Unlocking the Power of the Father-Daughter Visionary/Integrator™ Relationship | Tricia Schleicher & Robert Fleming

The team that she was building was very dedicated to her and to the company. They were doing 95% of what it, what I would do and the 5% that I wouldn't do wasn't really harmful, you know, and Trish and I kind of came to a point where we realized that we're aligned on 95% and on 5% we're not. My 5% is different than her 5%. So that makes for interesting conversations.

Hey everybody. This is Mark C. Winters, co author of Rocket Fuel, an expert EOS implementer. Welcome to the Rocket Fuel podcast where visionary and integrator duos from entrepreneurial companies share a behind the scenes look at their relationship. These amazing leaders blend their unique skills to create what we call rocket fuel. I'm really excited to introduce today's guest to you. Robert Fleming is the founder, president and visionary of San Antonio based Magnolia Pancake House. And his daughter Tricia Slyker is the vice president and integrator. In this episode, Robert and Tricia dig into the level of communication and perspective necessary to building a strong visionary integrator relationship as father and daughter. This episode brings value to more than those who are part of a family run business. If you're interested in how to transition from being a member of staff to becoming an integrator, how to build professional trust or what your life could be like with a solid visionary integrator relationship in place, then this episode is for you. We're going to begin the show where Robert and Tricia share how they built Magnolia Pancake House from scratch. Let's jump in.

I've been in the hospitality industry since I really, since I started working hotels and restaurants, my entire career. In the late 90s, I was a regional VP with a large hotel management group out of Dallas. They sold half of my portfolio and I came in the office one Friday from a road trip and they said, we sold half your hotels and here's a, here's a check. Thank you very much. You did a great job. And that was. So I went home and told my wife and we decided that I thought, you know, I want to go back and do my own thing. I want to be my own boss again. And so we took us a couple years to get around to find the right situation. But we came back to Dallas from, I mean back to San Antonio from Dallas in 99 and set about putting plans in place. In September of 2000, we opened in our original location which was about 3200 square feet, maybe 100 seats. And now all of our locations run 6000, 6500 and they see upwards of about 200. So it was really a thing of. I had traveled for years and years and years in the hotel business and Tricia was growing up and it was, you know, I ended up not being home for basketball games or volleyball games or orchestra recitals or any of that stuff. When we had the chance to go back into business for ourselves, we decided to take it.

How big was the team when you, when you first started?

It was pretty small. It was myself, my wife and trisha who was 12 years old.

Wow. And so what, what did you have Trisha doing when she was 12?

Well, she was supposed to only roll some one day on a Sunday. My wife was the cashier, who was a friend of ours said, I'm getting told my wife I'm getting, who was running in front of the house. I'm getting a lot of great compliments on Tricia and my wife's like, what for rolling silverware? Well, unbeknownst to us, she had paid attention during the server training and she was waiting on tables because, you know, as a brand new restaurant, you don't get all the pros. You know, they take a wait and see approaches, see if you're going to make it and then they might start coming around. So we had a fairly green staff and Trisha being kind of a willful and smart person, she learned it, jumped in and just started to make a difference from day one.

She promoted herself, right?

Yeah, pretty much.

So Tricia, what do you remember from those early days? So you're 12 years old, you're supposed to be rolling silverware. You see what the servers are doing, jump in there. What do you remember from, from those early days?

Yeah, you know, I remember being a seventh and eighth grader making 120 bucks on the weekend and thinking, hey, this is pretty awesome. You know, as a child, you know, I remember, you know, looking back now, you don't think of like, you know, you're working in a restaurant. For me it was like I'm just working with my parents and I'm working with these people that are older than me. And it's so cool and fun and so in my mind it wasn't really a job. It was just like this thing that I get to do that, you know, all the other kids at school have no idea about and can't, you know, don't really have an experience at that age. And so like I said, for me it wasn't really a job even. And it still isn't A job, which is what makes having your own business so great. But it was fun, and obviously it opened my eyes to a lot of things and helped me mature probably a little bit earlier than most people my age.

Sure. So talk to me about the journey kind of from then to now. And I'm sure there's a lot that kind of happened in between as the business got established and grew and all that. And Tricia, you're kind of growing up, right? So you're kind of doing your growing up thing during that time. So, Rob, for you, the team, as it started with just a few people, before Tricia was really old enough or had the time outside of school and whatever else to kind of put back to the business. What other combinations of kind of team leadership did you go through?

