Tag: Awareness
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Sharpening a Knife, Sharpening Yourself
The first lesson I ever learned in a professional kitchen wasn’t about flavor. It was about edges. Every good cook knows you can’t do much with a dull knife. Cuts get sloppy. Work gets harder. And sooner or later, the knife slips. That slip isn’t just frustrating — it’s a hazard. You’re more likely to…
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When You Inherit Someone Else’s Baggage
One of the harder parts of leadership is realizing that sometimes, when someone gets upset at you, it’s not really about you. Not long ago, I had a situation with one of our department managers. Earlier this year, he signed a new offer letter with a quarterly bonus tied to the net profit of his…
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Sharpening Your Excalibur: Playing to Your Strengths in Golf, Business, and Life
There are a thousand ways to make a birdie in golf. Draw it in, fade it in, chip it close, or roll in a 20-footer. The beauty of the game is that there isn’t one “right” way. But here’s the trap: too many golfers, too many leaders, and too many people in life spend all…
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How ChatGPT Sent Golfers to Sugarbush
AI isn’t just rewriting how people search for answers. It’s also rewriting how people decide where to play golf. I saw that shift firsthand at Sugarbush. The Breakthrough A few weeks ago, I was looking through our WooCommerce records and noticed something unusual: two transactions where the source was listed as ChatGPT.com. That means these…
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About MyJLStory: Golf, Food, and Life Connected
When people ask me what MyJLStory is about, the easiest answer is this: it’s a collection of the lessons and stories that shaped me. From my years grinding on the mini-tours, to the kitchens where I first learned to cook, to the golf clubs and businesses I’ve managed along the way — this blog is…
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When the Customer Isn’t Right: A Leadership Lesson in Backing Your Team
In golf and in business, there’s a moment every leader faces — when the easy choice and the right choice aren’t the same. The easy choice is to bow to the pressure of “the customer is always right.” The right choice is to stand with your team when they’ve done their job with integrity. Last…
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Planning the Off-Season at Sugarbush
Every golfer knows the feeling. The round is rolling along, the ball is in play, and then you reach a stretch where the fairways tighten and the birdie chances thin out. That’s when planning matters most. You don’t wait until you’re in trouble to make a decision. You play ahead. At Sugarbush, the calendar works…
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Operational Flow: Lessons from the Sugarbush Kitchen
When I first stepped into the kitchen at Sugarbush Golf Club, I didn’t just look at what we were serving. I looked at how we were serving it. Running a restaurant inside a golf club means more than turning out good food. It means keeping pace with tee times, serving members who expect both speed…
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Two-Month Check-In
Two Months, 52 Posts, and Still Swinging I started this blog on June 28 with one quiet story about burnt toast, tempo, and the power of small things. At the time, I didn’t know if I could keep up the rhythm. Now, just two months later, I’ve written 52 articles. By the end of August,…
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How a Better Fish Fry Helped Us Honor Tradition and Improve Service
When Tradition Meets Throughput When I first came on board at one operation I managed, one thing caught me off guard. There was no Friday fish fry during Lent. For a place built on Midwest hospitality, that didn’t feel right.So I asked why. The answer wasn’t about taste.It was about flow. The Constraint No One…