Teamwork Wins Championships

At Basil’s, we don’t believe in “my table.”

We believe in our guests.

That might sound like a small difference, but it changes everything.

A guest doesn’t know, or care, whose section they’re sitting in.

They don’t see sections. They see one restaurant. They see one team.

And every interaction they have shapes their opinion of Basil’s.

If you’re walking past a table and notice an empty drink, don’t keep walking because it isn’t your table.

If a guest asks for ranch, extra napkins, another beer, or a to-go box, help them.

If food is sitting in the kitchen getting cold, run it.

If another server gets double-seated, greet the new table while they finish taking an order.

The question shouldn’t be:

“Is this my table?”

The question should be:

“What does this guest need right now?”

Communication is the Glue

Helping another server doesn’t mean creating confusion.

It means communicating.

If a guest adds another drink…

Tell the server.

If they decide to add an appetizer…

Tell the server.

If they ask for dessert after you’ve cleared the plates…

Tell the server.

Thirty seconds of communication can prevent ten minutes of confusion.

Guests shouldn’t have to repeat themselves because we didn’t communicate with each other.

The smoother we communicate, the smoother their experience feels.

We Share Tips Because We Share Success

At Basil’s, we tip-share for a reason.

Hospitality is a team sport. No one wins by themselves. When one server is overwhelmed, the entire restaurant feels it.

When one server gets behind, drinks take longer.

Food sits in the kitchen. Tables wait. Guests become frustrated.

But when everyone jumps in, the dining room flows.

One person runs food. Another refills drinks. Someone else clears plates.

Suddenly, what looked like chaos becomes teamwork.

When everyone helps, everyone succeeds.

Don’t Walk Empty

One of the simplest habits you can build is this:

Never make a wasted trip.

Walking to the kitchen? Take dirty dishes.

Coming back to the dining room? Carry food.

Passing the drink station? Refill something.

Walking past a table? Scan it.

Can you clear a plate?

Refill a drink?

Deliver ketchup?

Every trip should accomplish more than one task.

That’s not working harder. That’s working smarter.

One Team. One Dining Room.

Championship teams don’t ask,

“Whose job is this?”

They ask,

“What does the team need right now?”

That’s the culture we’re building at Basil’s.

Not a group of individual servers.

ONE TEAM.

One dining room.

One guest experience.

Because at the end of the night, guests won’t remember who owned Table 2.

They’ll remember how everyone made them feel.

What Makes a Great Employee?

Since I was about fifteen years old, I’ve been an employee somewhere. Every job taught me something, but the biggest lesson wasn’t how to flip burgers, stock shelves, or answer calls.

It was how to work.

More importantly, it was how to be a teammate.

I was taught two simple rules early on:

Never let your boss catch you standing around.
Never let your boss do your work.

Those two lessons have stayed with me for decades.

To me, a great employee isn’t the loudest person in the room or the one constantly reminding everyone how hard they work. A great employee shows up on time. They don’t spend their shift complaining. They’re confident in their abilities but humble enough to keep learning. They finish the job correctly the first time because doing it right matters.

And when the shift is over?

They don’t sprint for the door while someone else is drowning.

They stay. They help.

Because they understand something that too many people have forgotten: when one teammate struggles, the whole team struggles.

The best employees don’t need to be told what to do next. They always find something productive. They take pride in their work, no matter how small the task. They don’t participate in workplace gossip, and they certainly don’t become the source of the drama.

Work isn’t high school. It’s a team sport.

For years, I was the employee. Today, I’m the boss. Ironically, I still think I was a better employee than I am a boss.

When I watch everyone clock out and one employee is left buried with dishes, cleaning, or closing duties, I don’t stand back and supervise.

I grab a towel. I pick up a mop. I jump in.

Because that’s what teammates do.

Titles don’t make people leaders. Actions do.

Someday, every employee gets a reputation. Some become the person management worries about every time they’re scheduled. Others become the person everyone hopes is working because they know the job will get done.

Which one are you becoming?

The wake-up call may never come for some people. But if it does, don’t waste it. Be the employee your coworkers are thankful to work beside.

Be the employee your manager can count on without a second thought.

Be the kind of worker a company is proud to have. Because people may forget what job you had…

But they’ll never forget what kind of teammate you were.

My Wishlist

An Unhealthy Way to Manage

Today’s blog is an angry rant. A painful, physically and mentally painful testament to why being in charge of people is an unhealthy stressor. How the constant repetition of explaining and showing how to do things is tiresome to the point of extreme exhaustion.

Reliability is at an all time low. Accountability is nonexistent. I wish making excuses and not owning up to wrongdoings was a fireable offense!

