 Aloha, and welcome to Business in Hawaii with Reg Baker. We broadcast live every Thursday at 2 o'clock for about 30 minutes from 2 to 2.30. We are broadcasting from the downtown studios of Think Tech Hawaii and beautiful Halalulu, Hawaii. We're a show that talks about successful stories in Hawaii, both the companies and the individuals. And we have a lot of success stories here in Hawaii. And today we're going to talk to two of them, actually. I've got Jan KaEO, who is the owner of Dale Carnegie Training Hawaii and Guam. And I also have Tom Jones, who is the owner of Kiotaku, who is a very popular Japanese restaurant here in town. So I want to welcome Jan and Tom to the show. Thanks very much, Reg. Thank you, Reg. Jan, you've been on the show before, and we've talked a little bit about Dale Carnegie and what you do and how you do it. And you brought a person that's going to maybe do a little testimonial for you. I guess Tom has been a user and a practicer of some of the skills from Dale Carnegie. So can you just share with us a little bit for the audience what exactly Dale Carnegie is and maybe introduce Tom, and Tom can share why he's here? Sure, absolutely. So Dale Carnegie has been around for 105 years, often credited as being the founder of workplace learning. He started a whole new industry called personal development, and from his teachings that he gathered 105 years ago came some of the greats that we recognize today, like the Tony Robbins and the organizations like that. Yeah, some of those household names that we kind of grew up with, at least some of us grew up with. Yeah. Carnegie actually recognized that if individuals and teams develop self-confidence, improve their communication skills, improve their leadership skills and their human relations skills, their people skills, and learn how to control their attitude and stress and worry that they could become even more successful in their workplace and in their home. Actually, and correct me if I'm wrong, but this was one of the first individuals that actually kind of developed that interpersonal skill type of program that everybody needs to have inside the workplace. Right. You know, one of the top selling books of all time is his book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and as recent as last year, Entrepreneur Magazine said that it is the one book that entrepreneurs should read every single year to be successful in their business. Right. No, that's a great background, and I guess you carry on that legacy here by offering classes and how to sessions on how it all works. Right. We have classes in, well, we have courses with Dale Carnegie. We have a Dale Carnegie course. We have sales training. I come from a sales and leadership background. We have leadership courses, both workshops and time-space courses to develop leadership skills, and we have live as well as live online training. Wow. That's a lot of going on. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess, Tom, you've been a practitioner. You've gone through some of these programs? Yeah. Absolutely. Interestingly, I took the Dale Carnegie course a little over 30 years ago when I was living in Tokyo training as a Japanese chef, and I met the franchisee from Japan, Frank Mojizuki at a restaurant, and he convinced me to take the class. I took it in English, of course. He was looking for English speakers to be in his English classes because most of the participants were Japanese, but they were, I guess, back in the 80s, Japan was pretty much taking over the world, much like China is today, and so there were a lot of Japanese executives in these courses, and so he asked if I would take the course, and I said, sure. So I found the course at that point in my life. I was probably about 29 at the time, to be just really, really foundational in helping me develop skills that I would need as I would come back to the United States with the Japanese company. No, I'm just curious, and I've got a little bit of an international background. I ran the international operations for the Bank of Hawaii for a while, so I spent some time in Tokyo and Hong Kong in different places. Does the course change at all by offering it in Japan as opposed to it being offered in the U.S.? Is there anything different, or is it pretty much the same? I think it's, you know, the Dale Carnegie Instruction is provided all around the world, so it's a global company with local reach. But you know, back in the day, back then, Japan was trying to emulate America, so the course was very much American style, with maybe a few adjustments for cultural differences. But now as it's developed, there are more cultural differences being taught in, you know, different countries around the world, I think. Interesting. That's good. And so you've had some really good success with taking the class, and I guess you have kind of worked with Jan over the years on this? Yeah, absolutely. Again, I found it to be really helpful in my own development, and so I recognized early on when I came back to Hawaii from Japan that managers that work for me would benefit, you know, in confidence, organizational skills and communication skills. So since I came to Hawaii in 1986, I've had managers that work for me in all the different companies, including my own company now, Kiotaku, take the Dale Carnegie course and leadership courses and workshops as well. So is this a benefit or I guess training that you provide to some of your key employees? Absolutely. I think employees respond very quickly to investments that you make