The temptation: every GM customizes their venue's voice, playbooks, and message templates. The result: inconsistent brand experience and a maintenance nightmare. The discipline: standardize at the org level, customize only what genuinely varies.
What should be the same across venues in a group
Brand voice. Foodie should sound recognizably the same at every Tabule, every Sushi by Bou, every Oliver & Bonacini venue.
Response style. Casual / Friendly / Balanced / Formal / Very Formal — pick one for the brand, apply to all.
Late-arrival message. Same wording everywhere. Guests who go to two venues in the same group shouldn't notice a different greeting on the same kind of message.
Cancellation policy quote. Same phrasing — unless your policies actually differ by venue, in which case the policies themselves are different, not the wording.
Complaint-handling script. Same posture brand-wide.
Group-inquiry follow-up text. Same.
What's expected to differ across venues
Hours. Obviously.
Menu. Obviously.
Address, parking, accessibility. Obviously.
Voice / accent. Different markets sometimes warrant different voices (a French-Canadian accent in Montréal, a different one in Toronto).
Phone number, transfer number. Different lines.
Notification routing. Different team per venue.
Specific named pronunciations. Each venue has its own quirks.
What's a grey area
Opening line. "Thank you for calling [venue name]" is the default; some venues want a brand-specific tagline ("Thank you for calling The Carbon Bar, Toronto's home for slow-smoked everything"). Org templates can include a placeholder; per-venue customization is OK.
Live transfer rules. Same rules typically apply, but a flagship venue may have a 24/7 transfer line where others only transfer 4–9pm.
How we keep things from drifting
At onboarding
Define the org-level templates before rolling the first venue.
Get the owner / ops lead to commit to brand voice and Foodie style.
Document any approved exceptions — "Montréal gets French… Toronto stays English-only."
Quarterly
Audit per-venue overrides. Most should match the org-level template. Investigate any that don't.
Push useful per-venue changes up to org-level so all venues benefit.
When a GM asks for a customization
Default response: "Let's do it at the org level so all venues get it."
Override at venue-level only if there's a genuinely venue-specific reason.
Why this matters
Consistency. A guest who calls Aburi in Vancouver and the same guest who calls a Toronto sister venue should feel they're talking to the same brand.
Maintenance. Tuning across 12 venues with 12 different setups is 12 problems. With shared templates, it's 1 problem with 12 deployments.
Onboarding new venues. A new venue inherits from existing templates. No rebuilding from scratch.
Standardize the system. Vary the data. That's the rule of thumb that's never failed us.