I wish employees would do their actual jobs and stop conducting their personal business while on company time.

I wish I could convey these messages and people hear them, believe in them and actually respond and do them.

I wish, because as a child we grow up fast and are taught to believe and make wishes. I’d rather be taught at a young age that failure is real and relying on others will break you!

I wish, I could stop wishing… I write because this is my release and my way to vent… I can type without being interrupted.

Confidence doesn’t exist in people anymore. Belief in oneself is a missing trait and because of that most work is incomplete or incorrect.

My final wish is to see an influx in solid, confident and skilled workers who accept accountability and put the business first before online shopping, family matters, chatting up strangers and friends and ignoring phone calls.

It’s all wishful thinking, not because I don’t think people exist out there who do the job right, but because I don’t think many people out there actually care…..

Being “Nice” Is the Most Expensive Mistake in Business

The biggest mistake you can make in business is being nice to employees.

Some people need discipline. Some people need to be fired. And pretending otherwise is how small businesses bleed out slowly.

Post-COVID didn’t just disrupt industries, it rewired work ethic. And small businesses are paying the price for government policies that rewarded not working while punishing those who kept showing up.

You can explain expectations until you’re blue in the face. You can train, retrain, document, demonstrate, and remind. And still…. people just won’t do what’s required. They’ll do the bare minimum and convince themselves that it’s “enough.”

Meanwhile, business owners are handcuffed.

• Food specials? Forget it — cooks “can’t handle” the extra.

• Drink specials? Forget it — servers don’t want to promote anything new.

• Responsibilities and accountability? Forget it — that’s suddenly “too much.”

We survived COVID. Despite shutdowns. Despite losing half our staff. Despite every attempt to pull the rug out from under us. We made it with what we had.

And now?

What we’re left with is an employee pool that’s lazy, disengaged, and painfully lackluster.

People love to say, “You can only go up from here.”

I disagree. When you’ve been stuck at the bottom long enough, sometimes the only way forward is to bail out and find a new starting point.

Between rising rent, food shortages, delivery delays, missed orders, and the added burden placed on owners because employees simply don’t care, it’s enough to make any sane person walk away.

But here I am. Circling the eddy. No paddle. Going down with the ship. Because that’s what captains do. Because we all know sanity isn’t my strong suit!

When “Not a Good Fit” Really Means “I Didn’t Want to Work”

Owning a business means hearing the same story on repeat.

“Why’d you leave your last job?”

“It wasn’t a good fit.” “The environment was toxic.” “Management wasn’t great.”

Funny how everyone worked in a nightmare… yet somehow those businesses are still open.

Meanwhile, I look around at my own place and watch my dad, my sister, and myself doing jobs that, anywhere else would be the employee’s responsibility. Cleaning. Stocking. Fixing. Resetting. Closing gaps. Picking up slack.

Not here though. Here, we just do it all.

Why? Because we bought into that dangerous little saying: “If you want it done right, do it yourself.”

We didn’t start this way. We trained. And trained again. We wrote memos. We made checklists.

We re-trained, re-explained, re-reminded. And what do we get?

A few people standing around chatting.

Scrolling phones.

Waiting to be told.

Waiting for someone else to care.

I suppose if we actually held people accountable, if we made everyone do their job, our place wouldn’t be “a good fit” either. Maybe it would suddenly become “toxic” too.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth:

This problem exists because we allow it. Not because we’re bad people. Not because we don’t care. But because somewhere along the way, we confused being understanding with being responsible for everything.

So now the real question isn’t about them. It’s this: How long can we sustain the long hours, the constant coverage, doing other people’s jobs and trying to run the business?

How long before burnout becomes the business model?

Only time will tell.

And right now… I’m not convinced it has good news.

When Everybody’s Here But Nobody’s All In

Today, if employees show up for a shift, owners call it a win. But winning the attendance lottery isn’t the same as having a crew that actually works.

Restaurants are short-handed everywhere, and that used to mean one thing: more money for the people who showed up ready to hustle. Now? “Short-handed” too often equals “one-dimensional” employees.

Example: no dishwasher tonight. A line cook jumps in to wash dishes, great… except now they’re unavailable to run the line. The kitchen stops being a machine and becomes a series of improvisations. ONE DIMENSIONAL.

If everyone understood teamwork, really understood “get-shit-done” and helped each other, the kitchen would hum. But I’ve watched us try to teach teamwork for more than a decade. I’m past “train more.” We’ve trained. We’ve written memos. We’ve spoken one-on-one. We’ve followed up. Some of these folks have been here 11 years and came from corporate gigs where micromanaging was normal operation. This is not ignorance.