in, and they appreciate the fact that you see value in them and that you want to help them improve. So immediately, just upon offering them an opportunity to take the course, you get a positive response from them, but then, of course, they take the course and they start to develop skills and abilities that, you know, they hadn't had before, and it really helps them do their jobs a lot, you know, a lot more effectively. Real positive for the morale, too, I would imagine. Absolutely. You know, and in today's job market, you know, there's low unemployment here, businesses, especially restaurants, but all businesses are really looking for quality employees, so it's very difficult to find them, so if you can't find them, you have to develop them within your own organization. And sometimes you don't have a whole lot of choice. You've got to develop them. That's right. Absolutely. Yeah, it's a tough environment. So, Jan, so you offer this not only to individuals, but then also to companies, too. I mean, it can be training for more than one person in a company. Absolutely. And when teams actually come into our programs and they learn together, they have a shared learning experience, the benefit to the employer is exponential, because now you have a team of people that are speaking the same language, that are looking to win people to their way of thinking so that they can be more effective managers and more effective team leaders. It's a win-win all the way around. Well, and I keep hearing that word team. I guess it really brings some cohesiveness to that team that's in the company, or I guess in your case, Tom, you've got different locations. Absolutely. So, you've got different teams in each place, and this really brings them together. Okay. You have teams of different restaurants. You have teams within teams. You have the front of the house, and especially in the restaurant business, the front of the house and the back of the house, they've got to get along in order to service the guests. So, it's really important. That's very good. And again, what these courses can be done, I guess, on-site? Are there any online capabilities? I mean... Yes, we do have live online programs. I was just on a call today with a local decision-maker that was saying, gosh, these programs are done by certified trainers. Are they relevant to us here in Hawaii? And I said, absolutely. I'm getting a lot of local companies who are investing in live online training because it's maybe more convenient. And what I'm finding within large companies is they're sharing the good news with different departments, and so I'm seeing enrollments come in from one department, then from another department, all from the same company. So that's another way to receive training on their own terms. See, and that's a great convenience because sometimes it's hard to get people to come together all at the same time at the same place, you know, and because we are dispersed out a little bit. Right. And until we get the rail going, it's going to be tough with that traffic. So... That's right. You know, it's good to have that online option. Right. That's good. And if people wanted to find out more information about some of these courses, where could they go? Well, they should go right to our website. It's hawaii.dalekarnagy.com, and you can see a list of our live programs that are scheduled between now and we are scheduled all the way to April of next year, as well as our live online programs are at the bottom of that list. Very good. So that's a great resource to have, and I guess, Tom, you give it five stars. I mean, it's a great way to train the staff, and you've got a lot of benefit out of it. You know, and you've also got some other interesting classes. It's not always self-improvement. Right. I mean, you've got other types, you know, and one that I've seen a flyer on recently is working with multi-generations, you know, millennials, and so forth. Absolutely. You know, and so that's something that's coming up soon? Yeah, absolutely. You know, never before have we had four generations in the workplace, and you can have a millennial, so someone who is between 20 and 35 years old that actually is managing someone who's old enough to be their grandmother and learning how to relate and connect with that generation. It's very different from your own generation, and so it's not just one-sided anymore. It's not the person that is 60 that is managing a 20-year-old. You could have the exact opposite, or you could have multiple generations in different hierarchies of the organization reporting to or working for each other, and so learning how to connect, learning how to be relatable, learning how to inspire someone who is old enough to be your mom or your grandmother is a skill that is really valuable to the millennial generation. Well, and what's interesting here in Hawaii is not only do you have the different generational issues, but you also have different cultural aspects, too, of what's going on, which makes it interesting. Yes. And then you throw customers into the mix. I mean, particularly in a restaurant environment, I can imagine it's a very dynamic type of activity going on in here. Absolutely. The restaurant industry is a lot of people serving a lot of people, and so there are human relations going on all over the place. And yes, it's important more than ever to be able to communicate effectively and with confidence to not only your employees, but also to your guests. And the guest expectation now is higher than ever with the development of the food