Cultivating a Legacy Mindset
by David Klemt
The letter “L” is for building a long-lasting, lucrative legacy. (AI-generated image)
We talk about legacy in restaurant, bar, and hotel brands like it’s something that happens once the awards start rolling in.
But at this year’s Bar & Restaurant Expo, a standout panel turned that idea on its head.
Legacy isn’t something we leave behind; we live our legacy in real time. Every hiring decision. Every shift meeting. Each and every moment we’re engaging with the public, representing our brand. Every awkward moment when a team member calls us out, and we choose whether to get defensive or get better.
And as Gen Z makes up more of our workforce—and, increasingly, our leadership—this mindset isn’t just good culture. A legacy mindset is great business.
Last week, I hypothesized that a growth mindset will help operators set themselves up for success from the outset. This theory is grounded on a few points made by Dave Kaplan about nontraditional capital raises, as well as being prepared to expand even if that never becomes part of the plan.
Part and parcel with a growth mindset is a legacy mindset.
As it happens, a panel of hospitality, operations, beverage, guest experience, artificial intelligence, and space tourism experts assembled during BRE 2025.
This powerhouse blend of operators and innovators included:
- Meaghan Dorman: The Raines Law Room, and Dear Irving
- Beth Hussey: Shifty, and Hazel’s
- Dave Kaplan: Death & Co., and Gin & Luck
- Colleen McLeod Garner: Paragon Space Development Corp., and Cecilia.AI
Each offered a different perspective on the idea of legacy, coming together to lay out a roadmap for what lasting leadership looks like now.
Legacy is Culture That Lives Beyond You
For Meaghan Dorman, legacy starts with perspective.
Not ego. Not personal mythology. Perspective.
“Legacy is building a shared perspective that can leave your concept and live on its own,” she said.
Take a moment to digest Dorman’s viewpoint.
An operator isn’t just building a concept they control. What they’re creating is a concept others carry forward because they believe in it. The team an operator builds and the guests they work to transform into brand evangelists believe in the brand and the mission.
At least, that’s what operators should do. Ultimately, success depends on whether team members and guests believe in the operator themself.
I take this to be a founder’s versus owner’s mentality. Anyone who can afford to do so can purchase equity in a business, and take a stake in ownership. A founder, however, takes ownership of the brand, mission, innovation…the entire business. That means owning the strategy, successes and failures, and responsibility for driving team members and the business forward.
This is exactly the shift in mindset needed to engage a generation that values transparency, inclusivity, and authenticity.
If the culture can’t thrive without the operator in the room, they’re an owner, not a leader. And if they’re not a leader, they’re not building a legacy.
In fact, what they’ve built is a leash, and they’ve strapped and padlocked it to their leg.
Staff Serves Guests. Management Serves Staff.
Beth Hussey doesn’t pull her punches. She’s refreshingly straightforward with her perspectives on, and passion for, hospitality.
For her, legacy is hospitality at its most fundamental: A value that lives on in others.
Expressing those values and their importance happens through modeling: small, consistent actions that communicate the message, “I’m here for you.”
Hussey takes the radical step of flipping the power dynamic.
“Management serves employees like they serve their guests,” she said.
That one sentence reframes everything. It forces leaders to examine how they show up, particularly when it’s inconvenient.
She also challenged operators to consider whether their training programs are as guest-friendly as they expect their team members to be.
Hussey encouraged the operators and leaders in the room to stop and think about their training processes as if they had just thrown their guests into the same experience. The majority who took the time to consider how they train their staff “probably wouldn’t like it,” she opined.
That’s a gut-check moment for anyone who’s watched new hires get thrown to the wolves. And if many people reading this are being honest with themselves, they’ve done exactly that to new team members at some point in their careers.
The Suggestion Box Question
Hussey doesn’t just talk about feedback. Instead, she builds in real, actionable systems for it
Two weeks before team meetings, Hussey puts out a suggestion box, open to any team member. Before the meeting, she and her leadership team sit down, go through each suggestion, and address them during the meeting.
This doesn’t mean the team always gets their way; not every suggestion gets implemented by leadership. However, the suggestion, good or bad, yay or nay, is addressed. A reason is provided, in front of the team member who suggested it, for the suggestion being embraced or rejected. That’s a powerful message of leadership, teamwork, and valuing the team’s input.
Shifty, interestingly, features a truly anonymous suggestion box. This is a real, anonymous channel that can be reviewed ahead of a team meeting.
However, Hussey has noticed something alarming about this feature.
“Operators have asked us to turn it off, even though it has never once been used for evil,” Hussey noted, to laughter throughout the room. “Why don’t you want honest feedback from employees?”
That question says it all, really. If an operator or member of the leadership team fears their team’s honesty, the problem isn’t the team.
Codifying Culture at Scale Without Killing It
Dave Kaplan knows what it means to build a brand that people believe in—and sometimes, walk away from.
During the panel discussion, he revealed an internal saying about the brand: “Everyone quits Death & Co. at least once.”
That may sound like a negative. However, the key insight is this: Everyone comes back.
