Doug Hisel, Senior Vice President, Store Operations, Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, Inc. | Real Leadership

What happens when a leader running nearly 660 stores decides the answer is less strategy, not more?

Doug Hisel is Senior Vice President of Store Operations at Cracker Barrel Old Country Store. He oversees field operations for the restaurant and retail sides of nearly 660 stores across 43 states. His path started far from the executive suite. He was a college bartender at Ruby Tuesday who spent eight years running independently owned restaurants, and he joined Cracker Barrel in 2007 as an associate manager in Indianapolis after his wife submitted his application for him. Nearly two decades later, he has held almost every operations role the company has.

Doug's leadership comes down to a lesson he learned in a hotel room with no bed: no amenity matters if you miss the fundamentals. At Cracker Barrel, those fundamentals are hot food, fast, attentive service and overwhelming hospitality. Over the past year, Doug made them the filter for every menu item, communication and new behavior that reaches the field. In his words, it was the least strategy he has ever deployed to the field, and his most successful year as an operator.

In this episode, we cover:

Why the employee experience comes first, and how a decentralized field HR team keeps a read on it

How Cracker Barrel runs a restaurant and a retail store under one roof, and why the two require different skills

The "bed and shower" philosophy: why fundamentals have to hold before anything else gets layered on

How every role, from the host to the overnight maintenance team, understands how it contributes to hot food

Why moving from single-unit to multi-unit leadership was the hardest jump of Doug's career, and the mentor who told him the truth about it

How he keeps nearly 20 years of experience from turning into "old mixtapes"

Doug's message is simple: don't go back to the basics. Go forward with them, every single day.

Key Moments