Case Study // Hospitality
How one day on-site became 24 step-by-step procedures and an AI Business Brain for a seasonal bar & grill that rehires every season.
Mudflats Bar & Grill · North shore of Lake Mille Lacs, Minnesota
The problem
Mudflats Bar & Grill sits on the north shore of Lake Mille Lacs in northern Minnesota. It opens for summer, closes in October, and opens again the day the ice is thick enough to fish on. Some years that's mid-December. Some years it's January.
Every opening, the crew changes. Some familiar faces come back. The rest are learning the place for the first time.
Where the know-how lived
Picture a bartender on their first shift. Where do they start? How do they log in? Should they be setting up the till or stocking the rail?
Some of it was written down. None of it was in one place. And the parts that mattered most lived in people's heads, including the owner's.
The fridge door
Next to the register
In the kitchen
In people's heads, including the owner's
That gap ran the length of the building.
A busser on the floor wondering if she should be greeting & seating guests
A cook in the kitchen wondering what to order, & when
"…too much of how the place actually ran was either ad hoc or lived in people's heads, including mine."
Brian Linne, President, Mil-Lagos Hospitality
Inside Mudflats Bar & Grill, at Barnacles Resort on Lake Mille Lacs.
Before day one
The owner gave me access to everything he had. Then he walked me through how the place ran day to day and his vision for what he wanted it to become.
There were job descriptions for five roles, but none of them spelled out what each person should do, and when.
The food safety procedures were buried in paperwork on-site, out of date, and out of the owner's reach. Before I arrived, I used AI to draft six up-to-date food safety SOPs, ready to check with the cooks on-site so nothing was missed.
SOP: standard operating procedure, the step-by-step how-to for a task.
The day on-site wasn't for starting. It was for filling the framework with the truth.
On-site
I was on-site from 10 to 5.
She started pulling out everything the crew leaned on: the lists magnetized to the fridge, the list by the register, the lists in the kitchen. I asked question after question. She walked me through how she
They walked me through how they
The hardest part is the part I love most
I'm the outside voice in the room. The crew can tell me what isn't working without it getting personal. The owner can hear it without having to defend himself.
Both sides get heard, and nobody has to be the bad guy. My job is to take what each side needs and build one way of working that makes sense to everybody.
One system both sides helped shape
A system only the owner believes in won't survive the first Friday rush.
The solve
Step-by-step guides covering every part of the operation.
A par level is the amount you always want on the shelf.
It answers only from Mudflats' own documents. A crew member asks a question in plain language, like "What's on the closing checklist?"
It answers from the SOPs and shows which one the answer came from.
The questions that used to land on the owner or the manager now have somewhere else to go, on any shift.
The SOPs also stand on their own. They live in a Google folder Mudflats owns. Print them, put them in a binder, and hand them to a new hire on day one. The AI Business Brain puts every answer within reach, for anyone, any time. But the SOPs work with or without it. When something changes, like a new vendor or a menu item coming off, the owner updates the SOP and refreshes the AI Business Brain. I train owners to do both. For a bigger refresh, they can bring me back in.
Inside the par level tracker
One count turns into an order list, sorted by vendor, & ready to send.
Real questions from the build
Pick a question to see the answer the crew gets, straight from Mudflats' own SOPs.
The rollout
All 24 SOPs delivered
The crew starts reviewing them for accuracy and working from them
The AI Business Brain goes live
The summer season closes
A new crew, returning faces and new hires, opens with the system in place
In the field
Once the crew was working with it, two things surfaced that every client after Mudflats will benefit from.
Looking back, I'd begin by asking every role two things. What questions did you have when you started? What do new people ask you? Then I'd make sure every one of those questions has an answer in the SOPs. For every client after Mudflats, that's step one.
It needed to know things that aren't processes at all. The everyday details nobody writes down because everybody already knows them. Until the new person doesn't.
The AI Business Brain knew every process by heart. What it didn't know was the Wi-Fi password.
The difference
After taking over Mudflats and running the bar and restaurant for a season, I realized that too much of how the place actually ran was either ad hoc or lived in people's heads, including mine. We engaged Natalie to extract and document the operations, creating processes that standardize the guest experience, clarify staff expectations, and reduce overall ambiguity. Natalie is phenomenal. She's organized, detail-oriented, upbeat, congenial, and consistently anticipates our needs. Her follow-through and the way she presents the finished work made this easy on our end. I've known and worked with her for almost seven years, and will continue to engage Natalie to help tackle complicated challenges.
Your business
Maybe every new hire learns the job from whoever's working that shift. Maybe every question still finds its way to you. Maybe the business only runs right when the right three people are in the building.
The fix starts the same way. Get it out of people's heads. Put it in one place. Make it something your team can easily get answers from, so they can get right back to your customers.
I spent 18 years in medical device packaging engineering, where every spec had to work for anyone who touched it. I build your systems the same way:
Systems are king & processes are queen. It's time the owner stopped being both.