Category Archives: Thinking Aloud

January 26, 2018 · 1:16 pm

I Love This Bar

Happy Foodie Friday! Actually, it’s more like Boozie Friday since our topic today revolves around a bar. Not just any bar: my bar. No, I don’t own it, but I feel as if a little part of it is mine. Let me explain and why this has a lot to do with your business.

Over a year ago on a Friday afternoon, I wandered into a bar I had passed a number of times. It’s not part of some chain. It’s part of a vanishing species: the local watering hole. Vanishing? Yes. As one trade publication points out:

The number of what the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics calls “drinking places” — a subcategory of restaurants that is focused just on sales of alcohol — have seen a multi-year decline in number. The number of privately-owned locations dropped by nearly 4 percent between 2013 and 2016, from 44,599 to 42,961 establishments. Nielsen data from 2015 paints an even starker picture, stating that one out of every six neighborhood bars closed between 2004 and 2014.

My bar may or may not be a “drinking place” since they do serve food (much of which is quite good), but it seems as though every Friday each person who passes through the door is greeted by name as they approach the bartenders who already seem to know what they’re having. Yes, it’s the epitome of the “Cheers” experience: a place where everybody knows your name.

In many places, particularly outside of big cities, neighborhood bars are being replaced by what I’ll call chain bars although technically they’re probably called casual dining establishments. You know what I mean – Buffalo Wild Wings, TGIFridays, and their other corporately-run brethren. It’s a shame, and it’s not because they don’t have the same drinks and maybe even better food. What they don’t have is the atmosphere. I’m sure they believe they are in the hospitality business but it’s just not the same.

A great neighborhood bar – my bar – feels like an extension of drinking in someone’s home. It has a unique vibe to it. You’re among friends, not just among other customers. That sort of feeling is something that I think any business can and should try to precipitate and instill in everyone who comes in contact with it: customers, staff, vendors, and the community as a whole. That changes a “like” into a “love,” and who can’t always use a little more of that?

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January 19, 2018 · 12:01 pm

Deglazing

This Foodie Friday I want to talk about deglazing. It’s a very basic technique for sauce-making but it’s also a word that scares a lot of people when they see it in a recipe. As it turns out, it also has something to do with business.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, deglazing is nothing more than using some sort of liquid to loosen the bits leftover in a pan (called fond) after you’ve cooked something in that pan. Say, for example, you’ve made a roast and after you pour out the accumulated fat and juices, you see a lot of crispy bits clinging to the pan. You would deglaze the pan by heating it and pouring in a liquid. It can be as basic as water but wine or stock is preferable because you’re going to use the resulting liquid as the foundation for a sauce or gravy. You’re doing yourself a great disservice if you don’t deglaze your pans!

I suspect some of you out there just toss the fond – you scrape the remnants into the trash. Well, as the saying goes, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and that’s where the business thought comes in. How many businesses have been built around taking what someone has discarded and finding a new or better use for it? The entire recycling industry is built around that notion. While we’ve been recycling things for centuries, especially during shortages of raw materials created by war, the modern industry is just about 50 years old and is a $500 billion enterprise.

The point today is to get you to ask yourself what might be incredibly useful and productive in your business that you might be discarding. It could be a person, it could be a product that’s underperforming because it’s not sexy and no one wants to work on it, or it could be an unexplored portion of the data you gather. These things might just be fond, and with a little deglazing they can be transformed. What do you think?

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January 17, 2018 · 1:50 pm

Snowing Our Ignorance

It’s snowing here in Central North Carolina. Again. Is that unusual? Well, the area usually gets less than 6 inches of snow a year and we’re about to get 4 or so. We also got a few inches several weeks ago. When we got a dusting (and to my Yankee friends I know that 6 inches are pretty much just a dusting) of snow last year – maybe half an inch – the area came to a complete halt and schools were shut for 4 days. You can imagine what 4 inches will do. Fortunately, by the weekend it will be near 70 degrees so the accumulation shouldn’t be around very long.

Photo by Catherine Zaidova

Other than venting about the golf courses being covered in white, why do I bring this up? Because it’s symptomatic of something which has business implications. Increased snowfall, extreme temperature changes, and other weather phenomena are indicative of something going on. It’s pretty clear that something has changed and yet there are those who turn a scientific and factual issue into a political one. Folks, you can call it climate change or you can call it Fred but no matter what you call it, it is real.

You know, of course, that we don’t do politics here on the screed and my point isn’t that we need to acknowledge that the weird weather everywhere is the result of climate change. The point is that any businessperson can give their own interpretation about what they see going on in the market and in their own enterprise. The problem is that sometimes their interpretation conflicts with the empirical evidence – the facts. A single data point isn’t a reason to change your entire strategy, but when you have enough data points to produce a reliable trend, attention must be paid.

There are some very famous studies that were conducted by Stanford in 1975. They showed how people’s opinions are often unmoved by facts. One need not go a heck of a lot further than your own Facebook feed to see one person trying to change another’s mind using some fact-based evidence and failing miserably. The cold weather and snow here remind me that you can deny the facts but that denial won’t keep the snow from falling. Question the sources of information, question the interpretation of information, but once those questions are answered, don’t deny the facts. You still will have to shovel up the aftermath regardless. Make sense?

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