Tag: Sales-Operations-organizations-Pune

The Dream Begins with Projections

Nothing stimulates the senses, pulls at the heartstrings, and invokes visions of successful grandeur more than the initial development of the first draft of a restaurant empire’s business plan. It?s how dreams are born. It’s how simple cooks and ex managers become pseudo celebrities in small towns across the country. I have spent many hours, days and weeks with a team of experienced enthusiasts planning spaces, developing menus, brainstorming concepts, running numbers, projecting lunch customers and dinner covers in order to tweak numbers to predict success. Aside from the location factor, I learned how o multiply chairs and convert those two tops, four tops, six top rounds and eight top rectangles into dollars and cents.

Looking back, this exercise was more important to my existence and my future than any recipe or menu I ever developed. It mattered not that the plan may not have worked in reality. The paper projections gave me the hope and drive and fuel to keep going. How then, could my Monday night predictions, done at another time, in another town, be so far off? And although many a night I was right on target, there were those Monday nights when I was so far off  if I had been pitching baseballs I would be back at the little league field never being asked to stop in the minors.

Needless to say, the exercise I did again and again, on vacant space after vacant space became perfected with time and experience. Eventually, I could feel the frenzy, or lack of it, that could be generated from a space, once bustling, now vacant. In many cases, the numbers proved that I shouldn’t sign a lease or make a move on a location that had gone bad. But not everyone runs the numbers or performs the actual exercises to decide if the project is viable.

Many dive head first, without the inkling of knowledge or experience. Many decide the concept is workable, the product surely profitable and the name and concept so significant that it is a sure fired success. Little could be further than the truth. The restaurant business isn’t one that can be conquered or adopted because of a cut feeling.

The success or failure of a restaurant is not necessarily in the hands of the owner or the beholder ? of a lease. The public has the final say as to when the next steak or the last bread pudding will be served. And, there is little else an owner can do once the public speaks. I found out last week that out of each of my restaurants that I sold, they have all eventually either ceased to perform and closed, or they have gone through substantial renovation and repositioning in order to limp along in a style that seldom pleases the masses.

When I sold the vibrant eateries, they were not highly profitable, but had decent cash flow and a reputation for consistently well prepared creative menus. The numbers directed the fate of each eatery. The profitability was continually tweaked and fine tuned. The excel spread sheet was not my bible, but when my partner, Kranston, ran the numbers I looked at them to make sure my projections and predictions coincided with the future. Yes, beginning a restaurant is one of the most difficult tasks in business.

And, seldom do new owners use the right formula to make the final decision. But that’s what makes the business so flamboyant and exciting. If you happen to have an inkling or small desire to open your own place, do it. Will you make any money- probably not- but seldom can you get the education you will receive for such a reasonable amount of tuition. And, there always is that chance that you may hit it just right. And then you can graduate to a multi unit operator after you find your second location. Yes, you could be on your way to a restaurant empire.

 Good luck.

Hard Truth? Soft Skills?

I love a good business book, which is why I was so excited to receive a postcard regarding a new book by Fortune 500 coach and author extraordinaire Peggy Klaus. The original brag-a-thon producer and author of BRAG! The Art of Tooting Your Own Horn Without Blowing It, has a new title that confirms, for me anyway, the value of soft skills. What’s the hard truth? According to Klaus, soft skills get little respect but can make or break your career. But most people learn that lesson the hard way.
In her new book, The Hard Truth About Soft Skills: Workplace Lessons Smart People Wish They’d Learned Sooner (Collins, February 2008), Klaus gives us 54 lessons that highlight how mastering soft skills can help us succeed. I’m guessing Klaus learns a lot on the road. She must speak to thousands of workers every year and wouldn’t you like to be a fly on the wall? I sure would. But then we don’t need to be, because in her new book she shares what she’s learned. She says the idea for the book grew out of a combination of tales from the office trenches, complaints from management (okay, I would want to be a fly on the wall there, because I’d love to hear that stuff), and an ever-growing body of research that points to a need for soft skills competency.
Klaus knows what she’s talking about, because this is what she does all the time. She listens and then takes what she’s heard and tries to fix things in a no-nonsense, easy-to-follow way. She says, “Whether young or old, experienced or inexperienced, what struck me most about their stories of missed opportunities and derailed careers was this: Their problems rarely stemmed from a shortfall in technical or professional expertise, rather from a shortcoming in the soft skills arena with their personal, social, communication and self-management behaviors.”
She also hears from managers and HR professionals about employees, those already in the workforce and the ones just coming in, who lack the soft skills. She suggests that one of the problems is semantics. She writes, “How could anything described as soft be valued in the hard-charging, results-driven business world or impact the bottom line?”
I think it’s also a matter of respect. For many people, if they can’t draw a dotted line to the bottom line, then the skill, soft or hard, isn’t as useful as those that help a company make more money. But soft skills are critical to the bottom line.
Here’s an activity: as you move through the day consider your soft skills. How often do you rely on your ability to listen, to observe, to be self-aware? I’ll bet you begin to lose count.
Next time: more about Peggy Klaus and soft skills.