March 17, 2014 · 9:57 am

St. Patrick And Your Business

photo credit: Lawrence OP via photopin cc

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day! This is one of the two days of the year (the other being New Year’s Eve) I like to call “amateur night.” People who rarely drink to excess seem to do so and the streets and trains are filled with people who were over served. All this in honor of the patron saint of Ireland.   As you can see from the statue, nearly every representation of him makes reference to his banishing the snakes from a country where they apparently never lived.

Patrick had the right idea even if the facts are a bit murky and that’s our business point today.  While different religions view snakes in different ways, a snake does get the blame in the Old Testament for tempting Eve in the Garden of Eden, thereby earning a reputation as a symbol of evil and plotting.  We see those kind of snakes all the time in business.  You know the ones I mean.

They might be the kind who pat you on the back and smile while they’re looking for a soft spot into which they’ll stick the knife.  Maybe they’re the ones who spread fear, uncertainty and doubt to create non-existent problems while presenting themselves as the only ones who can solve those problems.  Or maybe they’re just the people who come to work each day and are incapable of making decisions while keeping their conscience fully turned on.  They’re snakes and they need to go!

There are also systematic snakes.  The gremlins that inhabit all machines so they fail at exactly the wrong time and for which we have no back-up plan.  The process that ties up way too many people to produce way too little return on that time investment.  You probably know of quite a few of these in your business.  Why not take up St. Pat’s staff and drive all the snakes away?  Today is as good a day as any, before you have a sip of the green beer, isn’t it?

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March 14, 2014 · 8:52 am

Doing Your Mies

Beth via Flickr

I realized as I thought about our Foodie Friday topic for this week that I’ve neglected to write about the most basic, and important, step in cooking. Turns out that it’s a pretty important business subject too. That step is doing one’s mise en place. It’s a French term that means “to put in place” and sounds like “meez  en plahse”. No professional kitchen would dream of opening for the evening without the mise having been done. No other business should either.

Doing your mise means you cut up your onions, mice your garlic, and get all the other ingredients for your dish ready before you start to cook.  It has the added benefit of showing you right away if you have all the components necessary to make your recipe or if you need to rethink your plan.  It means you heat up the pan or turn on the grill so it’s hot before you begin.  When I’m cooking a number of dishes, I do all of the mise at once.  That step allows me to cook the dishes without worrying if my timing will be upset by having to slice or dice some forgotten element. It’s the only way that a restaurant kitchen can crank out dozens of dishes in a reasonable time period.  After all, can you imagine how long you’d be sitting if the cooks had to dice onions or search for a carrot in the middle of the evening rush?

You should be doing mise in the office as well.  Starting the day by taking the time to mentally prepare yourself and your staff for the day’s tasks may seem like an unnecessary waste of time but it helps avoid a lot of crisis situations.  A manager’s job is to make sure his team has what they need to do their jobs and doing the mise by walking around first thing is a good step in that direction.  Diving right in to email is like turning on the stove before you’ve brought the protein up to room temp first and making sure you have the sauce components ready to go.  The pieces of the day won’t go together nearly as well.  Most people’s minds are clear first thing in the morning.  That’s the time to prep.

Everyone knows “Ready, Fire, Aim” is a bad idea in business and in the kitchen.  Doing your mise is both “ready” and “aim”.   It assures that the great product you have in mind is what you produce in the end.  Make sense?

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March 13, 2014 · 10:41 am

Stupid Beer Tricks

I love stories like the one I’m about to share.  They’re the sort of tales that make points that are so blindingly obvious it makes my job as your friendly screed-writer extremely easy.  Well talk about a few of them in a minute but first, the details.

Draft A Bud

(Photo credit: Brave Heart)

Our story comes to us from Boise, Idaho, and the CenturyLink Arena.  This is the home of the Steelheads, a minor league hockey team and the Idaho Stampede of the NBA D League. It also hosts concerts.  Not surprisingly, they sell beer there.  Small beers for $4, large beers for $7.  Not very much unusual or instructive there.  One night at a game, two fans bought one of each size beer and, as fans sometimes do, tried to figure out if they were better off buying big beers or small beers.  As it turned out, although the $4 and $7 cup were different in appearance and shape, they held exactly the same amount of beer.  You can watch the video below to see it for yourself.  When confronted with this, the arena said they’d ordered the wrong size cups.  They’ll have a chance to prove that in court since the fans are now suing them.

The business points are pretty obvious.  Someone thought it would be a good idea to put the arena’s bottom line ahead of honesty with its customers.  They can’t really have thought that no one would figure this out, could they?  As we’ve said quite a few times here, happy customers will sometimes tell someone else but unhappy customers almost always will, and loudly.  As I’m writing this the video has almost 560,000 views and the story has been picked up by major news outlets.

What has the arena done to correct the problem?  Why they bought new cups, of course, and said they’re sorry.  Except in so doing they tried to pull another fast one since there is still better value in the small cups. Forty-eight ounces of beer costs $14 if you purchase two large beers or $12 if you purchase three regular beers.  The management thinks fans can’t do math.

To stay in business we can’t treat our fans as morons.  We can’t try to pull “a fast one.”  We need to provide excellent value for their money and treat them with respect.  That’s not so hard, is it?

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