channel, the food network, and so forth. People go to restaurants with much higher levels of expectation than ever before, and so they're expecting us to be able to deliver, so we've got to do our job. And I think, and I can speak from personal experiences, that I've got a millennial, somebody who's in their 25, 28 range, living in San Francisco, working for a company called Deloitte. So he's got a little expendable income, and I've got to tell you, he's a foodie. I mean, they go to restaurants, he practices cooking, I guess they've got services now where they'll send the food to the house with instructions. Oh yeah, absolutely. They have all this, and so when they go out, they're going not only for the food, but also for the experience. There's a component in there that I never really paid much attention to, but it becomes very important in today's, I guess, world. Yes, and when the experience is good or bad, they can actually communicate that satisfaction or not. Instantaneously, with everyone. So customer service is another area that we've had a lot of interest in, and just recognizing how to take good customer service to great, how to be exceptional in that customer to customer, employee to customer contact. Yeah, and I guess, and there's an awful lot of training that goes into that. And maybe awareness is probably the most important component, is that you just have to be aware of the different values and different cultures and different age groups have, both in an employee relationship as well as a guest or customer relationship. And is that part of what you also bring some? Yes, absolutely, and as Tom was speaking, he has had four restaurants that are very successful in a consistent delivery and consistent experience. And so, in the old days, we used to think of training as remedial training, something you did when something wasn't going right. But in today's world, it's about competing at a higher level, and so taking, I just work with an organization that is number three in their category of businesses, and they want to be number two, they want to be number one, and so it's not that they're doing anything that's negative, but they want to take that customer experience to the next level. So they have a company-wide initiative to boost their level of customer experience, they're gonna measure it, and we are lucky to be a part of that experience. You know, Jan, I want to talk a little bit more about that, but we're gonna take a short break. Okay. And then when we come back, let's revisit that point and maybe get different perspectives on how we move that mark up to the different levels. But this is Business in Hawaii with Reg Baker, we're talking with Dale Carnegie today and also a restaurant group, Kiyotaku, and we'll be right back in about 60 seconds. For a very healthy summer, watch Viva Hawaii. We're giving you the best tips and with our best health coach here. So Viva, health coach. Viva la comida saludable. Hey, how you doing? Welcome to Bachi Talk, my name's Andrew Lening, I'm your co-host, and we have a nice program here every Friday at one o'clock, Think Tech Studios, where we talk about technology and we have a little bit of fun with it. So join us if you can. Thanks, aloha. Aloha and welcome to The Savvy Chick Show on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm the weekly host at 11 a.m., Honolulu time. Very excited for the next six weeks, we have the Aspire series, which is all about the coolest careers I could find and interviewing and getting insights from these amazing people who want to share it with you and help you live your dreams. Look forward to seeing you on the show, aloha. Aloha and welcome back to Business in Hawaii with Reg Baker. We're talking today with Jan Keio from Dale Carnegie and also with Tom Jones from Kiotaku Restaurant Group. We were just beginning to talk about raising the customer experience bar up a little bit and how we have training that can help companies do that. And then we also have Tom that might speak a little bit to the hands-on approach to doing this. So taking the training to implementation. So Jan, can you just, what type of programs or how would you get companies to provide this training to increase that customer service bar? Well it all begins with making sure that the team has an attitude for service, has a desire to actually be of service to whether it be their internal customers, their fellow coworkers or to their external customers. And you'd be surprised at the sometimes lack of awareness of how that individual will impact their world around them. They never recognize that a bad attitude could have such a negative effect, not just one time, but down the line in their entire department. And so it's creating that awareness and then giving them tools to, once they recognize that the behavior is not what they want it to be, giving them tools to be able to change that. You know, from my experience, and you can speak to this, but from what I have learned over the years, I can teach people almost anything that they need to know. But one thing that I have a hard time teaching them is attitude. You know, attitude is a lot of times ingrained in that person. And that's probably the one trait that I look for the most when I go out and I or somebody is that they have to have the attitude to learn, to cooperate, to communicate, to collaborate. Does that make sense? Does that? Absolutely, it begins with attitude and one of the key things is to help them understand what's in it for them. We all know what the manager wants, they