I run a lot of my regional work remote now. Not by choice at first. The reality is that you cannot be onsite at six units at once, and if your region is spread across six states you are already remote by geography, whether or not you have accepted the label. The question is not whether to run remote. The question is how well.
At Hana Group I had 21 franchise units embedded inside Walmart, Sam's Club, Whole Foods, and Target footprints, across six states. On any given week I was physically at two of them. That means for the other nineteen, I was operating remote, and everything I saw and everything I did with those units was mediated by phone, video, dashboard, and general manager report. It works. It works better than most operators believe it can. But it works differently than being onsite, and the differences are what most people underestimate.
This post is about the remote-first multi-unit playbook I built for myself. What you lose when you cannot walk the floor. What you gain when you stop trying to. The cadence tools that hold a region together at distance. And the specific moments when you need to be in a truck to the airport instead of on a Zoom.
What running remote actually means
Remote does not mean you are never onsite. It means you have stopped defaulting to onsite as the answer to every operational question. When the walk-in temperature is off at unit twelve, remote means you do not get in your car. You call the general manager, you get their eyes on the thermometer, you decide the next action together, and you note whether this is the first time it has happened this quarter or the third. When it is the third, you fly in. When it is the first, you do not.
The shift is from being the person who sees the problem to being the person who teaches the general manager how to describe the problem well enough that you can help decide from a distance. That is a skill. Nobody is born with it, and most operators underestimate how long it takes to build in themselves and in the general managers reporting to them.
What you lose when you are not onsite
I want to name these plainly, because most remote-first cheerleading skips over the losses, and the losses are real.
Line-cook body language
When you walk a kitchen, you can see who is stressed, who is coasting, and who is about to quit. A camera does not tell you that. A general manager report does not tell you that until the person actually quits. The signal is there in the room and it does not travel over video. The best partial substitute is a general manager who trusts you enough to name it out loud in the weekly one-on-one, and that trust takes at least a quarter to build.
Walk-in temperature you can feel
A thermometer in a walk-in tells you the number. Standing inside it for ten seconds tells you how the door is sealing, whether the fan is running hard, and whether the last delivery got put away or is still stacked in the entryway. You cannot recover that signal remote. You can only replace it with a discipline: the general manager takes a photo and a temperature every morning at open and every evening at close, and you look at both.
Guest energy in the dining room
Whether the room feels alive on a Friday at 7 p.m., whether the host stand is calm or scrambling, whether the tables are turning at the pace you priced the shift for. You cannot see any of that from a laptop. The proxy is the sales-per-hour curve and the general manager's honest read, and both proxies are lossy.
The small conversation
The two minutes you spend with a line cook while she prepped garlic, or the eye contact you had with the closing manager when he told you he was tired. Those conversations move the culture. You cannot schedule them from home. You can only make sure that when you are onsite, you protect them.
What you gain when you stop trying to be everywhere
The gains are real too, and they are the reason remote-first works for a mature region.
Data discipline
When you cannot see the room, you have to read the numbers, and reading the numbers well is a skill most operators only build under pressure. My remote weeks made me a better reader of daily P&L than any onsite week ever did. When the room is not there to distract you, the story on the sheet gets louder.
Coaching depth
A phone conversation with a general manager, one-on-one, forty-five minutes, with the P&L in front of both of you, is a better coaching moment than most site visits. There is nowhere to hide, no floor to run to, no shift to disappear into. You are on the number and the person, and that is a good place to coach from.
Dashboard focus
When your entire operating picture arrives through a screen, you get very serious very fast about what is on that screen. The units that get run remote get better dashboards, because the dashboard is the whole picture. Onsite regions tend to tolerate weak dashboards, because the operator makes up the gap by being in the room.
Sequencing time
Remote weeks give you back the driving time. Six hours a week you were spending in a car become six hours a week you are spending on the two decisions that actually move the region. That trade is almost always worth it once your operating rhythm is running.
Fig. 1 · The remote trade. Both columns are real.
The remote-first operating cadence
The whole remote-first setup depends on the standing rhythm being strong. Weak rhythm plus remote equals a region that drifts silently. Strong rhythm plus remote is one of the highest-leverage seats in operations.
