E278 Christin Marvin
Building Restaurants That Run Without You
In this episode of The Industry Podcast, we sit down with Christin Marvin, founder of Columbine Hospitality, author, and host of The Restaurant Leadership Podcast. Christin started as a line cook at 15, worked her way through fine dining and high-volume concepts, and eventually helped scale a Denver restaurant group from six locations to 48 before burning out. She shares the honest story of how that growth cost her — including a period of heavy drinking she eventually walked away from — and how the process of rebuilding her own life became the foundation for the company she runs today.
Christin now leads Columbine Hospitality, where she and a small team of coaches help independent restaurant and bar owners build the leadership teams and systems needed to run a business that doesn't require them to be in it every hour of every day. She walks through how that work actually happens — remote coaching, digging past the surface-level complaint to the real problem, and rolling out change gradually so owners don't lose their sense of purpose in the process. She also gets into why she started writing (her first book, The Hospitality Leader's Roadmap, and her second, Multi-Unit Mastery) how self-publishing actually works, and her plan to grow her coaching team over the next decade.
- Growing up in the industry and the "highlight of her career" moment that hooked her on hospitality
- Scaling a restaurant group from 6 to 48 locations and what private equity changed
- Burnout, losing her voice as a leader, and the drinking that came with it
- Getting sober and rebuilding a life and business around her core values
- How Columbine Hospitality coaches independent owners remotely
- Writing and self-publishing *The Hospitality Leader's Roadmap* and *Multi-Unit Mastery*
- Hosting The Restaurant Leadership Podcast and building her coaching team
- Why "structure" is no longer just a corporate word for independent operators
Notable Quote
"There's gotta be more intention and more clarity and more systems, and systems used to be a very corporate word, but there's gotta be more structure to the business than there used to be in the past, because it's so hard to find experienced people."
— Christin Marvin
Connect with Christin Marvin
- LinkedIn: Christin Marvin
- Instagram: @christinlmarvin
- The Restaurant Leadership Podcast — available wherever you listen to podcasts
- Books: The Hospitality Leader's Roadmap and Multi-Unit Mastery
A big thank you to Jean-Marc Dykes of Imbiblia. Imbiblia is a cocktail app for bartenders, restaurants and cocktail lovers alike and build by a bartender with more than a decade of experience behind the bar. Several of the features of the platform include the ability to create your own Imbiblia Recipe Cards with the Imbiblia Cocktail Builder, rapidly select ingredients, garnishes, methods and workshop recipes with a unique visual format, search by taste, using flavour profiles unique to Imbiblia, share recipes publicly plus many more....Imbiblia - check it out!
Contact the host Kypp Saunders by email at [email protected] for products from Elora Distilling and Noble Estates.
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