June 3, 2020 · 3:30 pm

Take A Step Back

I know this is supposed to be a business blog and maybe I’ll find a business point as I’m writing this but business is really quite far from my mind today. If you’re even a little bit aware of what is going on in the world at large and in our country, you’re probably a little bit distracted at well.

I’ve spent that last 25 years or so involved in technology, mostly in the content publishing and monetization space as well as online commerce. I used to think that what we were developing was going to greatly improve peoples’ lives. After all, nearly everything we’ve learned over the last couple of thousand years is at our disposal. We didn’t have to spend time shopping and could use our newly-available time to improve our lives and those of others. Boy, was I wrong.

Instead of improving things, technology has in many ways made our lives worse. Take news and information. 25 years ago, journalism was something that was a profession with standards. The news was fact-based, and those facts were researched and confirmed before they were disseminated. Now, everyone is a publisher (including yours truly). Even though the dream of unlimited information has come to fruition, much of what passes as “information” is, in fact, absolute made-up garbage that hasn’t been vetted by anyone. The people who control the platforms – Facebook, Twitter, etc. – refuse to step in for the most part. All of the bad things we thought were possible but unlikely given the noble mission we were on have come to pass, just as the mission has gone from improving lives to making as much money as possible.

I read what my friends post on social media. Inevitably, the comments revert to factless name-calling. I probably spend as much time checking out the veracity of what I read as I do reading the original pieces before ever commenting. When I do, it’s generally to provide the facts as best I can find them. Leisure time? Do any of you feel more relaxed as your use of technology has grown? More likely, you feel like you’re never disconnected from work, that you’re missing something and the amount of information that is thrown at you is overwhelming. Think about how many series or movies you’ve been wanting to stream. We’ve all mostly had the last month or so off. Are you caught up? Probably not, and that’s leisure stuff. Hey, thank goodness there haven’t been any sports or we’d NEVER get anything done!

Maybe that’s the business point today. No, we can’t turn it all off – we’re way past the point of no return. But maybe we can do a better job of prioritizing. Limit ourselves to the very few information sources that DO check their facts, even if they publish 10 minutes later. Find first-hand data, not third-hand reporting. Bite your tongue (or your keyboard) before responding to everyone with whom you disagree (seriously, have you ever changed anyone’s mind via a comment?). Breathe.

At many Grateful Dead shows, there came a moment when the crowd would have pushed forward so much that the people up front were getting crushed. Bob Weir would then say

“Alright, now we’re gonna play everybody’s favorite fun game, move back!… Now when I tell you to take a step back, everybody take a step back! Right? Right! Okay, take a step back! And take another step back! And take yet another step back! And another step back! Take a step back! Doesn’t everybody feel better?”

So take a step back, ok?

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May 29, 2020 · 3:29 pm

That Tonnato Sauce

This Foodie Friday, I want to write about one of my favorite summer dishes, vitello tonnato. When I first had it at some fancy lunch many years ago, I thought it was something thought up by a clever chef. As it turns out, it isn’t a new dish at all. One can find it in the 130-year-old Italian cookbook Science In The Kitchen and the Art Of Eating by Pellegrino Artusi (it’s on page 271 of my edition).

The dish is veal, generally a shoulder or rump portion, that’s been boiled and thinly sliced. It’s topped by a sauce that’s basically a tuna and caper-infused mayonnaise. Trust me – it tastes a lot better than it sounds. The veal is really just a canvas for the sauce in my book.

I was pleasantly surprised when one of my friends emailed my a recipe for a vegetable plate of crudites that was served with a sauce that wasn’t called tonnato sauce but absolutely was the same as what one would put on the veal down to the capers and anchovies in the sauce. The chef described it as a “garlicky aioli bolstered with oil-packed tuna.” Uh, yes, please.

It got me thinking about special sauces since the tonnato sauce is clearly special to me. Every business needs a special sauce if it’s not going to be a commodity. If you’ve not done a competitive set analysis, that’s a great place to start to see how you’re different. Then ask yourself why you exist. What’s the problem you’re solving and why is your solution unique/better? Check your assumptions against what your customers and employees think. 

Is your sauce really yours? Can it be duplicated or is it unique and defensible? Back in the day, we used to call something that you marketed around a USP – Unique Selling Proposition but I think your secret sauce is more than that. It gets to the heart of what your business is, including the culture. It’s what makes you you!

You can put tonnato on sliced pork tenderloin, vegetables, and of course veal. I suspect it’s great on grilled foods – veggies and proteins. As I’m thinking about it, it’s not far from a Caesar Salad dressing but with tuna. You see? Once you have a secret sauce, you can’t really tell how far it will take you!

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May 22, 2020 · 2:37 pm

Not Delivering At All

If it’s Friday, the topic is food here on the screed. This week, it’s the food delivery services I suspect many of you have been using to support your favorite restaurants during the time we’re supposed to stay at home. Food delivery is not a new phenomenon. I know a lot of folks, myself included, who used it before all of this when they had nothing planned or bought for dinner and couldn’t bear the thought of pulling themselves together to go out.

What’s different with these services is that they’re third parties. One of my first jobs back in the day was as a food delivery guy (before I graduated to cook) for a local pizza place. Who hasn’t ordered Chinese food and had it delivered? But I worked for the pizza place and the kid making the Chinese food delivery was generally the owner’s son from the place I frequented. These services – Grubhub, Seamless, and others – are a relatively new business. For restaurants that didn’t do a large enough takeout business to hire a delivery person, they opened up new revenue streams. Of course, they come with a cost.

First, there is a human cost. These services pay very low wages and don’t make tipping mandatory (don’t be that guy – tip well, ok?). Then they charge exorbitant, often hidden fees to the restaurants. You might have read about one restaurant owner’s experience. In March, she got 93 orders through Grubhub, totaling to $6,626 in revenue. From that, GrubHub took $1,208 in commission, a $592 delivery fee, and $230 in processing fees, totaling to over 30% of the revenue. In an industry where margins are often low double digits, that’s not sustainable.

We could continue the discussion beginning with why restaurants don’t hire their own delivery people but the point I want to make today which might just apply to your business is about using third parties, especially third parties who end up owning the customer relationship. What is to stop Grubhub from promoting another restaurant to someone who is looking at your menu? Do a search on Yelp for a specific restaurant and you’ll usually see a couple of other promoted alternatives first in the listings. I don’t know what data the restaurant sees when an order comes in via one of these services but at a minimum someone else is privy to a portion of your customer base, their preferences, addresses, etc.

You might have heard of third-party cookies. Third-party cookies are created by domains other than the one you are visiting directly, hence the name third-party. They are used for cross-site tracking, retargeting, and ad-serving. They’re what makes it possible for you to see an Amazon ad for a product you just searched Amazon for on another, unrelated website. They’re going away, in part because of privacy concerns and, I believe, in part because marketers are waking up to the fact that having someone else own data that you help to generate so that they can sell it back to you as well as to your competition is silly.

Industries outsource all the time. Generally, this is because they don’t want to deal with solving a particular problem themselves for whatever reason and it becomes easier to let someone else deal with it. That’s often shortsighted, particularly when it ends up with someone else owning the customer relationship. After all, in business, that’s probably the most important relationship you have, right?

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