Running a restaurant requires a strong team, but trusting your team can sometimes be another challenge. In this episode of The Pre-Shift Podcast, we sat down with Avery Ward, CEO of Little Italy Ristorante, to discuss the art of delegation—including when to lean on your team, how to do it strategically, and why it all matters.
Listen to the episode
Meet Avery Ward & Little Italy Ristorante
As the third-generation CEO of Little Italy Ristorante in Groveport, Ohio, Avery’s journey with his family’s 60-year-old business has come a long way. He’s also recently ventured into the coffee industry with the opening of Main Ground Coffee.
As for Little Italy, it all started in 1966 when Avery’s grandparents, Chuck and Janet, stumbled across a little grocery store hole in Central Ohio. After one four-hour conversation—and a same-day loan of $18,000—they ended up purchasing the store, along with the next-door house that came with it.
Avery explains how the grocery store was built on community ties: “ What my grandma always said was that if we can build a connection with somebody that they go out and tell others about, then we’ll be on the right path because word of mouth travels fast.” Then, when a new grocer came into town, business slowed down, and his family decided to pivot, turning the store into a Little Italy.
But a family business doesn’t come without its struggles. Avery noticed the toll it took on his dad, who became the next successor, during his childhood: “We took three vacations as a kid. All of them were three-day little trips because we had to get back to the restaurant quickly. And I definitely was like, ‘I don’t want to live that lifestyle.’ So I was a huge technology person, very passionate about computers and software and development of software and just how it all works.”
At 16 years old, Avery landed a job at Apple and saw himself doing that for the rest of his life. But in 2015, his dad fell ill—causing the business to suffer also. Avery explains how his family faced four options: close the restaurant, sell the restaurant, file for bankruptcy, or have Avery, himself take over the business. And for Avery, “It just felt right to continue that on.”
“ I decided to leave my full-time job and come back to the business. But I said, ‘Okay Dad, if I do this, I’m going to do it my way. I’m going to blow this thing up and anything bigger than it’s ever been.’ He was reluctant to that statement. But here we are—eight years later, and we’ve done exactly that.”
On relying on technology
Delegation isn’t just limited to people—it can apply to technology, too. Avery can combine his passion with his role at the restaurant, saying, “Technology now is the integral part of what we do. It’s tried and true.” He highlights the value in both customer-facing and internal use cases—not only do servers use tablets to send orders to the kitchen instantly, but the team also relies on technology for internal communication.
“ Our employee experience is huge to me where they get their information. The information that they can consume and how they consume it is really important. And so having that one umbrella ecosphere of information for employees from time cards to payroll to scheduling to communication to everything—it’s incredible that it’s all in one place. And it doesn’t feel overwhelming for an employee to consume the information that you tell them.”
Additionally, Avery highlights some other use cases for technology:
- Gathering customer feedback
- Creating checklists for accountability
- Forecasting sales for inventory management
It took some time, but Avery is proud of his progress with restaurant tech: ”Utilize what’s at your fingertips is what I’ll say on technology. There’s a lot out there, and it’s overwhelming and trust me—I’ve gone through the mirror to get to where I’m at today, but I feel confident in our tech stack that we have now for our restaurant.”
Also read: How Little Italy turned hours of payroll processing into minutes
On relying on people
When it comes to relying on others, Avery says it’s as simple as asking for help. “If you have good people and you believe in the people on your team, they will step up and they will help you.” He does this by framing his asks as ‘special assignments’ (instead of handing out big management titles immediately). That way, if they fail, there are no hurt feelings—no titles need to be revoked. He takes this as an opportunity to identify the right people to trust.
“ We call it our ‘implementer’ or ‘side-by-side’ person who can help pull that weight off of your shoulders as the operator. And so when you’re doing everything and you have everything on your plate, you physically can’t—but know that everything that you do is just a task. Everything from top to bottom is a task that you are doing in your business.”
His philosophy is simple: any task can be done by any person as long as they’re taught it. Avery explains, “There’s nothing special about you as an operator that makes you different from your employees. So if you can teach them your ways—your process, your how your when—they will do. And then it just becomes an accountability piece. You’re the operator that holds them accountable to the standard that you expect.”
And if nobody steps up? Avery believes that’s an operator problem.
Building the right team using accountability
Little Italy was a small-scale family business with 12 employees that has grown team of 85 since Avery came back. Avery explains, “ It starts by identifying what your company structure looks like. So we are firm believers in currently, a business that operates on EOS and the mindset of that.”
To find the right people for each role, he has a strategic process in place:
- Pinpoint the gaps: Identify the areas in the business where more support is needed.
- Define the role: Outline the key responsibilities for each restaurant position.
- Match by values: Consider which team members best align with each role based on their core values.
He adds, “ Sometimes, you’ve selected a person that’s a culture fit for your business, but they’re just doing the wrong job. Maybe they don’t have the skill set. They don’t have the training. They don’t have the capacity. […] So you identify your whole organization as a whole and all the structure inside of it. And then you work through all the people and putting them in the right seat.”
That’s when you start to feel relief as an operator. But Avery brings it back to the accountability factor, saying, “ Your role as the operator just becomes the accountability metric. You’re just holding people accountable to what you expect.” It’s not all on one team member. Instead, it’s guided by what Avery calls LMA—leadership management equals accountability.
To hold others accountable, Avery emphasizes the importance of a detailed checklist. He uses Jolt to define every role from top to bottom for the day. For example, instead of simply stating to ‘clean the bathrooms’, a checklist should include details like ‘grab the sanitizer in the bottle’, ‘spray the toilet with 80% concentration’, and ‘wipe the toilet until there are no streaks left’.
He explains, “ When people don’t do their job, we can just simply ask ‘Why, what was missing?’ And we look at the checklist, and we ask ourselves first internally: ‘Is it an us problem? Were we clear enough?’ And if the answer is no, then it’s an easy question for the employee what happened, and it’s a pretty hard way for them to negotiate their way out of why they didn’t do it.”
Creating role expectations with checklists
Avery adds, “ If you’re an operator who doesn’t have your checklist in place, that’s your first task you can delegate. How do you get a great checklist? You pick the great people in your organization and give them the first delegation task of what you expect.”
He explains that it can be as simple as handing employees a yellow legal pad and a pen and then asking them to document their day-to-day activities. This should include all the details of their role, including:
- What they do
- How they do it
- When they do it
- The order they do it in
- Deadlines or timeframes for each task
Following this, Avery advises delegating task number two: systemizing all the checklists into some form of software. “ And that slowly gets distributed to your employees, and now the golden ticket for relief is when operators start to see that one person who they selected as their golden child start to tell people that’s not how we do it here because they built the list. They have ownership over that expectation.”
More insights from the podcast
Outside of delegation, we also discussed a few other topics with Avery—be sure to listen to the full episode for more insights on:
- The path to opening Main Ground Coffee
- Building an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP)
- Why documenting your restaurant story matters
- The future of family-owned restaurants
And check out these resources below:
Jessica Ho, Content Marketing Specialist
Jessica Ho
Content Marketing Specialist
Hi, I'm Jessica, Content Marketing Specialist at 7shifts! I'm writing about all things related to the restaurant industry.
