Tag Archives: Strategic management

August 29, 2014 · 10:23 am

Servers

It’s the Foodie Friday before the Labor Day weekend so what better topic than those who labor in the food business? We talk a lot here on the screed about cooks and cooking. Today we’re going front of house to talk about servers.

Waiter in Vienna, Austria.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When you think about it, being a server is one of those jobs that many people don’t want. It’s what some people fall in to while they’re trying to do something else – be an actor, finish school, etc. While many high-end restaurants train and keep their wait staff for a long time (I’ve seen some pretty old guys schlepping trays at a few fancy steakhouses), much of the industry is people in transition.  It’s hard work, demanding both physically and  psychologically (you try dealing with a demanding drunk jerk who is showing off for his equally drunk friends).

Some of the challenges restaurant managers face with servers are instructive for other businesses.  Training is the first.  Once a server is trained they become very attractive to other businesses.  Obviously not training the staff isn’t an option since you want customers to have the best experience possible.  How, then, do you retain employees?  Having trained many junior people in my day, that problem applies everywhere.  We can’t usually match the extra money a new job will offer.  Why, then, would they stay?

In any industry, I think that’s done by sharing the vision of where the business is heading along with a value statement you live by and use to make decisions.  Letting the staff in on your goals in a specific fashion (grow revenues 10% without raising prices, turn 5 more tables an extra time each night) gives them ownership of where the business is heading and why.  The next step – execution – is all on the manager’s shoulders. They need to  manage the staff and the business towards the goals.

I know that servers have a reputation for behaving in ways that rarely happen outside of the restaurant world more than once.  Showing up drunk or stoned or calling in sick at the last-minute are symptoms of what I wrote about above.  When your job is just a step to someplace else you tend not to treat it seriously, which is especially dangerous when that job is the primary point of contact with the customer.  Paying well, training well, being demanding but fair, and sharing the goals and visions of the business can help every employee take the business as seriously as you do, whether they’re servers, accountants, marketers, or sales reps.

Thoughts?

 

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August 26, 2014 · 11:37 am

The Only Two Numbers That Matter

Everyone in business has heard talk about “big data.” It Takes 2!There is no question that we know more about our customers, their buying patterns, their media usage – heck, just about anything – than ever before. It’s easy to get trapped into micromanaging all that data which will overwhelm even the best systems and the smartest analysts.  So today I’m going to try to get you to follow some great advice from Thoreau:

I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.

He wasn’t exactly talking about big data, but he might have been.  In my mind there are really only two numbers that matter.  While I’m going to speak of them in web terms the reality is that they apply to every business as I will explain.  They are:

That’s it.  Multiply those two and you get a measure of success.  The first is how many opportunities you have to create a successful interaction; the second is the rate at which you do so.  That successful interaction can be a newsletter sign up, a sale, a social share of some content – you will need to define it.  Taking the number of times that successful thing happens and dividing it into the number of people who potentially might have done it (your traffic) gives you a conversion rate.  Simple!

You would be surprised how many of the analytics accounts I’ve looked at over the years haven’t set up goals, and without goals there are no conversions.  It’s not just web-based businesses that can do this.  Retail can count foot traffic and numbers of sales, for example.  Numbers of customer service calls with a successful (in the customer’s eyes) resolution.  Once you’re focused on measuring traffic and conversions, you can place everything else you do in marketing in those contexts.  More traffic without conversions is useless.  More conversions from the same traffic is fantastic.

Big data is great and I use it all the time.  As with all things, however, start with the simple, which often gets overlooked – the necessary and the real, as Thoreau says.  You agree?

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August 21, 2014 · 10:19 am

Results, Stupid

You probably get a lot of “news” in your Facebook feed.  You know – really critical information that tends to end with “you won’t believe what happened next” which is begging you to click through to see.  If you take the bait and do so, you probably consume the content and forget about it within a minute.  The result the post was looking for was the click.

The Marketing Metrics Continuum provides a fra...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Marketers do that a lot.  They get focused on you seeing the message, maybe clicking through to see “what happens next”, but they seem to be forgetting that the result they’re after is either a direct business result such as a sale or a deepening of the ongoing relationship with the consumer.  It’s the relationship – the emotional connection – that leads, once again to a measurable result: sales.

I was sort of surprised, therefore, when I came across the results of a survey from the Korn Ferry Global Marketing Center of Expertise.  I’ll quote from their release here:

The survey indicates there’s growing pressure among marketing executives to demonstrate that their work directly contributes to bottom-line results. Fifty-seven percent of CMOs cite the inability to directly connect marketing efforts to tangible business outcomes as the top factor behind low CMO tenure…Only 27 percent of marketing executives cite connecting marketing to bottom-line results as the top concern keeping them up at night. What plagues CMOs the most is the ability to create sustainable and engaging customer relationships while improving the customer experience (34 percent). Also, 27 percent say staying ahead and taking advantage of the latest digital technology trends is a main concern.

Hmm.  It’s great to create those relationships but if nearly 3/4 of these CMO’s are focused on something other than results it’s no wonder that they’re not lasting very long in their jobs.  The last point about focusing on the latest and greatest tech concerns me a lot.  This goes against my basic mantra that the focus needs to be on the business and on measurable business outcomes, not on the tools.  A business can’t do tech (or anything else) because “it’s cool.”   Sales are cool.  Profits are cool.  Tech is a series of tools which may or may not be appropriate (or cool)  for the given situation and desired outcome.

You wouldn’t cut a board with a screwdriver.  You’d select the right tool with the desired result in mind.  If over half the CMO’s surveyed aren’t connecting with those results, their brands and businesses have a big problem.  It’s not a surprise to me that Facebook is cited as the top channel for consumer connection but I wonder if the CMO’s who use it realize how little connection is really going on between “fans” and brands?  Facebook or any other tool are neither good nor bad.  They have to be measured in the context of results, otherwise they’re just the latest shiny object.  We can’t build a long-term business on those shiny things, can we?

 

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