Heather Morrison and Austin Carson are the co-owners of Restaurant Olivia in Denver, a fine-dining restaurant known as much for how it treats people as for what’s on the plate. With decades of combined experience, they’ve built a business rooted in hospitality, sustainability, and long-term thinking, one where culture is protected as deliberately as margins.

In this episode, they break down how values-driven hiring, honest leadership, and systems-based sustainability show up in real day-to-day operations, and why none of it works unless the business remains financially viable.

Takeaways

• Build culture by protecting the whole team, not individual exceptions
• Hire for values alignment first and train the rest
• Sustainability must work financially or it won’t last
• Hospitality applies to staff as much as guests
• Systems remove ego and make consistency possible
• Letting go of misalignment is part of leadership
• Care is not soft when it’s paired with accountability
• Transparency and honesty create trust at scale
• Mentorship starts with understanding how people want to be seen
• Reduce waste by designing systems, not relying on willpower
• Innovation often comes from constraints, not abundance
• Quality and warmth matter more than any marketing strategy
• Leadership requires vulnerability, not perfection
• Long-term success depends on clarity of purpose

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