Well, I had, you know, for the first couple, three years, it was really my wife Sheila and I running the business six days a week. And as we got more successful and our business started to build, you know, I was able to bring in some stronger players in the kitchen who took some of the pressure off of me because I was also functioning as the executive chef. And I think it was about 2005 when we hired our first management person. We hired a restaurant manager to take on some of that so that Sheila could be relieved of some of those things, because my deal with her was, come help me get it open, and you don't have to work there, you know, long term. And Trish was still in high school and she was busy. She was on volleyball team and the basketball team and the track team and then the orchestra. And so she had plenty to do. And so we kind of built it from there. And it was about that same time in 2004, when I got invited to join a peer advisory group called the Alternative Board, or TAB for short. And during that journey, I was introduced to the E Myth revisited. And the whole idea of personal vision, professional vision, and pocket vision became very clear to me. And that probably was the turning point for us to grow the business and to start to build the business out and get some help in there so that we could reclaim a little bit of our lives and business.

So what was your next move in terms of adding somebody else to the team?

Well, in 2006, we moved across the parking lot from our original location into a larger space. And it was that at that point in time, we fleshed out the team with some more supervisory and leadership type people that were. They had hourly functions, but they were also, in terms, they had some leadership. Then in 2008 I made the decision to bring in, really someone who could replace me on a kind of a daily basis operating restaurant. And that was a good thing. It brought someone. And we weren't really thinking of it in that way. We hadn't even heard of Rocket Fuel at that time. But it was kind of the genesis in our organization of a visionary integrator relationship.

Where did that person come from? Where'd you find him?

I had found him through an ad that I placed for a director of operations. And he had had multi unit experience with Houla Hands and some other groups, Max and Irma's. And it was a good guy and it was a good Zen fit between he and I in 2008. And things really started to take off. In 2009, I was diagnosed with stage four cancer in my tongue. And I was sick for the whole year. I lost a whole year. And at the same time, Tricia was off at school. She was at college at Marquette University, studying to be a civil engineer. And so this fellow, you know, was able to step up and provide the stability that, you know, a business at that point needed. We were eight years in business. I didn't think we were going anywhere. But I've been in the business line with that. I've seen lots of times when owners got sick, real sick, and the business just fell apart. We were very fortunate, very fortunate that we had great team in the store in both management and in our hourly associates that they just kept plugging away. And then in 2010, I made the decision to add a real executive chef, a culinary school trained like myself to the team to take a lot of that off of me. And that's the time when we started think about growing business. And in 2012, we opened our second store. And that took off immediately in 2015. Tricia had finished undergrad and grad school and had been working as a project manager for a large general contracting firm. But she called us up one day and said, we're coming home with her husband, who was her fiance at the time. We're coming home and I'm coming back to get involved in the business like I always said. And while she was never my retirement plan, I was happy the day she told me she wanted to come back and get involved.

Sure, I bet.

And that was in 2015, moving on this track. Progress, progress, progress over the last six years.

So Tricia, my wife, is also a Marquette alum, and so that's good to know. Yeah, actually, we've got a lot of friends that went to school up there. So when you came back this. This time. Right. So after after school, you come back and you have, I'm sure, a lot of different roles before you kind of actually get fully into the integrator seat. So talk about when you came back after college and kind of what that journey looked like to get to where we are today.

Yeah, so when I came back, there was no, this is what you're going to do. You're going to have this schedule or anything. You know, as a company, we're just. We were kind of still flying by the seat of our pants a little bit with certain things. And so, you know, my official title was Director of Brand Management and Special Projects because we were in the midst of starting to build our event center, and that was something that was totally out of our wheelhouse and not something we'd done before. So that was a special project for us. And so my focus, since I had a construction background, was being the general manager or the general contractor for the building. And then when we got it opened, it was like, hey, who's going to run this thing now? And lo and behold, I have capacity to do that. So that was kind of the next step for me there. And then in 2018, we did make a switch with the leadership team that we had. And at that point, you know, for me, it was like, I'm going to step in. I want to step up and start really getting into the minutiae of what this company is, how we operate, how we can make ourselves better, how we can grow and really continue on the legacy of that we had built on for the past 18 years at that point and say, okay, what can we do now? Because we still had people that would come in after 18 years and say, oh, this is my first time in. And so in my mind, that kind of always just was like, wow, we've been here for so long, and there's still people in town that have never heard of us or never been in. And so it was really like, what can we do to put our name out there even more?

So, okay, so that's when you literally became the integrator at that point, essentially.

I mean, it took. I'd say, 2018-2019 was kind of like a year of understanding how to work with my dad and not work with my dad, work with Rob, you know, the owner, the visionary of Magnolia Pancake House, because, you know, our relationship as father and daughter is different than boss and employee. But again, it melds together in some instances and some. So it took a little while for Us to really understand how each other works and what's the best way to address situations and how, you know, to really work as a partnership like the visionary and the integrator should have.

