- January 15, 2025
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Editor’s Note: The Culture Club series is a behind-the-scenes look at company or organization in the region with top-tier culture and how they built it and sustain it.
Cameron Mitchell's multi-brand national restaurant company, which has a stable of high-end eateries and a growing presence in the region — including a new splashy, $10 million Ocean Prime in Sarasota — can credit one basic menu item as the key to the success: a milkshake.
Milkshakes have become the emblem of customer service for Cameron Mitchell Restaurants, which has nearly 50 restaurants around the country, including five on the Gulf Coast. It owns the Ocean Prime brand (with Sarasota, Tampa and Naples among its 20 locations nationwide) as well as Del Mar in Naples and The Pearl in Tampa.
CEO Cameron Mitchell, who says the company is targeting nearly $500 million in revenue in 2024, attributes much of his company’s success to its culture. Getting across the corporate values is so important to him that Mitchell, whose company's headquarters is in Columbus, Ohio, travels to each new restaurant before opening to help train employees.
And that leads to the milkshake.
To prepare the 100-plus employees opening Ocean Prime in Sarasota Mitchell spoke at employee orientation, where each trainee was presented with a milkshake.
The tradition started more than 20 years ago, after Mitchell went out to lunch with his family and ordered a chocolate milkshake for his young son.
He was informed the request was impossible — even though the restaurant had the ice cream, and it had milk, he learned after a back-and-forth conversation with the server.
During a speaking engagement in 2002, he recounted what happened and said that would never occur at Cameron Mitchell Restaurants. A week later, a woman came up to him and said her husband tried to order a milkshake at one of his establishments and was told by the bartender that they didn’t make them. In the days that followed, Mitchell took the issue to an executive meeting, where he asked how the company could instill in its employees that their job was to deliver.
“That day, we brainstormed and decided that a chocolate milkshake would become the symbol of our culture. We would use the milkshake story and the beverage itself again and again to emphasize that the answer is always yes, and that we are great people delivering genuine hospitality,” writes Mitchell in his 2018 book, "Yes is the Answer. What is the Question?: How Faith in People and a Culture of Hospitality Built a Modern Restaurant Company."
“Today, each person who starts working at Cameron Mitchell Restaurants receives a chocolate milkshake and goes through a four-hour orientation to our culture and values," he adds. "Milkshakes appear at regional meetings, special events and other important moments.”
During the training in Sarasota, Mitchell — who has a second home on Siesta Key — says the No. 1 question people ask him is how he hires such great employees who deliver top-notch hospitality.
“We get the same people,” Mitchell says to the 110 employees of Ocean Prime Sarasota. “The difference is how we treat our people. Our associates come first.”
Cameron Mitchell Restaurants employs about 5,000 people, whom Mitchell deliberately refers to as associates.
“We treat our associates with great care and concern. They're partners in business,” Mitchell says in December interview with the Business Observer. “I look at it as a triangular relationship. We take care of our people; our people take care of our guests; our guests take care of our company by repeat visits.”
On the corporate side, Cameron Mitchell Restaurants provides benefits like paid time off and closes for seven major holidays — including the Super Bowl — as a way to care for its employees, according to Mitchell. “We could make a lot more money, a lot more profit, if we were open Christmas Eve,” but the restaurants close “because I want them to be with their families,” Mitchell says of his associates.
“Our staff turnover is record low in the industry,” Mitchell says, in part due to the company’s culture. One of the pillars of the culture is quality.
Quality “permeates everything we do,” Mitchell tells the employees in training. “You'll see the quality of food, the quality of service, quality of people. It’s built in everything we do. Never, ever cut corners on quality.”
Mitchell will be traveling a bit this year to rally his employees ahead of grand openings, with restaurants and milkshake deliveries planned in Naples, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach; as well as Nashville, Tennessee, and Birmingham, Michigan.
