Jennifer Dodd is Chief Executive Officer and Board Advisor of Main Squeeze Juice Co., a cold pressed juice brand with 25 locations and a home office in New Orleans. Before this she spent about 30 years inside much bigger chains. Wendy's at 15, then six years at Hardee's and seven at Arby's, where she reached the executive team at 28. Then Applebee's International, Dunkin' Brands and Tim Hortons, where she ran US development. She has taken brands into 13 countries on three continents.
I built 720 Sweets from one shop to seven locations, then sold it. I hosted speaker interviews at Workstream's On the Clock 2026 in Atlanta, where Jennifer's session was recorded. She is the only operator I have heard describe working with AI the way she does, and copying her approach costs nothing. Here are her five moves, each with the version that fits a two location owner.
Most operators talk about AI as a tool they bought. Jennifer talks about it as a person she hired.
"My AI agents are full time employees for me and for my team."
Jennifer Dodd
That is not a figure of speech. She gives them names. She says an agent has to be validated by leadership, backed by the culture, and protected by a process everyone has agreed on.
Then comes the part I did not expect. If you do not set the protocol, and you do not do the planning with the agent, that is not a technology problem. That is poor leadership, and it looks exactly the same whether the thing in front of you is a computer or a person.
Once that is in place, she gives an agent the same freedom she would give a manager, in the same words. Go and be objective. Find what you can find. Come back to me with what you think the best next step is.
What you can copy: write the agent the same one page you would write a new assistant manager. What it owns, what good output looks like, and who checks it. If you cannot write that page, the tool is not the problem.
This is the sentence I would pin up in the office of any operator who has started using an AI tool for numbers.
"People think AI is a perfection model. It is not. It is a probability."
Jennifer Dodd
Her reasoning is practical. The model only works from the last data set it was able to draw on, and that can be days or even weeks old. So the tool can hand you a confident answer about a version of your business that no longer exists.
That is why she argues with it. She challenges the output, asks for proof points, questions the assumptions behind them, and says she often finds errors. If it comes back wrong, she gives it coaching rather than dropping the tool.
She is blunt about the work this takes. You cannot be lazy and you cannot be lethargic about it. The standard is the one you would use on an employee who walks in with a number, a conclusion and a recommendation. It needs to be well vetted before anybody acts on it.
That is also the honest answer to the question about whether automation replaces hourly workers. The work does not vanish. It moves from producing the answer to checking it.
What you can copy: pick one number your tool gives you every week and verify it by hand for a month. After four weeks you will know how much of that number to trust.
Jennifer had two bad restaurant experiences the week before the interview was filmed. She will not name the companies, and says twice that both are great companies.
Here is the one that stuck with her.
A youth conference brings thousands of teenagers into Birmingham every year. Her granddaughter is 14 and goes each time, and Jennifer walks her over. That weekend the whole crowd flows into one shopping area. There is a busy restaurant there.
She ordered ahead on the app. Everyone else was queued out of the door at the kiosk, confused about how to order, and there was nobody in the dining room helping them.
"That's an example where the employee could have been redeployed versus labor being cut."
Jennifer Dodd
She asked what was going on. The manager was new and said he had no idea it would be this busy that day.
That is the part she cannot forgive, and she is right not to. The conference happens the same weekend of the same month every year. The store's sales from last year's conference weekend were there to look at. There were police directing traffic in every parking lot. Some stores on that street were clearly prepared and this one was running out of product. When she mentioned the conference, they wrote it down. They also did not know that two arena concerts were coming later the same week, so it was about to happen to them twice more.
She was trained the old way, and it shows in what she noticed. She learned to track how much the weather moved sales in the hours you were open, and which kind of weather did it. Then what that meant for the forecast, the labor plan, the next three days and the truck order coming in.
Her point is that software can do that work now, as long as she checks what it produces. The hours a tool frees up do not have to leave the payroll. Ten people whose job is pulling data together for business intelligence can be moved to other work. The greatest way to build trust, she says, is to spend time with people, whether that is a frontline employee, a board member or a customer. Over the last decade, in her words, the industry has gotten away from hospitality.
