Tag Archives: business thinking

August 21, 2015 · 9:02 am

Becoming A Steakhouse

It’s Foodie Friday, and my mind is turning to steak. While I enjoy grilling steaks as much as the next person, most of our efforts here at Rancho Deluxe can’t compare to the product put out by a good steakhouse. It got me thinking about why that is, and it turns out there are some really good business points one can take away.

Steak at Peter Luger's

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At first I attributed the biggest difference to the meat itself. After all, high-end steak places serve nothing but prime meat, and generally, it’s been aged. As with any business, NOTHING can take the place of top-shelf raw materials. You can’t make a great product out of inferior ingredients. So on a special occasion, I splurged on an aged piece of Prime porterhouse thinking I now had the ability to replicate that great steak at home. While it was very good, it was definitely NOT the same.

Then there is the cooking method. Top steak places might use a broiler that is heated to 1,000 degrees or more. While I do have a high-end broiler in my oven, I don’t think it gets quite that hot. A charcoal grill can get quite hot using lump (not briquette) charcoal, but it’s a different experience than most steakhouses. Still, it came close in terms of providing enough heat to do the job.

So now I had the equivalent ingredients and a similar cooking tool but it just wasn’t the same. Putting aside that I was doing the cooking and not just being served, I realized that there was one more huge difference: practice. Steakhouses cook 1,000 steaks a week or more. If I do 24 in a year it’s a lot. But it’s a good business point.

There is no substitute for practice, and the more times we do things – presentations, analyses, whatever – the better we become at them. That’s noticeable to the recipient.  Having great raw materials – that includes people – and a great methodology coupled with the right tools to do the job and a LOT of practice can produce a great steak.  That formula’s also capable of producing greatness in your business if you’ll let it.  Will you?

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August 17, 2015 · 11:02 am

Business Jams

Grateful Dead: Backstage Pass

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was driving around this weekend listening, as I often do, to The Grateful Dead. Like them or not, you probably are aware that they were the world’s preeminent jam band, even if jamming as a concept that is as old as music itself. What’s interesting about jamming is that the music is never the same. Oh sure – ideas get recycled from one night to the next, but the entirety of the piece of always pretty different no matter if we’re listening to The Dead or to some great jazz.

What’s interesting is that some bands will cement the better ideas into songs. That is how some bands write. They just start playing until some good ideas surface. Those ideas are memorialized, lyrics added, and voila – a song. It’s not a bad business concept either.

When musicians get together to jam, they come from a place of openness and collaboration. They are there to experiment. While some jams start with the framework of an existing song or just a blues jam in G, most of the time you’re off following musical ideas thrown out there by the other musicians. You’re guessing about what will work at some points. To do that well, you need to keep an open mind.

Brainstorming is business jamming. You need an open mind and a willingness to go where the music (thinking) leads. Sometimes you happen upon a great riff – a fantastic business thought – that can be preserved and turned into a song – a product, or maybe an entire business.  You might think that some brilliant new innovation was the result of careful planning.  The execution probably was, but I’m willing to bet that the underlying idea came out of some mental jamming by a person or a group of people.

When I used to play music seriously, jams were fun.  They involved getting the right people together – people who have both the technical and mental abilities required as well as whose musical styles meshed well with the others in the room.  I can’t think of a better way to lay the foundation of a successful enterprise, can you?

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August 6, 2015 · 11:32 am

No News Isn’t Good News

I’ll let you in on a little secret.  Here at the World Headquarters, we step away from the computer screen at lunch time, usually to watch the big screen.  Generally it’s a whip around through the various news channels to make sure that it’s worth continuing to work the rest of the day.  After all, if the world is going to end, I’d rather try to sneak in one last round of golf than write a few more emails.

One thing I’ve noticed lately as I watch CNN/MSNBC/FoxNews during lunch is how little actual content I see.  Mostly I see ads.  After many years in the TV business I understand why, but when you factor in national breaks, promotional spots, and the local cable affiliate breaks, a viewer can leave the set for 5+ minutes at a time and not miss a thing.  Entertainment programming doesn’t seem much better. Then again, maybe I’m just old and cranky and wrong.

It turns out I’m not.  As Business Insider reported:

Almost every major TV network in the US is stuffing more ads into their commercial breaks in a “desperate” attempt to prop up ad revenues as ratings across the industry decline, according to a report from investment research and management company Sanford C. Bernstein. The report shows that prime-time TV audiences (as determined by Nielsen C3 measurements: TV watched both live and three days after the show was first aired on catch-up services) are down 9% year on year, yet ad loads on some networks are up as much as 10% on last year.

The chart I’ve embedded shows how commercial hours have changed in the last year across major cable network groups.  3% or 4% may not sound like a lot, but when you’re running over 10,000 seconds of commercials a day, that’s several minutes more each day.  Times 7.  Times 365.  The problem with that is that in the process of maintaining revenues you’re exacerbating the problem of viewer abandonment.  In particular, viewers are going to streaming, where commercials loads are way smaller if they exist at all.  What I find nice about the commercials on Hulu, for example, is that you know exactly how long they will last.  I have no clue as I’m taking my short lunch break if I’m ever going back to the news.  In this case, no news is very bad news since it means yet more of what I definitely did not tune in to see.

We can’t alter our products to preserve an income statement when that alteration provides a lesser experience for the consumer.  It’s a short-term fix that will have very bad long-term ramifications.  Cheaper ingredients, lesser workmanship, or ad cramming are all part of the same mindset.  It’s one we should avoid, don’t you think?

 

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