About Your Business

Too many people, including operators, consultants and restaurant associations, fail to understand what strategy is and what it isn’t.

There are two main questions you must answer:

1. what kind of business do you want to be (the strategy)
2. how will you become it (the tactics)

The problem is you cannot begin to do things (the how) without having first defined the answer to the first question (the what). Everything flows from that answer.

But most operators continue to create ways of doing things without any sense of what the overall outcomes should be. They say we want to increase sales and engage in any number of (tactical) activities, which fail due to that fact that they were unconnected to any overall strategy.

Or they were successful for a short-term but fizzled after a while (the while never being long enough to grow the business). So their entire ‘strategy’ becomes one in which they engage and create one event after another. It’s a never ending cycle of disjointed, unrelated activities which never yield the desired outcome.

There are any number of false strategies floating around at any given time:

• marketing strategy
• cost control strategy
• sales strategy
• profit strategy
• staffing strategy
• location strategy
• social media strategy

The list goes on and on.

While these sound good, they become dysfunctional business activities. Why? Because they aren’t connected to any overall strategy. Each one winds up going off in it’s own direction and you never see or hear from it again.

The twofold reality is that most of these are:

1. simply operational decision points which need to be analyzed and managed
2. about the how and not the what

This single point of understanding has been the tipping point for creating and sustaining more success, for more operators than you can imagine. Synthesizing your perspective about what kind of business you are trying to create and then organizing all of your activities to that end is the singularly powerful focus you need to build success.