My first year as Regional Operations Director at Hana Group, I had 21 franchise units across 6 states inside Walmart, Sam's Club, Whole Foods, and Target host stores. Combined P&L, roughly $36M. My office was in California. Six of my general managers had never met me in person before I inherited them. Two ran units I could not reach in less than a day of connecting flights and rental cars.
That first quarter I tried to solve the geography by working harder. I ran phone calls at 6 am to catch the East Coast openings. I ran phone calls at 10 pm to catch the West Coast closings. I flew somewhere every other week. By the end of month two, half of the general managers were quietly hiding problems from me because a call from me meant something they had to defend, and none of the fixes I was pushing were sticking because I was not there long enough to install them.
Then I did what I should have done in the first week. I sat down with a notebook and I wrote out two lists. What I actually needed to know about each unit each week. What each general manager actually needed from me each week to do their job. The lists barely overlapped. That was the whole problem.
This piece is about what came out of that notebook. How to coach a general manager you are not going to be standing next to on Friday dinner. How to build a cadence that does not turn into surveillance. When video is the right medium and when a plane ticket is. And how to know the difference between a general manager who needs you closer and one who is telling you, politely, to back off.
The distance problem nobody names
There is a physics problem in multi-unit operations that nobody says out loud. If you have five units and you can walk to all of them in a week, coaching is a shift-side activity. You watch. You correct. You leave. The general manager gets used to your presence and stops noticing you.
If you have twenty units across six states, none of that applies. Your presence is not a background hum. It is an event. Every call is loud. Every visit is louder. And the general manager learns, correctly, that the way to survive your attention is to give you a clean picture the week before you show up.
That is the trap. The general manager is not being dishonest. They are managing your presence the way they would manage a health inspector's presence. The signal you get back is not what is happening in the unit. It is what the general manager thinks you want to see.
The fix is not more visits. The fix is to make your presence quieter and more constant so it stops being an event the general manager has to perform for.
That is a cadence problem. And once you say it out loud, it stops being about the miles between you and starts being about the calendar between you.
The three-channel cadence
I run remote coaching on three channels, deliberately mixed. Each one carries a different kind of information. Any two of the three works. All three is what actually holds a bench.
Fig. 1 · Async carries pattern. Video carries tone. Walk-through carries the room.
The async weekly recap
Every Monday by noon local, each general manager sends me a five-line written recap. Last week's labor as a percent of sales. Food cost. Top three variances with a one-line reason each. One problem they need help on. One win. One ask of me for the coming week.
Fifteen minutes to write. Ten minutes for me to read. No meeting. The whole file for 21 units takes me under two hours on a Monday afternoon, and by the time I am done I have the operational shape of the region in my head before a single video call has started.
The written format matters. Writing forces the general manager to think in specifics. A phone call lets them tell you a story. A five-line recap makes them show you a number.
The weekly video one-on-one
One 30 minute video call per general manager per week. Camera on, both sides, same day and time each week, locked. If I have to move it, I move mine, not theirs. The call is not a status update. It is a working conversation about the one problem they flagged in Monday's recap.
Camera on is the whole ballgame. A voice-only call gives you the words. Video gives you the face. A tired general manager, a scared general manager, a general manager who is done pretending, all show on video in the first two minutes. On a phone call they can hide for forty five.
The monthly walk-through on their phone
Once a month, during a working shift, the general manager walks the unit on their phone camera and narrates. Walk-in. Prep. Line. Pass. Front of house. Office. Twenty minutes. I ask three or four questions during the walk, no more.
This is the closest substitute for being on the floor that video can build. You see the walk-in shelves. You see the line's mise en place. You see whether the closer's checklist from last night is actually clipped to the board where it belongs. And the general manager sees you seeing it, which is a different quality of attention than a scheduled visit gives.
Trust as a scheduling problem
The single most useful reframe I ever put on remote coaching is that trust across distance is a scheduling problem before it is anything else. If your standing one-on-one moves twice in a quarter, you have not earned the right to coach the general manager. Not because they are punishing you, but because they cannot plan around you, and a manager who cannot plan around their director stops sharing the hard stuff.