So what is it? Defiance? Laziness? A refusal to care? I don’t know. What I do know is this: I can control me. I can control expectations and consequences. I can’t control someone else’s choices … but I can decide whether those choices keep a job.

This business will survive. We’ll be short for a season, we’ll hire, and we’ll rebuild standards. But there has to be accountability. We need to implement a demerit system: three documented failures to perform essential tasks and you’re out. No drama, no opinion, just standards, enforced.

If you care about your job, show it. Restock the line. Put the next shift in a better position than you found it. Teamwork isn’t a warm, fuzzy idea, it’s the difference between a smooth service and chaos at 7 p.m.

We can keep doing the same thing and expect different results. I’m not that hopeful, or insane. I’m that done. Time for consequences.

Positivity Posts and the Reality of Running a Business

Every morning starts the same: I grab my coffee, scroll through social media, and like clockwork, LinkedIn hits me with a wall of motivational posts. You know the ones: “Hire people you can learn from!” or “Don’t micromanage, trust your team!”

At first, it feels inspiring. Those bright graphics, powerful quotes, and feel-good fliers promise a world where leadership is effortless and teams run like well-oiled machines. But then I pause and ask myself…. what does it really mean?

Because here’s the truth: you can post all the “how to be the best leader” quotes you want, but how does a business grow when no one’s applying for the jobs? And worse, what do you do when the people you do have need constant hand-holding just to keep things on track?

I’ve tried it all. I’ve trusted. I’ve encouraged creativity. I’ve stepped back to let people shine. And more times than not, it’s backfired. The meltdowns, the costly mistakes, the inability to handle adversity alone… they’ve all landed squarely on my desk.

I think back to when I lived down south, scrambling for a place to stay after my roommates left post-hurricane. A boss took me in… let me stay in her garage apartment just so I could keep working. I showed up every day, hungry to learn. Then there was the boss who taught me everything I know about restaurants and bars. He didn’t see a lost, rebellious kid, he saw potential. And he bet on me.

That’s the kind of leadership I remember. The kind that invests in people, not just platitudes. This is the kind of leader I want to be.

So, when is enough enough with all the motivational fluff?

Where are the real posts, the ones that admit no one’s applying, that training feels like Groundhog Day, and that micromanaging isn’t about control, it’s about survival?

Until I see those, I’ll keep scrolling past the positivity posts, knowing that, in the real world, hope doesn’t run your business. Hustle does.

The Greatest Innovation Happens From Iteration

“The greatest innovation happens from iteration.” – Jesse Cole, Savannah Bananas

Jesse Cole didn’t reinvent baseball with one big idea. He did it by trying, failing, tweaking, and trying again, over and over, until the Savannah Bananas became the phenomenon they are today. And that’s a lesson that resonates far beyond the ballpark.

At Basil’s, it’s the same story. Nothing we do lands perfectly on the first try. Some of the best things on our menu were born from long nights in the kitchen, too much caffeine, and a few batches of wing sauce that should’ve been labeled “hazardous materials.” That soup recipe everyone raves about? It didn’t just happen…. it was stirred, tested, adjusted, and cursed at until it finally tasted like comfort in a bowl.

Failure Is the Seasoning of Success

We all love the idea of getting it right on the first swing, but truth is, success tastes a lot like failure, you just have to keep seasoning it until it works. Every burned batch, every half-baked idea, every “nope, not that one” gets us closer to the version that sticks.

But here’s the part nobody talks about: even the greatest recipe won’t succeed if your team isn’t bought in.

Teams Win, Not Individuals

The Savannah Bananas aren’t just Jesse Cole’s vision, they’re a whole team of players who believe in that vision enough to put on a show every single game. Same goes for Basil’s. I can spend hours perfecting sauces, writing menus, or tweaking specials, but if the people behind the bar, in the kitchen, and on the floor don’t share the dream, then the whole thing falls flat.

You can’t build lasting success without buy-in. Employees, just like players, have to believe in the direction, trust the playbook, and feel like they’re part of the bigger picture. Without that, success isn’t just harder…. it’s nearly impossible.

Iteration Never Ends

That’s the beautiful part: iteration isn’t a stage you finish, it’s the process itself. Whether it’s food, service, or team culture, we’re constantly reworking, improving, and adapting. Some days it feels like two steps forward, one step back. But as long as we keep moving, the dream keeps building.

The Bananas proved you can rewrite the rules of baseball. We’re proving every day at Basil’s that you can rewrite the rules of what a sports bar can be. It just takes iteration, belief, and a team willing to swing at every pitch, even the wild ones.

So yeah, the greatest innovation happens from iteration. And around here, that means late nights, bold flavors, and a crew that shows up ready to win together. The only attitude is a positive attitude and buy-in requires a real effort not lazy individualization.