Yeah. And I want to come back to that family dynamic because I see it a lot. But before we get there, just for context. So when did EOS kind of come into the picture in relation to kind of when you stepped into that new role?

In early 18, late 17, we had been talking about, how do we grow this business? How do we, you know, what's the best way? We felt we needed to get some kind of organization, better organization, because, like Trish said, it was a very entrepreneurial situation. So we looked at scaling up and we looked at a couple other things, and then we looked at EOS. So we started in late 17, Trish, early 18. And then we had the situation that Trish referred to where we ended up really trading out the management team, three members of the team, go and replace them with others. And then we took a little hiatus and then decided to go to forward with EOs. And that's where we started the journey then in early 19, I would say, is when we started the journey down this path and with the more formal visionary integrator roles and worked our way, you know, we had to work through, like Trish said, there were, you know, there were some challenges that. Not that they were insurmountable, but we worked through some challenges for sure. And I think that those things probably happen more in a family business than, you know, in a pure structured business where the visionary is. Is the owner, but everybody that works for him is basically a hired associate, you know. And I think the other thing is, because Trish and I always had a really great relationship as father and daughter, that we both had a different idea about how this whole thing would go down. And so it took some growing, definitely growing on my part, for sure, and letting go of some of my. My need to be in ultimate control of what I was doing.

So two things I want to pull out of that. So one is, what do you feel like was the family unlock? Right. Because I see spouses that work together. I see parents and children that work together. I see siblings that work together. I see all these different versions. And you're right, it's like a different layer of complexity added. On top of the complexity, it's already there now. Maybe there's a higher trust factor present. So that's probably a helpful thing. But it's stepping out of these roles. Tricia, you hit it of not dad, but Rob. Right. And so what was sort of the unlock for you to kind of make that less of a thing?

I think on my side it was, we both have the same personality. We're very strong headed. Our way is usually the right way or the way that it needs to get done. And so for me, it was kind of taking it a step back and saying, you know, obviously I love my dad. He built this business, obviously, into a very successful one. He knows what he's doing. You know, I have ideas of how things should get done. You know, I'm a younger generation. I'm a little more tech driven, using this, doing that. And so I know I had kind of to step back and say, okay, this isn't the way that my dad's been used to it, but let's kind of offer in a way that, you know, shows obviously I care about the business and I want the best for it, but understand that, you know, I just can't come in and say, hey, let's do this and we're going to change it tomorrow and we're going to get everyone on board for it. You know, as someone who's just getting into the role of the integrator and trying to get those processes rolling, you know, I had to take that step back to say, okay, I need to, you know, take the right steps, address it the right way with him and build that. You know, like you said, the trust level is there, but there's still that level of, well, I haven't been in the business this long, so I kind of need to take that into account when I'm looking at things to change in the business.

Right. There's the family trust, which is, I trust you're not going to try to hurt me, but then there's the competence trust that I need to learn that I can trust you, that you actually know how to do this and make it work. So, Rob, talk about for you how you were able to eventually, you know, let go more and more and then, you know, sort of what that set up for you, what that's making possible for you as you've been able to, you know, Trisha shows up and you're able to let more go. What is, what kind of a world does that create for you to piggyback.

On what Trisha was saying. I mean, there was a point where I came to the realization that I needed to. Not that I, like I say, I didn't trust. I trusted her implicit and had absolute confidence in her competence, but I knew she hadn't been doing it. You know, I thought she was going to need me. I'm going to need to be involved. But it really came to a point where I realized that, you know what, the team that she was building was very dedicated to her and to the company. They were doing 95% of what I would do, and the 5% that I wouldn't do wasn't really harmful, you know, And Trish and I kind of came to a point where we realized that we're aligned on 95% and on 5% we're not. My 5% is different than her 5%. So that makes for interesting conversations. But it really was also a point for me where I had at that point been in the business for 20 years, and I was like, you know, I've got to find my way out because it's no good. It's no good for the business and certainly was not good for our relationship. So that we were able to. We were able to come to a point and I can't think of anything that brought us to that point, but we came to this point where I think one day the light bulb just went off. You know, like, I understand what it is she needs for me. She understands what it is I need from her. And our conversations then became more. More broad, more visionary, integrator, more. Are you thinking about this? This is what I'm seeing come down the pipe. How are you guys thinking is going to affect the business? And so for the last couple of years, that's really been the relationship that we've been developing. And to the point now where, you know, I. It's exactly what I want. I am of consult. I am here. I am the institutional memory currently. But they're starting to develop more of their own. And so, you know, there's very few things that I will pick up the phone or reach out to her and say, hey, I don't think you guys are doing this right, or I think this is a problem. Really, not so much. And I actually kind of enjoy the role now because I go into the businesses now and I'm. I'm Mr. Happy Go Lucky, and I'm everybody's friend and everybody gets banded on the back and everybody love me, you know, and it's all great and I don't have to be the heavy anymore, you know, so for me, it all fixed, worked out just perfect.

