We spend a lot of time talking about a specific generation — Gen Y — but even within that generation there is a great deal of diversity in terms of expectations.

It is very easy for us sitting here to speak to this conceptually, but where it really makes a difference is to cascade that thinking down through your organization so all your employees, including those on the front lines, understand that.

Post: When you look at trying to create clearer paths from the front lines to the management ranks, it starts with us to set the pace in terms of inclusion. There may seem to be a lot of loyalty in our organizations right now, because people are afraid to jump. But next year, when unemployment levels off — and it will level off — there is going to be a war for talented labor.

If you are not clearing the path for your good people, if you are not reaching down to them and guiding them and treating them right, you are going to lose them.

On cratered catering

Post: There are some signs catering may be coming back, but the lesson is we have to make sure we don't depend on it. You have to look at your accounts meal by meal and customer by customer and drive your business that way.

“The big challenge we face with nutrition, obesity, sodium: everyone knows what is right, but very few people do what is right.”

— Ira Cohn

Bickford: To me the irony is, why did we become so dependent on catering? Its high gross profit was always part of the business model and it just became a staple in the contracts and as an expectation. We now find ourselves in different times and as it was stripped away, it exposed the weakness in the overall model.

Also, to Rick's point earlier, employees are still pooling money for birthday parties, but they are calling pizza trucks and the competition is coming in the front door. They're not coming to us because our model is a corporate catering menu that is pre-defined in price and has little flexibility. So there is an opportunity for us to market very differently.

Cohn: It wasn't just us who over-relied on catering. The contracts we won and negotiated with many clients depended on it as part of efforts to limit subsidies.

As an industry, we as clients and providers became dependent on catering and have a mutual responsibility to deal with the consequences as it has declined. Circumstances sometimes dictate that you rebuild the business model — that is a big part of the flexibility we all have to understand is required in our provider-client relationships.