Cultivating Operations Talent with Ross Nibur, Director of Operations at Toast

Cultivating Operations Talent with Ross Nibur,
Director of Operations at Toast

Ross Nibur, Director of Operations at Toast

In this episode, Rachael is joined by Ross Nibur, Director of Operations at Toast, an all-in-one restaurant management platform that empowers restaurants of all sizes to build great teams, increase revenue, improve operations, and delight guests.

Ross started his career as a prep cook. But then he pivoted into sales, and from there, into operations development and leadership. He has been at Toast for nearly six years, having moved from Director of Business Development to Director of Revenue, Operations, and Strategy to his current role as Director of Operations.

Ross was also recognized as one of the Top 10 Sales Development Leads in the World. Today, he shares how he built his operations team and how to successfully hire and train a high-performing group of operators.

Key Highlights:

3:35 – 6:05 – Evolving Thinking About Staffing and Skills – Rapid growth and scale require you to think about training your operations team differently. At early stage companies, the lines between tactical and strategic roles are more blurry. As companies scale, these two become more differentiated, and leadership styles can change.
6:07 – 8:09 – Evolution of Operations Require More Strategic Thinking – A significant shift is happening in how Ops is being viewed – historically as a cost center, now a competitive advantage. Leadership teams will need to evolve to become more collaborative and strategic partners to senior-most players in the business.
9:57 – 14:12 – Finding the Right Talent – Understand what you are trying to accomplish with this position and focus on the project or a program. A project happens once, while a program is a strategy that runs repeatedly. Many teams hire Ops talent to run a project, but that job runs out of complexity and doesn’t give that person a creative scope. Be aware of different hiring personas and hire people for their mentality, communication and technical skills, and attention to detail.
25:58 – 27:07 – Training and Enabling – There can be many right people for a role, so look for dynamic problem solvers. If you find the right person with the right mindset, you can train them to be successful.
27:45 – 34:11 – Driving Success – In creating a metric or business outcome-driven result, there’s a ton of clarity as new team members ramp up. Don’t put a talented operator in a role and give them a specific project plan outlining how to do it. Start small, make the goal clear, make the team clear, and provide documentation on paths and processes around it and any context on the business decision-making and value. This will give them the space they need, and you can create the tools to hold them accountable.

Episode Resources

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“There’s a major shift happening in the way operations are viewed because historically, we’ve been a cost center, a part of the business that did things to reduce costs or improve efficiency. Where what I’m seeing now is operations as a competitive advantage”.

Ross Nibur, Director of Operations at Toast

“This role today, leading strategic projects, is less can I teach someone how to do a specific thing, and more can I give them the space to think about a problem and set the right expectation”.

Ross Nibur, Director of Operations at Toast

“There might be a lot of different kinds of Operators that could accomplish that goal in various ways. So think how do you bring them into your organization and let them find that path to success for themselves. And that onboarding process of how do you take somebody from a different organization or who might not have been in a direct strategic operations role and empower them to think this way. That’s the real challenge and secret sauce of building a successful long-term Operations team”.

Ross Nibur, Director of Operations at Toast