The math on this is stark. If your call is at their 9 am every Thursday, they will save the one thing they need help on all week for Thursday morning. They will not text you at 8 pm. They will not sit on it and let it fester. The Thursday slot is a container for the problem, and the container is what makes them bring the problem.
Move the container twice, and the container stops holding. They stop saving problems for you. They start solving problems alone, which sometimes goes fine and often goes sideways in the ways you would have caught in the Thursday call that did not happen.
Reliability of your presence matters more than the intensity of it. A boring, predictable cadence you never break is worth more than four heroic drop-ins a quarter.
When to fly in
I do not visit on a rotation. I visit on a trigger. Rotational visits burn travel budget and teach the general managers to perform the week you are on the calendar. Trigger visits catch what is actually broken. The triggers I use:
- A new general manager in their first 90 days. Two visits inside that window, non-negotiable. You cannot install a new leader remotely.
- A P&L that has slipped two consecutive months in the same line, without a satisfying explanation in the written recap.
- A serious people situation the general manager cannot handle over video. Terminations, harassment complaints, a key departure.
- A promotion decision I want to make in person. Career-defining conversations do not travel over Zoom.
- A health or safety incident that changes anything about how the unit operates.
Everything else, I hold on video. When I do fly in, I stay two days minimum. A one-day visit is theater. Two days lets me be there for a close and an open, which is where the operating system actually lives.
Watch daily, coach weekly
The single hardest discipline in remote operations is not reacting to the daily P&L. I read it. I do not call about it. If labor was 4 points high on Tuesday, I do not text the general manager on Wednesday morning. I let it sit until the Monday recap.
The reason is simple. If the general manager knows you are watching the hourly data and pinging them about it, they stop running the unit and start managing your feed. Every text you send about a single day teaches them that a single day matters more than the pattern. It does not. The pattern matters. The single day is just noise until it becomes a trend, and you cannot see a trend on a Wednesday morning.
Watch daily. Coach off the pattern weekly. If Tuesday's labor spike shows up as a variance in Monday's recap, you have a conversation about it. If it does not, either the general manager caught it and fixed it, in which case there is nothing to say, or they missed it, in which case what you want to coach is the missing, not the spike.
Language, quietly
One thing I do not see other regional operators talk about. Roughly a third of my general managers across host store franchise operations were more fluent in Korean or Spanish than in English. I speak all three. Doing the weekly one-on-one in the general manager's stronger language, when I could, cut the length of the call by ten minutes and doubled the specificity of what came out. A general manager who is translating in real time gives you the corporate English version of the problem. A general manager in their own language gives you the actual problem.
This is not a diplomacy move. It is a coaching move. Meet the general manager where their language actually lives, and you will get better information than a call in the language of the head office ever produced.
What I got wrong
Three things I would do differently if I inherited a 21-unit multi-state bench tomorrow.
- I moved the standing calls too often in month one. I told myself I was being flexible for the general managers. I was actually being unreliable. It took a full quarter of not moving anything to earn back the trust I burned in that first month.
- I sent too many texts about daily numbers. Every text was a small correction. In aggregate they trained the general managers to stop calling me and start managing my inbox. Fewer texts, longer video calls, better outcomes.
- I under-invested in the monthly walk-through. I treated it as optional for the first two quarters. When I finally made it mandatory, I caught two serious operating drifts inside 60 days that would have shown up in the P&L three months later. The walk is where the picture lives.
The point
Coaching a bench of general managers you cannot walk to is not a smaller version of coaching a bench you can. It is a different job. The tools are async writing, video with the camera on, walk-throughs on their phone, and a plane ticket you only buy on a trigger. The discipline is a cadence they can plan around, and the patience to coach off the pattern instead of the day.
Do that for four quarters and something changes. The general managers stop performing for you. They start telling you what is actually happening. The distance stops being the problem. It becomes the reason the cadence has to be honest, and the honest cadence is what a general manager needed all along.
Cadence beats charisma. Distance just makes that more obvious.