Just what you never knew you needed. Your own...
For women leaders in foodservice who are out front, holding it together, carrying the tray, calming the room, and ready for a back booth moment of their own.
Kelly Swanson, Your Back Booth BFF
The one who’s waiting to catch your breath, touch up your story, and send you back out swinging.
Sometimes life gets loud, work gets heavy, and leadership feels like trying to carry a full tray in high heels through a room full of people who keep asking for one more thing. And every now and then, you just want to sneak away to the back booth, come completely unglued, and let somebody else be the strong one for a minute.
That’s when you need Kelly.
She’s the one waiting in the back booth with a soft place to land, a sharp little truth bomb, and just enough Southern sass to make you laugh before you cry your mascara clean off.
She’ll let you vent, help you reframe, remind you who you are, and hand your story back to you with a little more lipstick and a lot more backbone.
Because sometimes the bravest thing you can do is catch your breath, fix your crown, and walk back out there like you didn’t just ugly-cry into a dinner napkin.
Dear Woman in Foodservice,
Before you solve one more problem, answer one more email, calm one more crisis, or carry one more tray full of everybody else’s expectations, I need you to hear me:
You are doing better than you think.
I know it may not feel like it today. Maybe your coffee got cold before you finished it. Maybe your inbox has started reproducing like rabbits. Maybe you’ve already smiled through three conversations where your inside voice had to be put in timeout.
And maybe there’s a mountain sitting in front of you right now that you did not order, did not ask for, and would very much like to send back to the kitchen.
I get it. Some days the mountain is a hard conversation. Some days it’s a team that needs more from you than you have left to give. Some days it’s numbers, pressure, change, exhaustion, or the quiet little fear that you’re supposed to know exactly what to do next.
But listen to me. You do not have to climb the whole mountain before lunch. You just have to take the next right step.
One breath. One decision. One conversation. One honest moment. One tiny act of courage with your knees shaking under the table. That counts. You are still here. Still leading. Still serving. Still showing up. Still finding answers. Still making people feel cared for, seen, fed, trained, heard, managed, guided, and Lord help us, occasionally tolerated.
Whether you’re at the front counter, in the boardroom, on the plant floor, in the test kitchen, on the franchise call, in the distributor meeting, behind the scenes, or somewhere between the walk-in cooler and your third cup of coffee, you are carrying more than people see. And bless your heart, you make it look easier than it is. But here in the back booth, you can take a moment to put the tray down. You can exhale. You can laugh too loud. You can admit you’re tired without somebody handing you one more thing to fix. You can say, “I’m fine,” and I’ll look right over these glasses and say, “Well, that was adorable. Now tell me the truth.”
You are not behind. You are not broken. You are not failing because you’re tired. You are human. And honey, even the strongest women need a soft place to land before they walk back out swinging.
So take a minute. Catch your breath. Touch up your story. Whatever mountain got dropped in front of you, you are not facing it as the same woman who used to doubt whether she could handle hard things. You have receipts. You have scars. You have stories. You have made it through things before that once looked impossible from the bottom.
You may not know the whole way up yet. But you know how to take the next step. And right now, I’m your soft landing and these chips in my hand are going to make sure I stay that way. :)
Now touch up that gloss, straighten that crown, and strut out of here like the mountain just found out who it’s dealing with.
Love,
Kelly
Your Back Booth BFF