want, or the owner wants, they want higher production at less costs and more revenue, that's kind of a basic. But the employee needs to know what's in it for them if they have a better attitude, if they deliver higher level of customer services, they sell more. So much of employee engagement is not so much, attitude is important, but a lot of the attitude from employees is driven by the way we treat them. And so we have a tremendous amount of control over their level of engagement by the way that we interact with them, the goals we set for them. And so our communication skills to our employees in many ways drives their engagement and what we call their attitude. Well, attitude is a two-way street, right? Absolutely. You gotta have the proper attitude to work with the employees and empower them and give them what they need to be successful. Exactly. And they have to know what's in it for them. It all pays off in the end. I mean, it results in happy customers that feel that they're getting the value and they'll come back and it kind of all fits together. So from an implementation standpoint, Tom, how do you, assuming a person's got the attitude, how do you work with your team, both the front and the back and moving that bar up to the next level? Well, most restaurants or any business, actually, is usually very good at their own technical training. We know how to make sushi or cook tonkatsu, tempura, what have you. So our training in those areas or our standards in those areas are pretty well set, but it's the way that we are able to deliver that training to the employees and the interpersonal skills that really make a difference and set organizations apart from each other. So that's why we use the Del Carnegie training with our managers to help them be better communicators. And I think one of the things that's basic in the basic Del Carnegie course, what they call the magic formula talk. And it's a short, two minute or three minute talk and you cover three basic areas. And so by helping managers be able to be concise, clear and drive the point home, you're able to get a skill that will help them when they're actually training people on the job. So those soft skills trainings are what we don't inherently have in our organization that we need to reach out to. And that's always something that for whatever reason seems to always have a little bit of a second priority is those soft skills. But once you've got the technical skills down and you're delivering consistently, the difference is really gonna be seen when you've got the soft skills to deal with the in-house and the external customers. And in many ways too, just reinforcing positive behavior. I mean, that's the easy, behavior rewarded is behavior repeated. So managers and supervisors who know how to compliment employees at the right time and provide clear compliments on specifically what those employees are doing are gonna be successful. I think you just answered the question I'm gonna ask, but I'm gonna ask it anyways. How do you, and I can see this as being particularly important in your business, I guess in any business, but in restaurant business particularly, consistency. You've gotta maintain consistency. And how do you monitor and ensure that that happens? Well, in our company, we have a lot of computerization of food prep charts. And so we take a lot of the mental calculation off the responsibility of the manager. So they don't have to worry about that. And then they can focus actually on the quality. But delivering consistently is important. And so having a training program and having a consistent core ideology or a mission statement throughout the organization that everyone understands really helps the organization deliver consistency. Do you have a coaching type of program? Do you have people to kind of mentor and kind of coach the others and give them advice as they're going through their work day? Yeah, absolutely. Each department has what we call, we have server trainers who are the best servers that we have. And they're not only necessarily the best servers, but they're the best at teaching other servers how to be a good server. So a great server isn't necessarily a great server trainer, but identifying those people that have those skills and then reinforcing their skills so that they can deliver good training is mission critical to our success, and the managers as well. That's great. And Jen, is that kind of incorporated into your courses and how to set that up and structure that and make that happen? We do have coaching for performance type of workshops. And we also model that in our foundational Dale Carnegie course, be able to coach and understand the elements of coaching so that you can help reinforce positive behavior or coach for alignment when it's not exactly where it should be. Right. And I imagine that it becomes an important component because you can provide the training, but unless you've gotten, you have somebody there kind of monitoring and coaching to make sure it's consistent. Memories are short sometimes when people tend to forget. And actually our methodology for Dale Carnegie training is to not just give information that will result and will produce great results, but actually practicing it in the classroom environment and making sure that it's practice because practice makes permanent. It doesn't make perfect. So make sure that they practice, they get the skill down and then they go out for a week and actually practice it for a week, a specific skill and then come back and tell us how you did. And so what