good book. But he had he I would check out that interview by the way. He did a really, really great interview with with Ferris back in the day. And that was the first time I ever got to hear him hear him speak. But yeah, he's he's super sharp.

Maddy Shannon (06:30.36)
Well, I'll check it out.

Joshua Sharkey (06:31.871)
Is there something unique about the way that he made decisions that you take with you?

Maddy Shannon (06:36.506)
I would say his confidence in the decisions he made. I think I think good leaders can look like a lot of different things. And when we get into single thread, I'll talk about, you know, what leadership looks like there, which was really inspiring to me. But I do think clarity for the teams beneath you on what does success look like is critical. And when you kind of waver from that, it can be super confusing. And and

You know, Nick Kakonis never wavered. Like he he knew what we were aiming for and made that super clear and and that, you know, his expectations were clear. That helps the team perform against those expectations, I think.

Joshua Sharkey (07:18.99)
How that manifest? Was like is there a time you could think of when you're like, Wow, I can't believe you stuck to that.

Maddy Shannon (07:23.608)
The example that comes to mind is one of my side projects on the business team was actually to design the landscaping outside of Royster, which was one of the restaurants in the group. Not landscaping, but like planters and stuff. This was a side project. I was mostly building budgets and doing things like that. Steve Bernacke was actually the person who I interacted with the most on the business team. He was the CFO. And so he was like where I was building budgets and and working on that stuff. But I worked with Nick on this kind of

gardening planters project outside. And, you know, he he basically told me it has to look amazing and your budget is X. I can't remember what it was. X being a relatively no low number. Yeah. Yeah. So it was up to me to make both of those things true. Make it look amazing and up to the standards of an Illinear group restaurant. And you're sticking to this budget, which means you're negotiating or you're you're going to do the diligence required to

Joshua Sharkey (08:03.497)
X being a low number.

Maddy Shannon (08:20.81)
Even in this space, just outside the restaurant, a couple planter boxes, we're not going to sacrifice any quality or any of our standards. It's gonna be up to snuff.

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