That’s legacy in action.
Operating multiple concepts in multiple cities, Kaplan has learned how important it is to codify culture without strangling it. His company’s five core values aren’t just decorative, they’re operational.
These values are applied to hiring, recognition, and even when it’s time to let someone go.
Scaling that culture requires infrastructure. Kaplan shared how they’re developing a company-wide learning management system (LMS), and investing in a tight tech stack to align operations across markets.
That said, tools alone don’t build trust. For that, a leader needs transparency.
When a major operational change is proposed at Death & Co., they open a two-week feedback window. If necessary, they even hold a town hall. This process isn’t just good policy, it’s a direct response to something Kaplan once heard from a long-time team member.
Ronald Fucking McDonald
Kaplan told the story of being a bit surprised—and somewhat frustrated—by the reactions to him visiting a Death & Co. outpost.
To paraphrase the response from a long-term (I believe original) Death & Co. team member addressing Kaplan’s frustration: “You haven’t been around much. You may as well be Ronald Fucking McDonald.”
Brutal, but honest. And exactly the kind of wake-up call too many owners brush off. To his credit, Kaplan took that blunt feedback on board.
He could’ve flexed his title as Dave Fucking Kaplan, if he were that type of person. And he could’ve taken out his frustration on the team members he felt had slighted or at least ignored him. Instead, Kaplan used that reality check as fuel to double down on being present, accountable, and humble.
There it is again: the founder’s mindset.
Here’s the unspoken truth about legacy: It doesn’t care about your title. Legacy cares about how a leader shows up, and how often.
Reverse Mentoring, AI, and the End of Top-Down Leadership
Anyone still asking whether artificial intelligence has a place in hospitality (and building a legacy), Colleen McLeod Garner has a message for you: “Pandora’s Box is already open.”
In other words, AI is taking its place in hospitality, regardless of who agrees with it doing so. Operators can either determine the best ways to implement and succeed with the AI solutions best suited to their operations, or they can fall behind, ultimately finding themselves passed by.
McLeod Garner doesn’t support replacing people with tech. If she did, we at KRG Hospitality wouldn’t agree with her on AI, and I would say so.
Her approach is to enhance human connection through strategic automation. By streamlining ops and freeing up staff from menial tasks, AI empowers staff to spend more time doing what matters: serving guests, supporting each other, and representing the brand.
But McLeod Garner’s real breakthrough insight about leadership? Reverse mentoring.
Flip it, and Reverse It
“Age does not dictate knowledge or leadership,” she said.
In a world where Gen Z employees bring digital fluency and cultural insight to the table, the smartest thing a senior leader can do is listen. That means inviting younger team members into leadership discussions, not as silent observers, but as active participants.
An operator adding reverse mentorship to their leadership toolbox sends a powerful message: “You matter. What you do here matters. Your ideas matter.”
McLeod Garner challenged leaders to ask questions, then shut up and listen—literally.
Ask open-ended questions. Let people until they’ve exhausted the issue on their own. This isn’t done to prove a point about what a great leader an operator is; this simple action shows team members that an operator respects them enough to listen fully, and give their insights careful consideration.
Respect. Empathy. Trust. Those aren’t soft skills, they’re business survival skills. And for Gen Z, and therefore future-proofed businesses and brands, they’re non-negotiable from this point on.
The New Metrics of Leadership
What makes this conversation urgent isn’t just generational turnover. While our industry is facing that issue, what we’re all facing is cultural transformation.
Gen Z, speaking generally, doesn’t tolerate hypocrisy from employers. These team members, admittedly generalizing again, are quick to hold leadership accountable. They’re not impressed by surface-level perks or “cool culture” branding.
They want authenticity, action, and alignment.
Legacy, then, isn’t about what leaders build for themselves. It’s about what they build with, and leave for, their teams.
This commitment to legacy includes:
- Transparent hiring and promotion processes.
- Feedback mechanisms that actually lead to change.
- Recognition systems rooted in core values.
- Tech that improves but, crucially, doesn’t remove people from the human experience.
- Intergenerational learning that flows both ways.
None of this is easy. It takes hard work, humility, and long-term commitment. As Kaplan has put it, practicing relentless pursuit until it’s a key component of your everyday life.
As each panelist explained in their own way, the payoff for all the hard work in developing a legacy mindset is real: improved staff and guest retention, stronger culture, and a business that stands for something more than a bottom line.
Last Call: Build a Brand That Outlives You
Legacy doesn’t just mean being remembered. At least, not to me. Legacy means an operator’s impact, and that of their brand, is being repeated.
If team members carry a former employer’s values into their next job, or share an operator’s leadership principles with someone else, or feel changed for the better because they worked with a given operator, that’s a legacy.
Achieving that type of legacy doesn’t take ten or 20 or 30 years. In fact, there’s no set timeline that determines a legacy has been developed. Building a legacy requires presence and perspective. It demands the courage to be the kind of leader a team actually wants to follow.
And if Gen Z in particular has anything to say about legacy in hospitality—and they do—that’s exactly the kind of leadership that will last.
Image: Canva
