What One Outlet Teaches

Two of my three floor staff had resigned.

The professional thing, we thought, was to let them finish out a notice period and train the people coming in after them. They offered. We accepted. It seemed like the right call at the time.

It was not.

What We Got Wrong Before the Exit

When someone resigns, they have already made a decision about this place. Something shifted for them, and they chose to leave. That is their right, and I hold no bitterness about it. But the moment a person decides they are done, they stop seeing the job the way someone who is staying sees it. Their patience for the small difficulties shortens. Their investment in what happens next drops. The pride they once took in how things are done here starts to feel optional to them, because they know they will not be here to live with the consequences.

None of this makes them bad people. It makes them human.

The mistake is thinking that a person in that state is the right one to train your next hire.

We had two staff members who, during their time with us, struggled to communicate within the team, stayed inside their own problems when the floor needed them, and rarely moved toward a problem when they could move away from it. We knew this. We had seen it in every service. And when they offered to stay on and train the people coming in, we said yes because we thought their operational knowledge was worth more than the risk.

What they trained the new batch in was not just how to carry plates or read a table. They trained them in how they saw the place. The frustrations they carried. The shortcuts they had made peace with. The ceiling they had quietly accepted for what this job could ask of them. You cannot separate a person's knowledge from their attitude when they are teaching. The two come together, or they do not come at all.

The Real Cost

We now have a new batch that arrived with someone else's conclusions already loaded in.

That is the cost we are sitting with. Not the short-staffed days, not the harder shifts, not the longer search for the right hire. Those are solvable. What takes longer to fix is a new team member who arrived open and willing, and was handed a frame for this job by someone who had already given up on it.

The leaner days after a wrong exit are manageable. The days spent un-teaching what the wrong person taught are a different problem entirely.

The Path Forward

Here is what we are doing, and what I think any team in the same position needs to do.

The first thing is to reset the frame for the new batch. Not with a speech, not with a policy document, but through the shifts themselves. When you work alongside someone new, the way you move, the standards you hold without being asked, the decisions you make when things get difficult, all of it is teaching. You are either confirming what they were told by the last person, or you are quietly replacing it with something better. The reset happens in service, not in a meeting room.

The second thing is to be honest about the search. We are looking for people who are a fit for the company, not just a fit for the role. The role is learnable. The attitude is not something you can train in after the fact. We would rather run lean with a solid core for a few weeks than fill the seat quickly with someone we will have to manage around.

We step in. The kitchen covers when it needs to. Management takes the floor when it has to. None of that is ideal, and none of it is permanent. But it is better than the alternative.

What This Looks Like at a Hundred Outlets

Bread and Brew is one outlet. When something needs to be corrected, we can be in the room. When a new hire is picking up the wrong cues, we can catch it early and redirect. The damage, while real, is contained.

Naveh Collective is planning to grow to 100 outlets.

At that scale, we will not be in the room every time. What we will have is whatever culture and hiring standard we built here, running in every location, carried by every manager who learned from how we do things now. If we learn here that you let a resigned employee train the next batch, that lesson scales. If we learn here that a wrong exit needs to be a clean exit, that scales too.

The mistake of a slow, contaminated handover is recoverable at one café. It is a much harder problem when it is the default across 40 kitchens.

So the lesson we are taking from this is not just operational. It is structural. When someone resigns, accept the resignation with professionalism, acknowledge what they contributed, and let them leave quickly. Bring the next person in clean, into a room that still believes in what it is building. Train them yourself, or put them beside someone who has not already decided to go.

What You Are Actually Waiting For

If you are in the same situation, here is the thing I want you to hold on to.

Being short-staffed while you look for the right person is uncomfortable. It means longer shifts, less margin, days that end late and start early. But a lean team with a clear standard is something you can build on. A full team carrying someone else's conclusions is a much harder starting point.

Wait for the right fit. Let the exits be clean. Train the next batch yourself.

Because the person who shapes your new hire's first few weeks is not just teaching them the job. They are teaching them what this place is. Make sure that is someone who still believes in it.

Bread and Brew is a hospitality brand run by Naveh Collective, a Chennai-based group focused on baking, continental dining, and corporate kitchen operations, with plans to grow to 100 outlets over the next decade. This blog is written by the chefs, bakers, and leads who run it every day.