The Cutting Onions Podcast

Hosted by Bobby Shaw

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Episodes

122

Latest episode

Oct 2026

Language

EN-US

About the show

On the Cutting Onions Podcast, restaurant executives Bobby Shaw and Myles Gift celebrate leaders and organizations that build strong people cultures that develop other leaders. Bobby and Myles interview leaders who have built amazing cultures in their organizations through developing great leaders who produce amazing results, the right way.

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60 recent

October 29, 2026Episode 12139 min

121. Bobby & Myles talk Success vs. Significance

In today's episode of The Cutting Onions Podcast, Myles and I focus on changing the conversation from Success = what you accomplish for yourself to Significance = positive impact 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.

October 23, 2026Episode 12046 min

120. Building a Restaurant Company: The Grit, Growth, and Leadership Behind the Brand

On this episode of The Cutting Onions Podcast , Myles and I are excited to share our conversation with an entrepreneur who is making a lot of noise in the Atlanta restaurant scene, Teneshia Murray Butler , 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 in multiple industries, navigating the challenges of growth, and creating restaurant concepts that 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 is an incredibly fun and inspiring conversation, and we can't wait for you to hear it!

October 11, 2026Episode 11938 min

119. The Real Cost of Leadership Silence

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 Gift and I are digging 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.

October 4, 2026Episode 11847 min

118. Bobby & Myles talk about C-Store vs. QSR competition

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. For the last year Myles has been an executive for a premium C-Store company, and he and I have been talking about this very topic for a while. This week, Nation's Restaurant News published an excellent article highlighting new Technomic, Inc. research around C-stores and their growing competition with QSR, which we use as a springboard for this conversation. 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 big 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. We hope you enjoy this conversation. You can find this episode wherever you consume your podcast content.

September 28, 2026Episode 11745 min

117. Tim Robinson talks Leadership, Career Lessons, and Being Present.

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. We talk 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.

September 18, 2026Episode 7636 min

116. Leadership, Vulnerability, Failure, and the Stories We Don't Tell.

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.

August 20, 2026Episode 11542 min

115. Aaron Anderson, franchisor of Sunrise Social joins us today to talk about his unique point of view as a Franchisee and a Franchisor.

Welcome back to The Cutting Onions Podcast. Today’s conversation is one Myles and I have really been looking forward to because our guest has experienced the restaurant business from almost every angle. Aaron Anderson has been a franchisee, a multi-unit restaurant operator, a concept creator, an entrepreneur and now a franchisor. He’s operated brands including Rita’s Italian Ice and The Original Hot Dog Factory, experimented with ghost kitchens, created Brunchaholics, and ultimately evolved that concept into Sunrise Social. And we think what makes Aaron’s story especially interesting is that he didn’t just study franchising from the outside. He lived it first as the person buying into someone else’s system, and now he’s sitting on the other side of the table building one of his own and supporting his franchisees. So today we’re going to talk about restaurants, entrepreneurship, scaling, franchising, leadership, and mistakes, and what it really takes to turn a great concept into a great company. We loved this conversation with Aaron and know you will too. You can enjoy this episode wherever you listen to podcasts.

August 14, 202643 min

114. Carlo D'Amore, Founder of Live In Theatre, Talks about the Importance of Play and the Power of Story

Welcome back to The Cutting Onions Podcast. Myles and I are so excited to present this conversation with Carlo D’Amore. Carlo is an actor, playwright, director, producer, experience designer, and the founder/creative director of Live In Theater (LIT) . His professional theater career spans more than three decades and includes Broadway appearances in Summer and Smoke and Latinologues , as well as Off-Broadway, regional theater, film, and television work. We spent a great deal of time in this episode talking about the importance of play and the power of storytelling and how that works in the theater, but also how that impacts the hospitality world in powerful ways. There are more similarities than you might think. Storytelling isn't merely something Carlo does professionally. There is a very personal connection between story, identity, truth, performance, and survival in his life. We loved this conversation know you will too.

August 12, 2026Episode 11356 min

113. Mike DeJong, Restaurateur and Author of Grow Smart joins us today for a conversation about The Operator Trap

What happens when the thing that made you successful becomes the very thing holding your business back? On this episode of The Cutting Onions Podcast , we sit down with Mike DeJong for a conversation about growth, leadership, systems, and one of the hardest transitions entrepreneurs and operators have to make: learning how to step out of the day-to-day without becoming disconnected from the business. We talk about what Mike calls the “Operator Trap” —when the leader becomes the person everyone depends on to solve problems, make decisions, and keep things moving. That may work for a while. But it doesn’t scale. We get into building systems without creating bureaucracy, developing leaders who can make good decisions without you in the room, understanding the metrics that really matter, and recognizing when your organization is truly ready to grow. One of my favorite parts of the conversation is the tension between letting go and staying connected . Great leadership isn’t about disappearing from the business. It’s about building people, systems, and clarity so the business doesn’t require your constant intervention. If you’re an entrepreneur, restaurant operator, or leader trying to build something bigger than yourself, I think you’ll get a lot out of this conversation. Growth shouldn’t require more heroes. It should require better systems and stronger leaders. We had a mishap with the audio last week, so it sounds like Mike and I are in a pool! But I promise you we weren’t. The convo was so good, I am sharing it as is. We hope you enjoy it!

July 24, 2026Episode 1121 hr 5 min

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

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. He and Deanna really want to show what the future can look like for roasting coffee beans. 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.