Short YouTube dialogue (two speakers) about restaurant training at Slam Dunk/SDP. The speakers contrast the common "shadow" onboarding (follow-for-days then released) with a structured, continuously evolving training program that uses written training sheets, regular retesting/retraining, and leadership meetings to keep long-tenured staff aligned with the "SDP/The Slim Gun Pizza way." The video emphasizes continuous training, documented standards, and leadership-level reinforcement to prevent drift.
Especially this is one of the things I think you do at Slam Dunk that's really, really different than almost all the brands I've worked with over the years, is that you really focus a lot on training, and you spend a lot of time on training where a lot of restaurants do the typical just shadow program, you know, like, Matt gets hired, you follow, you know, so he goes follow somebody around the kitchen for three or four days, and they turn them loose, and that's it. Talk people through a little bit. Like, Slam Dunk is, like, so dedicated and so invested in training their people.
We never stop training. That's something that we've learned because obviously, before into the TRC program, we were like every other restaurant, and you trained in the fire of Friday night, you know, and now we have a training program, and it's constantly evolving. It's always evolving as we get new people or we come across new things. But we have sheets, really, and everybody has a sheet for everything they get trained on, and we bring those sheets out constantly, and we retest and we retrain. And that's one thing that we've learned, especially because what happens with all people is as we get, if you've been here six years, three years, you start doing it your own way, slowly but surely. So we pull them back into what we call the SDP way, the Slim Gun Pizza way. So it's just a good thing, and it's good for all of us, because then we sometimes find out that we're all training a little different, too.
That's why you have the leadership meetings and the training every time. It's like just to make sure everyone's on the same track.