you see is you see confidence building, you see skills building and communication and human relations and that results in transformation at the end of the course. Very good. I mean, it sounds like a very comprehensive course and when you go out and apply it, it works in the real world too. Absolutely. That's very good. Looping back a little bit, you've got a millennial generational program coming up here soon. Can you just spend a minute and tell us a little bit about what that is and what we would expect to get out of it? So everyone's talking about the challenge of having millennials in the workplace. More importantly, by the year 2020, millennials will almost dominate the leadership level of an organization. And so everyone's squandering in not that far away. And so everyone, which is a good thing is trying to understand, how do we adapt our work environment? How do we adapt our communication to be effective? Both millennials as a leader as well as managing millennials. And there are fundamental differences and we liken it to say that when our grandparents told us, you don't understand what it was like to trudge in the snow two miles to walk to the store to get a loaf of bread. Uphill both ways. Uphill, and that was in Hawaii, right? So we heard those stories when we were younger. So our millennials hearing our stories about how difficult our life was. Every generation has difficulties. It's important to recognize what makes that generation different. What has impacted that generation that has changed their values different from the baby boomers, different from the Gen Xers? And then once we understand their strengths and what is different than being able to meld them in the workplace so that we can be an effective team whether we are 20 years old or whether we are 65 and still in the workplace. I'm kind of curious. And I don't want to put either one of you on the spot, but what are some, I mean, I come from the baby boomer generation and I have a son that's a millennial. So I know the differences that we have, but I'm curious, is there any other types of differences that maybe I don't see personally, but you might have offhand? What are the differences between, say, the boomer generation and the millennials? Do you know what some of those differences are? Yeah, if you don't mind. One of the key things is baby boomers, when they went to get a job, they were reviewed once a year. And so you worked for that once a year raise and then you were told whether you did a good job or not and you're given your list of what you did that could be improved and then you went away. And if I was lucky, I get to keep my job. Right, right. And you tended to stay with the company for a long time because you were really impacting the future of the company. The millennials today will not wait a year for feedback. They want immediate feedback. In fact, they want feedback several times, maybe five to 10 times a day. A day? A day. And the reason why they want that is that we have bred a generation that wants feedback so that they can realign, self-correct, do it right the first time. That is the mentality of a millennial. They want to do it right. And the way they didn't wait for correction, they ask for feedback. I can see some of that because of the technology and as we talked earlier, you get that immediate feedback and they've come to expect that, both technology as well as an interpersonal level. Right, and they don't understand why they can't get it because they can get it in many other different mediums. Why can't they get that in the workplace? Good point. Now we've got probably about a minute left and I wish we had more time to talk about it. But Tom, have you had any experience with the millennial? You've got multi-generations in your, I mean, what's some of the challenges that you face there? Well, I think as we started off at the beginning of the conversation talking about millennials leading boomers, because most times you hear boomers like ourselves talking about the millennials and all the difficulties you have dealing with them. But in our business, we have young restaurant managers that are in their late 20s or 30s supervising boomers at all levels in the organization. So the communication skills required for effectively managing up and down the chain of command are very important. I can see, and maybe I'm gonna be unique, but as a boomer, if I was getting feedback five or 10 times a day on my performance, it probably would get bored of it pretty quick. I don't need that. Right, exactly. But I can see where there just needs to be that awareness of how to deal with different generations. Right, absolutely. Very good. Well, we're gonna wrap up here. Is there any final words you wanna, anything coming up you wanna announce? I guess you're gonna have a busy holiday season. Yeah, Giotaku is a family restaurant. We have entertaining people from around the country. People come home to visit for the holidays and Giotaku is a gathering place. Maybe a lot of parties or a great place to visit and bring families and friends together. And if people wanna see how the Dale Carnegie programs actually are working, they can come out and see it firsthand. Meet some of our managers, right? All right, they're graduates. Well, thank you both for being on the show today. It was very fascinating. I'm gonna know now how to better deal with my millennial children, so very good. But this is Reg Baker, business in Hawaii. We broadcast live every Thursday at two from 2.30. I hope to see you next week. Till then, aloha.