Patio Potential: Why Ours Isn’t Working… and Our Attempt to Bring It to Life

Let’s be real for a second, our patio is ok. It’s got sturdy tables, comfy chairs, big umbrellas with our logo, and a front-row seat to a beautiful West Virginia backdrop. But here’s the hard truth… nice isn’t enough.

Right now, our patio is like that friend who has all the right clothes but never gets invited to the party because they just stand in the corner sipping water. It’s clean, it’s ready, but it’s missing that spark…. in all seriousness it’s a corner of the parking lot and the vibe isn’t really hitting! The thing that makes people want to be here, laugh here, and post about it online, doesn’t really exist YET!

So, why isn’t it working?

1. There’s No “Scene” (Open to Suggestions)

People are drawn to energy. A packed patio makes more people want to sit outside. An empty one… not so much. If there’s no live music, no games, (we had games, the kids broke them all) no conversation flowing, it’s easy for folks to just choose the table inside.

2. We’re Not Creating FOMO

Social media should be showing people what they’re missing. If the only thing they see online is a picture of an empty table, they’ll assume it’s quiet and skip it.

3. The Experience Doesn’t Feel Different

If eating outside feels exactly the same as eating inside (just with more sunlight), people will pick comfort over heat, wind, or bugs. The patio has to offer something special.

How We’re Going to Change That( Or at least attempt change)

Alright, enough with the diagnosis…. here’s the cure.

Step 1: Make It Look Alive

String lights, colorful flowers, maybe a firepit when the nights cool down. Outdoor games like ring toss (again) or giant Jenga to keep the atmosphere casual and fun. We want people driving by to see action and think, “What’s going on over there?”

Step 2: Social Media FOMO

We’ll start posting videos of laughter, clinking glasses, and sizzling food coming straight off the grill. Not stock photos — real people, real fun. We’ll tag locals, drop event invites, and make sure every picture says, You should be here.

Step 3: Partner Up

Local breweries & distilleries for some tap take overs and tastings could help.

The Goal

We want Basil’s patio to be the place people think of first when the weather is good. A space where locals know they’ll see friends, hear music, and get a great meal with a side of fresh air.

Starting a Business isn’t Always What it Seems

Starting a business sounds sexy. You’ve got the vision, the ideas, the late-night “this is gonna be huge” moments.

But here’s the cold truth, ideas are cheap, execution is where most people crash and burn.

Rule #1: Don’t Dive in Head First

I don’t care how good your idea is. Slow. Down.

Do your research. Know your market. Have your finances, systems, and people ready before you open those doors.

When day one hits, you should have:

Every moving part of your business trained and ready. A clear vision everyone understands and commits to. No surprises when it comes to inventory, staffing, or operations.

Because if your business needs a team and your team isn’t on the same page, you’re already sinking.

Rule #2: Communication Is Non-Negotiable

If you have multiple managers, communication is your life line. Daytime and nighttime supervisors can’t be ships passing in the night…. they need to share what’s happening and when.

Set regular team meetings. Weekly or monthly, whatever your operation demands….. and make them count.

Review your finances. Identify what’s making money and what’s bleeding it. Ask where the team needs help.

Rule #3: Small Businesses Fail Where Big Ones Succeed

Large corporations have systems. They’ve got layers of communication and accountability.

Small businesses? Too often it’s chaos and crossed wires.

Before you even think about opening, create a vision board, your “north star.” Policies & procedures, your playbook for daily operations.

One rogue employee doing their own thing can cause a ripple that turns into a tidal wave of problems.

Rule #4: No Freelancers in the Trenches

I’m not talking about the people you hire from Indeed or Fiverr.

I’m talking about the “I know a better way” employees who ignore your systems. Even managers have to be on board with your system.

If you’ve got a set way things should be done, follow it to the letter. Deviations kill consistency, and inconsistency kills customer trust.

Rule #5: Presence Matters

Some businesses can run themselves. Most can’t.

Be there. Watch your business. Guide your team.

Team building and training aren’t optional, they’re survival skills.

Rule #6: Partners Can Make or Break You

Partnerships aren’t bad. But they require absolute compatibility, clear agreements, and constant communication.

If your partners, investors, or managers don’t share your vision, you’re not the owner anymore…. you’re just another employee with a title.

The American Dream Comes with Nightmares

Your business is your baby. It’s late nights, early mornings, and constant problem-solving.

If your team doesn’t support you, if your systems aren’t tight, if your leadership isn’t present, the dream turns into a nightmare real quick.

Success isn’t about the idea. It’s about the grind, the systems, and the people who believe in them as much as you do. Implementation of your ideas is the key to any successful business!