There is a conversation that happens in a number of leadership meetings I’ve ever been part of or heard about.
Someone at the table — a VP, a director, an owner — says something along the lines of: “Our people know what to do. We just need them to execute.”
I’ve heard it hundreds of times across 25 years in multi-unit operations. And every time I hear it, I ask myself the same question.
Do they actually know that — or do they believe it?
Because those are two very different things. And the gap between them is where most operational performance problems quietly live.
What leaders see versus what the front line experiences
When you’re running a multi-unit operation, your visibility into what’s actually happening at the location level is filtered through layers. You see reports. You hear from your managers. You walk a location for an hour and get a read. You review the numbers.
What you don’t often see is the shift lead at a quick-service restaurant who has been guessing at a procedure for three weeks because the SOP is buried in a folder she hasn’t been able to find. You don’t see the new gym associate who felt unsupported from Day 1 and is already mentally on their way out. You don’t see the tunnel attendant at a car wash who hesitated for forty-five seconds when the conveyor stopped — not because he didn’t care, but because he wasn’t sure of the exact protocol and had no fast way to find it.
Those things don’t show up in the weekly report. They show up in your turnover number six weeks later. In your customer satisfaction scores. In the subtle, persistent inconsistency that never quite gets diagnosed because everyone is too busy to look closely enough.
The people on your team are not hiding this from you intentionally. In most cases they don’t even have language for it. They just know something feels harder than it should be.
The assumption that costs operators the most
After 25 years in this business I’ve come to believe that the single most expensive assumption in multi-unit operations is this one:
Because we trained them, they know.
Training and knowing are not the same thing. Training is an event. Knowing is a condition — and it requires that the right information be accessible at the right moment, repeatedly, under real operating conditions.
A new restaurant crew member can sit through onboarding, nod at the right moments, and genuinely want to do the job correctly — and still find themselves standing in front of a customer complaint they’re not sure how to handle, with no fast way to find the answer.
A front desk associate at a fitness studio can complete their orientation and still freeze when a member asks about the freeze policy — not because they weren’t paying attention, but because the policy lives in a document nobody can find mid-shift.
That’s not a character failure. That’s an infrastructure gap.
And closing it is a leadership responsibility — not a training department project.
What the best operators do differently
The leaders I’ve watched build genuinely consistent operations over time share a habit that most leaders don’t have.
They stay close to the question their team can’t answer.
Not just the big operational questions — the strategic ones, the financial ones. The small, daily, front-line questions that reveal exactly where the gap between the standard and the reality actually lives.
They walk into a car wash and they ask the team member — not the manager — what’s been getting in the way. They sit with a restaurant shift leader and pay attention to where hesitation shows up. They treat inconsistency as information rather than as a performance problem to be corrected.
And when they find a gap, they ask the harder question: is this a people problem or a system problem? Because in my experience, it is a system problem far more often than most organizations are willing to admit.
The front line is always telling you something
This is what I want every operator, every multi-unit leader, every franchise development executive to sit with.
Your front line is always communicating. The hesitation at the point of service. The workaround your gym staff developed because the official procedure was too hard to find. The repeated question your restaurant manager answers twelve times a shift because there’s nowhere else to get the answer. The small deviation from standard at your car wash location that nobody flagged because it seemed minor — until it wasn’t.
All of it is signal. All of it is your operation telling you where it needs support.
The leaders who build the most resilient operations aren’t the ones who enforce standards most aggressively. They’re the ones who stay genuinely curious about why the standard isn’t being met — and who build environments where the right behavior is easier than the alternative.
That starts with honestly answering one question.
Not “are my people executing?” but “have I given my people everything they need to execute?”
The answer to that question, honestly examined, is where great operations are built.
Ben Coarde is the Founder of LeadOps AI and a 25-year multi-unit operations executive with experience across hundreds of locations for some of the world’s largest restaurant, retail, and service brands. LeadOps AI is the operational intelligence platform built for multi-unit operators at leadopsai.io.