That reminds me of how people describe being a grandparent. I'm not a grandparent yet, but I've certainly been a parent and talk about being a Grandparent is being able to, you know, love that baby and then hand it back and let them do the discipline and the, you know, the tough stuff that Trisha's a new mom.

Her granddaughter just turned a year old last week on Thursday, and she started walking on Sunday. So, you know, for you to say that, probably so. Except the difference between being a grandfather and being Mr. Benevolent Business Owner is, you know, well, maybe there's not a difference because I do sometimes walk around and hand out $20 bills to employees because they're doing a good job.

You spoil them.

My granddaughter ever needs anything. There's a. With her name on it. There just no two ways about so great, probably. But what it does. What it does for the company, I think. And Trish, Tommy. Wrong. But. And especially in restaurants because they can be so intense, especially these days, with the struggles that we're in. It just for me, I think it helps lighten the load a little because we're not focusing in on, oh, what was us. You're doing this wrong. We've been very successful. 22. The problems we have, realistically, even in today's environment, most restaurants would kill to have our problems. Got too much business, you know, too much. We've been able to solve problems over the years by just going out and spending money on it. You know, that's successful, but that's not always the best way to do things. You know, it's the path of least resistance, but it's not always the best way. So, you know, for me, me, this role now is where I've always wanted to be. That's what I've always wanted to be, too. Yeah.

Right. Okay, so Rob's right where he wants to be. Tricia, how does that compare for you?

Yeah, I was going to say one thing I wanted to add kind of to touch base on what my dad said. The one thing that I think helped us transition into that visionary integrator role was obviously the communication between us, too. There was a lot of times where we would sit down and talk. And to be honest, you know, this seems kind of silly, but at the end of it, you know, my dad would be like, we're in a good place. Right? I think we're in a good place. And we would have, you know, another five, seven minute conversation about, like, how we feel, like we're communicating well, like we're not holding anything back from each other. We're being honest and open with, you know, what our feelings are about certain things or how we think the business is going. And you Know, like I said, it's kind of silly, but a lot of times I feel like that just kind of gets pushed under the rug. You know, I think for family businesses, it might be a little easier because we have that emotional connection already to each other. But I really feel like for us, that helped get us into a really great spot of visionary integrator, because we were constantly, you know, letting each other know, like, well, you know, the other day when you walked in and you told me that, you know, this was this and, you know, this person was doing that, and you see, said, fix it now. I didn't really like that. Like, you know, maybe we can figure out how to address those issues in a different way. And so we were able really to work out some of those kinks by just communicating as much as we can and being open with each other. And so, yeah, I mean, I obviously want the best for my dad after all the. The work that he's put in over these 22 years. And so for him to be able to be the grandpa of Magnolia Pictures Pancake House is, I think, the perfect spot for him in his life right now.

I love that. I love that. Yeah, that's a very cool story to hear you both kind of be in that place that you want to be, and what a great evolution. So I really appreciate you two taking the time to spend just chatting with me a little bit today and sharing your experience. I know that you've shared some things that are going to help our listeners, those visionaries and integrators that are out there, kind of learn from your journey. If they want to find out more about your company or either one of you, what's the best place for them to go?

Our website, kind of our story and stuff. Yeah. Magnoliapancakehouse.com Just like everyone else, we're on social media and try to do the best we can and almost got it in.

Yeah, all that stuff will be in the show notes. So, you know, with that, let me. I want to thank our listeners for, you know, being here and listening to our podcast. And until next time, go Rocket. Thank you for joining me today for another inspiring story. Are you an integrator? Are you ready to begin your journey to integrator mastery? Visit rocketfueluniversity.com to join the free Rocket Fuel community and learn how to register for an upcoming integrator masterclass. You cannot build a great business on multiple operating systems. You must choose one. EOS1 is the simple to use software exclusively from the makers of EOS. By bringing everything EOS into one place. EOS1 allows you to run better meetings, access the foundational tools faster, and build a More accountable team. One vision, one system, one team. Start your 30 day free trial of EOS1 today@eos1.com.