Have you watched The Bear on Hulu yet? If not, go watch this award-winning series about what happens when you put incredibly talented yet somewhat damaged people together trying to build something meaningful. While on the outside it’s about running a business and restaurant, the insanity of the grind and sense of urgency illustrate a steep, slippery slope of grief, perfectionism, leadership, and learning to trust other people, from which many lessons can be drawn.
You really need to have watched this series to understand much of the context, but even if you have worked the line in a kitchen before, you will still understand this setup. A chaotic kitchen, tickets piling up, everyone screaming, something is burning, and in the middle of it all, a chef and team who are brilliant yet broken, and completely unable to get out of their own way because the system around them simply doesn’t work. There is no system. It’s pure chaos. The Bear is great television, but it’s anxiety-inducing for most business owners because we all have felt like we have worked in that kitchen before. I watched the first season with my husband and didn’t say a word for about twenty minutes afterward because it spoke to almost every business I had come into, whether my own or a client’s, from the agency perspective.
The kitchen at The Bear, before any system is in place, is loud and reactive, and everyone is doing their best with no framework holding it together. Carmy knows the problem but has no idea how to fix it. The concept of “mise en place” becomes the major turning point in the restaurant and for every character in this show. Once systems are in place, every ingredient is prepped, labeled, and portioned before tickets start coming in. The work happens in the quiet so the execution can happen when the noise starts. Beyond the amazing character growth the viewer gets to witness, The Bear gives an honest depiction of what building a business or a marketing operation actually looks like on screen. I know what it feels like when the system doesn’t exist yet, and what it feels like when one finally does.
Every entrepreneur can relate, whether trying to figure out operations, branding, customer experience, or a million other things simultaneously.
In 2010, my sister Chelsey Seabrook and I created one shop and one brand, Yogurtini, the first self-serve yogurt shop in AZ, and turned it into a full franchising company under the same name. The difference between a good day and a bad day at Yogurtini in those early years wasn’t talent or effort. The difference was the absence of systems in place before we could sell a franchise to someone else. I didn’t have a culinary school mentor to teach me that lesson, but my sister did, and she put the systems into place that took us from one store to 29 in under a few years. Soon after, we sold that company to the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory.
Here’s the thing about franchises. Your brand has to work when you’re not in the room trying to control. It either has to hold together through the systems in place, or it will fall apart, no middle ground. We built the manual, the training, the brand standards, and operational frameworks so a customer in one city could have the same experience as a customer in another, without my sister and me in the store. That is “mise en place” at franchise scale. The Bear gets it right when Sydney approaches Carmy about the kitchen rebuild. It wasn’t about retraining the team. She installed a system with defined roles and set stations so the most important part, the communication, had structure. By the time Yogurtini was acquired, we had built something that could run without us. I know what it feels like when the system doesn’t exist and when it finally does.
When you’ve been involved in something that initially started in chaos and lived through what that costs, you don’t forget it. When my co-founder and I started Golden Arrow, a PR and Digital Marketing agency, we made the decision early on not to build “the kitchen” without a system. Over the past ten years, Golden Arrow has found a niche in medically regulated brands and med-tech devices, specifically for dental and orthodontic manufacturers such as Ormco, Spark Clear Aligners, and DEXIS.
There is no “winging it” in this category or “we’ll figure it out when the campaign launches”. A social post that hasn’t cleared compliance review or a press release with an unapproved clinical claim doesn’t go out. The stakes are different than most marketing environments I had been in before, certainly different than frozen yogurt. So, we built the systems, including content batching weeks in advance, approval workflows, social channels staged and ready before a product launch is announced, and every person on the team knows their station. From previous experience, I know this is not how all agencies operate, not even the big flashy LA and NY outfits, but this is how we have evolved to deliver superior results for our clients and keep our own sanity. I’ve seen what happens when the kitchen doesn’t have “mise en place,” and I think a lot of marketing teams confuse having a consistent content calendar with having a system, they just aren’t the same thing.
In The Bear, there’s a moment when heads collide with the new system Carmy is trying to install. The tension is not about the food, it’s the discomfort of moving from chaos to structure. We have seen clients come to us because their systems are unclear or chaotic, and their busyness is mistaken for strategy, reactivity mistaken for agility, or a full content calendar mistaken for a functioning system. At Golden Arrow, we make sure that when something unexpected happens, which it always does, you have enough runway in the system to absorb it without calamity.
The genuine talent of the head chefs, Carmy and Sydney, was always there, and by the last season, beloved cousin Richie, for the first time in his life, found a role that fits who he actually is. The Bear isn’t really a show about food, it’s a show about what is possible when talented people stop operating in chaos and start operating inside a system that respects what they’re capable of, and most importantly, how it stretches and changes the individuals involved more than they could ever imagine.
If you’re running a marketing team, a brand, or an agency, you should ask yourself one honest question before your next campaign launches. Is your “mise en place” done and ready, or are you walking into the kitchen just hoping you remember where you put everything?
Natasha Nelson is the Co-Founder of Golden Arrow PR & Social Media, a boutique agency specializing in PR, social media, and digital marketing for medically regulated healthcare brands. Before Golden Arrow, she co-created Yogurtini® Self-Serve, a frozen yogurt franchise that grew to 29 locations before being acquired by Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory® in 2013.
Connect with Natasha on LinkedIn or visit goldenarrowpr.com