What you can copy: before you cut a shift because a tool made something faster, ask where that person would create more value on the floor. Offsetting a rising labor cost is not the same thing as having fewer people in the building.
Saved hours should move, not disappear. Every hour a tool gives back can go to guest service, food prep or training instead of being cut. Workstream runs payroll on the same platform as hiring and HR, so you can see where those hours and those dollars actually went. Right now there is up to 8 months free on payroll. Explore payroll →
She was asked what one thing a small brand needs in order to scale against the giants. The answer came back in one line.
"Be darn good at what you do."
Jennifer Dodd
First you have to be the best at the thing you sell. Nothing else you do works until that is true.
To keep themselves honest, her team rewrote the company's core values and then set a test for each one, what she calls a litmus test. Rooted in nature is one of those values, and it is not decoration. It decides what they are allowed to buy.
Right now that costs them. Tariffs and border issues have made some of their adaptogens and superfoods hard to source, and an ingredient like organic activated charcoal has to be genuinely pure and scientifically tested. They pay about eight times more for a pure version of an ingredient that a bigger brand will dilute and still put on the menu board. She says they make it harder for themselves because they are being true to the value set.
What you can copy: take your three values and run this week's buying decisions against them. If none of the decisions would have gone differently, the values are not doing any work.
This is the move most independents skip, and it is free.
"So many people do great work around being authentic to their brand, and they don't tell the customer that."
Jennifer Dodd
Her example is the kind of thing a good kitchen does without thinking. You chop the avocado and the cilantro fresh four times a day so nothing browns and the product is never treated badly. The customer never sees any of it, so the kitchen gets no credit for it.
At Main Squeeze, telling customers is a regular program rather than a sign in the window. Community is one of their values. Stores with big enough dining rooms host classes after hours with an outside instructor. They bring in a nutritionist to explain what an ingredient like blue spirulina actually does. The result, she says, is that people see the brand as a source of truth and trust the menu.
She thinks customers are learning more about authenticity every day, and that her side is winning that battle.
Her closing line is the one a two location owner should copy word for word. If we tell you this is what we are going to do, that is what you are going to experience. Today's audience is not going to be loyal to you unless you are true to that experience.
What you can copy: write down the five things you do that nobody sees. Put one of them on a card by the register this month. You have already paid for the work.
The one thing Jennifer would add is governance. When she was shown a compliance system built for hourly teams, the first thing she said was peace of mind, as an owner and as an investor. She called it an extra eye in the sky. It catches what a growing brand cannot hold in one person's head, and it frees the leader to get back to the humanity side of the job. She also thinks the industry does not use the word governance nearly enough, and that doing things by the book matters more as you add units. Compliance for an hourly workforce is not the glamorous part of any of this. It is what lets the rest of this survive your next ten stores.
Manage it the way you manage a new employee. Jennifer Dodd names her agents, gives each one a protocol and a plan, has leadership validate the output, and then grants the agent autonomy to go and find things. Skipping that setup is not a technology failure in her view, it is a leadership failure.
Not without checking it, because the answer is a probability rather than proof. Jennifer Dodd points out that a model works from the last data set it could draw on, which may be days or weeks old. She challenges the output, asks for proof points and says she often finds errors.
It does not have to. Jennifer Dodd's argument is to redeploy the labor instead, and she uses the example of ten people pulling data together for business intelligence whose hours can move to serving guests. She points at a busy store with a queue at the kiosk and nobody in the dining room helping. Her point is that the hours do not have to leave the payroll.
By being the best at the one thing it sells, then proving it. Jennifer Dodd runs 25 locations and her first rule is to be darn good at what you do. Her second is to hold every buying decision to the company's stated values, even when the pure ingredient costs eight times more.
Because nobody ever tells them. Jennifer Dodd uses the example of a kitchen chopping avocado and cilantro fresh four times a day so nothing browns, which no guest will ever notice on their own. Her fix is to tell them on purpose, through classes, nutritionists and staff who explain the menu. The work is already paid for.
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About the author. Wilson K Lee built 720 Sweets from one shop to seven locations and sold it. He now runs wilsonklee.com, where he publishes real numbers and playbooks for food and beverage owners, and he hosted the speaker interviews at Workstream's On the Clock 2026.