Here is what the week looks like.
Morning standup by phone
Every day, 8:15 a.m., fifteen minutes, every general manager on a rolling group call. Not video. Voice. Video eats bandwidth and adds thirty seconds of setup to every unit's turn. Voice is instant.
Each general manager answers three questions in under a minute. Yesterday's number versus plan. One thing that surprised them. One decision they need this week. That is it. If a general manager needs longer, you take that unit offline for a followup call at 9 a.m. Fifteen minutes for the group, nobody's day gets held hostage by anybody else's problem, and every unit has told the region something true before the shift starts.
Live camera checks
Twice a day at each unit, the general manager walks the line with their phone on video, five minutes, no script. Once at open, once at pre-shift meeting for dinner. You are not watching every one live. The recordings save. You watch the ones at units where the numbers moved yesterday, and you ask about the ones where they did not.
The point is not surveillance. The point is that the general manager knows the walk exists, so the line looks like it should look, and if it does not look right, they have already fixed it before you see it. That is the whole game.
Weekly video walk with the general manager
Once a week, forty-five minutes, video, general manager walking their unit end to end. Front of house, kitchen, walk-in, dry storage, back office, dumpster area. You are asking questions the whole time. Not "is this clean." Ask "when did that last get deep cleaned, and by whom." The specifics make the walk real.
Weekly P&L review
Monday, one hour per unit, phone, general manager and area director on the line. Same seven metrics every week. Labor as a percent of sales. Food cost. Comps and voids. Sales versus plan. Top three variances. One thing to fix this week. The general manager runs the meeting. You listen and ask.
The units that get run remote get better dashboards, because the dashboard is the whole picture. Onsite regions tolerate weak dashboards because the operator makes up the gap by being in the room.
When you fly in
Remote-first does not mean you never fly. It means flying is an intentional act, not a default one. Three moments earn a plane ticket.
Openings
A new unit opening needs the regional operator onsite for opening week. Full stop. There is no remote substitute for standing in the room the first time customers come through the door. You are watching for the moments the systems were not built for, and you cannot see those on a camera. I have opened more than a dozen units and the pattern is the same every time: the third day is when the shape of the real operating problem shows up, and if you are not in the room on the third day, you inherit the wrong picture of the unit for the next quarter.
Crisis
A health inspection failure, a serious guest incident, a general manager resignation. You are onsite the next day. Not to fix the shift, but to make sure the general manager and the team know the regional seat takes the moment seriously enough to be in the room. That is culture work, and it does not travel over video.
New general manager, month one
When a new general manager starts, you spend the first week onsite with them. Not shadowing every shift, but present. They are learning the unit. They are also learning what kind of operator you are. Both learnings compress when you are in the room. From month two onward you can go remote, but month one is nonnegotiable.
What I would tell an operator moving to remote-first
Three things.
- Build the cadence before you go remote. If your operating rhythm was weak when you were onsite, it will collapse when you are not. Get the daily standup, the weekly review, and the dashboard live for a full quarter with you in the region, then start pulling back on physical presence. Not the other way around.
- Overcorrect on communication for the first sixty days. More calls than you think you need. More thank-you notes to general managers who did the video walk well. More sending of the pattern you noticed across units. Remote defaults to silence. Silence defaults to drift. Fight it explicitly.
- Protect the onsite time you do spend. When you are onsite, do not fill the day with meetings you could have done by phone. Walk the line. Have the small conversations. Sit in the dining room. You bought the plane ticket for those, not for the calendar block that could have been a call.
The point
Remote multi-unit operations is not the compromise version of the job. It is a different, sharper version of the job that rewards operators who have already built a real operating rhythm and punishes the ones who have not. What you lose is the sensory read of the room. What you gain is the discipline to run the region on signal, not on presence. Presence is a scarce resource. Spend it on purpose.
The best operators I know now do more of the region remote and land in the units with more intent. The rhythm holds the region between visits. The visits are for the moments the rhythm was not built to catch. That is the trade, and it is a good trade if you set it up right.