Épisodes

  • 121. Bobby & Myles talk Success vs. Significance

    121. Bobby & Myles talk Success vs. Significance
    Oct 29 2026
    In today's episode of The Cutting Onions Podcast, Myles and I shift the conversation from Success = what you accomplish for yourself to Significance = the positive impact you have on others.

    Here is some of what we tackle in this episode:
    • The Sustainability Gap: Success without significance often leads to burnout and rapid decline in the hospitality industry. Leaders focused solely on personal success fail to build the culture and infrastructure required for long-term growth.
    • The Significance Sacrifice: True significance requires being intentional enough to develop people who may eventually become better than you.

    We also discuss: Leadership Legacy Through People
    • Your greatest career accomplishments have very little to do with yourself
    • Legacy only lives beyond you if it’s built into other people

    Building Future Leaders, Not Followers
    • Develop leadership capacity, not dependency
    • Celebrate leaders who develop people better than themselves; make it a cultural honor
    Holding People Back vs. Empowering Them
    • Lesson: don’t let your need to feel indispensable block someone else’s growth

    Giving Freedom Without Losing Accountability
    • Developing people takes more time than just giving someone the answers
    • Undermanagement and overmanagement: both are failures in leadership

    This was a fun conversation, and we hope you find it inspiring and helpful as you think about your leadership legacy through the people you have developed throughout your career.
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    39 min
  • 120. Building a Restaurant Company: The Grit, Growth, and Leadership Behind the Brand with Teneshia Murray Butler

    120. Building a Restaurant Company: The Grit, Growth, and Leadership Behind the Brand with Teneshia Murray Butler
    Oct 23 2026
    On this episode of The Cutting Onions Podcast, Myles and I are excited to share our conversation with Teneshia Murray Butler, an entrepreneur and restaurateur making a lot of noise in the Atlanta restaurant scene. She is the owner of T's Brunch Bar and T's Burger Bar.

    But that is just the start of Teneshia's story. What makes Teneshia's story so interesting isn't just the restaurants she's built. She's spent more than two decades as an entrepreneur, building businesses across multiple industries, navigating growth challenges, and creating restaurant concepts people genuinely get excited about.

    She's also passionate about mentoring other entrepreneurs and giving back to the communities that support her businesses.

    And we're going to get into all of it today. This was an incredibly fun and inspiring conversation, and we can't wait for you to hear it!
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    47 min
  • 119. The Real Cost of Leadership Silence

    119. The Real Cost of Leadership Silence
    Oct 11 2026
    Have you ever stopped to think about how much damage a conversation that never happens can do?

    Not something someone said. Not a bad decision someone made. But something that needed to be said, and wasn't.

    In this episode of The Cutting Onions Podcast, Myles and I dig into a leadership challenge that we believe has quietly destroyed more trust, damaged more cultures, and driven away more talented people than most of us would care to admit.

    We're talking about the real cost of leadership silence.

    Check out this episode wherever you consume your podcast content.
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    39 min
  • 118. Bobby & Myles talk about C-Store vs. QSR competition

    118. Bobby & Myles talk about C-Store vs. QSR competition
    Oct 4 2026
    What if one of the biggest threats to the quick-service restaurant industry… isn’t another restaurant at all?

    Welcome back to The Cutting Onions Podcast. Today, Myles Gift and I are talking about something that I think restaurant operators need to be paying a lot more attention to: the evolution of the convenience store.

    The timing of this conversation was pretty incredible. Myles and I had actually been talking about this very topic the morning before Nation’s Restaurant News published an article highlighting new Technomic research around C-stores and their growing competition with QSR.

    And the numbers are pretty eye-opening.

    Today’s convenience store isn’t just a place to get gas, a bag of chips, and a fountain drink. These companies are investing in kitchens, chefs, equipment, digital ordering, menu innovation, and, maybe most importantly, the guest experience.

    And here’s the question we get into today: If a customer can get fresh, quality food quickly and conveniently somewhere else, does it really matter whether that place calls itself a restaurant?

    We talk about Casey’s selling tens of millions of pizzas, why C-stores may actually understand the human ordering experience better than some restaurant brands, and what restaurant leaders can learn from an industry that already owns millions of customer visits every single day.

    Enjoy this conversation.

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    47 min
  • 112. Jim Varney, co-founder of Wavelength Coffee Roasters talks Coffee, Sustainability, and Storytelling.

    112. Jim Varney, co-founder of Wavelength Coffee Roasters talks Coffee, Sustainability, and Storytelling.
    Jul 24 2026
    On today's episode of ⁠The Cutting Onions Podcast⁠, we are excited to feature our conversation with Jim Varney. Jim is an industrial designer, engineer-minded entrepreneur, sustainability advocate, and co-founder of ⁠Wavelength Coffee Roasters⁠. After roughly 25 years in product development and design, he made a significant mid-career pivot into specialty coffee.

    Alongside his wife, Deanna, they founded Wavelength in Massachusetts in 2025, officially launching the brand in November of last year.

    The most compelling part of Jim's story is not simply that he started a coffee company. It is that he is applying industrial design, technology, systems thinking, and environmental sustainability to an industry still dependent on many traditional processes.

    We also spent time discussing the power of storytelling and how that is central to the Wavelength brand. There is a fully integrated message from the roastery to farmers' markets, to the website, to the packaging.

    This was such an inspiring conversation, and we can't wait for you to hear it. Check out this episode wherever you consume your podcast content.
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    1 h et 5 min
  • 117. Tim Robinson talks about Leadership, Career Lessons, and Being Present

    117. Tim Robinson talks about Leadership, Career Lessons, and Being Present
    Sep 28 2026
    On this episode of The Cutting Onions Podcast, Myles and I sit down with my longtime friend and former Freebirds colleague, Tim Robinson.

    I’ve known Tim since 2013, and we worked closely together across Operations and Finance during my time at Freebirds. His career has taken him through restaurant operations, professional sports, finance, supply chain, procurement, and FP&A, and he brings a rare ability to understand both the four walls and the numbers behind the business.

    Today, Tim serves as Director of Procurement and Director of FP&A for Swensons Drive-Ins.
    In this episode, we talk about leadership, culture, career lessons, being present, baseball, and what Tim has learned from a career spent seeing the restaurant business from just about every angle.

    I promise, you don't want to miss this episode.
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    45 min
  • 116. Leadership, Vulnerability, Failure, and the Stories We Don't Tell.

    116. Leadership, Vulnerability, Failure, and the Stories We Don't Tell.
    Sep 18 2026
    We live in a world where everybody is building in public. We're sharing our accomplishments, our wins, our new businesses, and our successes. And that is great to do, of course.

    But we have been asking ourselves this question: Why are we so comfortable building in public, but we fail in private?

    Most leaders, including us, have failed, and in some cases spectacularly so. But rarely do leaders share that story.

    Which got us thinking. Are we doing a disservice to the people coming up behind us by only sharing the highlight reel?

    So today, we want to talk about failure, vulnerability, and why maybe the stories we're most uncomfortable telling are the stories somebody else needs to hear.
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    37 min