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I grew up in a small business. My parents ran one, and I learned the business the way most independent owners do, from the inside, on my feet, watching the money and the mistakes up close.
I notice something whenever the subject of chains comes up with independent owners. There seem to be two main reflexes, both can lead to problems. Some wave the chains off entirely. They look at chains like they're a world apart, with different rules, and nothing to learn from a place that ships their sauce from their own warehouses. On the reverse side, there are owners who quietly envy the whole machine and start attempting to bolt pieces of it onto a twelve-table dining room. Both of these directions can be costly mistakes.
The owners who get ahead in the cutthroat business of restauranteering have made peace with a more useful idea. Chains are worth studying, but only if you know what you are trying to learn. National chains are engines built to reproduce the same experience across thousands of locations run by franchise owners who will never meet each other. Almost everything impressive about chain restaurants, and almost everything "soulless" about them, comes back to that single design goal.
Once you see it, studying them gets easier. Some will strengthen your restaurant. Others will slowly turn it into a worse version of the place down the street. Here is how I sort them.
#almost #mistakes #learn #place
I grew up in a small business. My parents ran one, and I learned the business the way most independent owners do, from the inside, on my feet, watching the money and the mistakes up close.
I notice something whenever the subject of chains comes up with independent owners. There seem to be two main reflexes, both can lead to problems. Some wave the chains off entirely. They look at chains like they're a world apart, with different rules, and nothing to learn from a place that ships their sauce from their own warehouses. On the reverse side, there are owners who quietly envy the whole machine and start attempting to bolt pieces of it onto a twelve-table dining room. Both of these directions can be costly mistakes.
The owners who get ahead in the cutthroat business of restauranteering have made peace with a more useful idea. Chains are worth studying, but only if you know what you are trying to learn. National chains are engines built to reproduce the same experience across thousands of locations run by franchise owners who will never meet each other. Almost everything impressive about chain restaurants, and almost everything "soulless" about them, comes back to that single design goal.
Once you see it, studying them gets easier. Some will strengthen your restaurant. Others will slowly turn it into a worse version of the place down the street. Here is how I sort them.
#almost #mistakes #learn #place
19 days ago
