Hospitality
Frank Bennett
The DNA Required to Clone a Successful ...

Successful full service neighborhood restaurants are rarely duplicated in a second location, even by their original founder. I have observed this phenomenon over and over throughout my forty years on the New York restaurant scene. Whenever a successful restaurant in one neighborhood tries to expand to another location, it rarely enjoys the success of the original restaurant and often fails completely after a short stay in business. Why? Why can't successful restaurateurs do it again? The failure rate for duplicating successful restaurants is too high! What goes wrong when industry leaders try to repeat their success?

 To find the answer, I decided to interview 25 independent restaurant owners who had tried to open a successful second restaurant and had met with varying degrees of disappointment.

SOMETHING

Louis the XIV is a fifty-eight year old overweight skin-head biker with tats from head to toe who favors gold chains. That’s why they call him, Louis the XIV. He’s my sponsor.

I met him at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting in 1995, my first day out of rehab.

“What are you lookin at?” was the first thing he said to me.

I was only 16 years old and wearing khakis and a polo shirt. “I’m looking for a sponsor,” I replied in a shaky voice. “They told me I needed to find a sponsor right away.”

When Louis the XIV smiled at my remark his two gold incisors shined like headlights in a rear- view mirror. “You,” he began slowly with a note of scorn in his voice. “Want me” he added as a sort of afterthought. “To be,” he said dragging out the word “be” like “beee”. “Your what?” he concluded, cocking a multi-pierced ear in my direction.

WHY SUCCESSFUL RESTAURANT CONCEPTS OFTEN FAIL AS FRANCHISES

A line begins forming at PIZZARUN's front door just before his 11:00 A.M. opening and does not abate till after 3:00 P.M. By 4:30 the crowds start squeezing toward the front of the dinner line. Arun's unique all natural pizza, fair price, and lightning fast service are obviously magic. However, his first franchisee is struggling.

"Everything is the same but he's not getting the business. We can't figure it out. 

WHITE PAPER: ENHANCING YOUR ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE: AN APPROACH TO PROFITABLE OPERATIONS

A CONTRACTOR'S GUIDE TO FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

Hard times teach hard lessons. The great recession of 2008 has alerted the construction industry to the fact that it cannot rely on boom times and unlimited growth to insure profitability. Shrinking revenues over the past six years have inspired contractors to take a closer look at their management practices and search for ways to maintain profitability in the absence of top line growth.

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Let's Go Cuba 2.0

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Last year, after President Obama relaxed travel restrictions to Cuba, this blog began to research incentive travel opportunities to the mysterious island 90 miles off our coast. Like many American travelers, incentive groups were captivated by Cuba’s promise of something new and different. Americans have been prohibited from traveling to Cuba since 1963, so curiosity alone has intensified the allure of our neighbor to the South.

Last Year

After extensive research, we concluded last year that although Cuba presented a colorful and entertaining culture, wonderful food, rhythmic music and dance, intricate history, soothing climate, natural wonders, and a curiously “stuck-in-time” joyful population, it still had a long way to go 

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It's Not What You Know... It's WHO You Know

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Event Attendance

Competition for event attendance continues to heat up. Planners are charged with improving attendance year after year in a highly competitive event marketplace where it seems like more events are vying for attention every day. The pressure to include the latest innovation, to locate in a trendy location, to present A-list entertainment, and to offer gluten-free, farm-to-table, organic, low carb, vegetarian, pescatarian, low-cal culinary fare has never been more intense. However, recent research into what factors have the greatest effect on attendance indicates that influencers have a greater impact on attendance than any of the factors listed above.

Influencers

People do business with people they trust. This mantra has been part of the planner’s lexicon for many years. 

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Letting the Air Out of Airbnb

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DISRUPTION

  • Ten years ago, Steve Jobs introduced the IPhone and, as he predicted, changed the world. The original device looks almost “cute” alongside the powerhouse cell phones we all use today, but it was a mighty disrupter that upended the music and publishing businesses forever. It even introduced the word disruption to business discourse.
  • Then Travis Kalanick imagined fellow citizens offering each other a lift and Uber disrupted the transportation industry reducing the word “taxi” to an historical reference.
  • After dealing a knock-out punch to the publishing and bookstore industries, Jeff Bezos unleashed Amazon on retailing and mighty department store chains like Macy’s and JC Penney’s could feel the ground give way under their brick and mortar retail palaces.
  • In 2007 Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia decided to blow up an air mattress and rent it out in their apartment in San Francisco to help pay the rent. When Nathan Belcharczyk showed them how to utilize the new IPhone and internet powerhouse combo to turn their air mattress into a business, Airbnb was born and the travel industry was put on notice.

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How to Keep Them Coming

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Premier Meeting Services collaborates with Athena Education Group, LLC, as the continuing medical education provider to plan, develop, and implement live CME conferences, meetings, and symposia at the local, regional, national, and international levels. Over the years, our main challenge has been to keep medical education meetings up-to-date and attractive to an often repeating but ever-evolving audience of medical professionals.

  • The Baby-Boomers in the audience who have been to many CME programs are “old-pros” who attend for very different reasons than their younger millennial colleagues. Often senior practitioners come to network with old friends, recruit employees, and find out “what’s new”.
  • The Millennials, on the other hand, come not only to learn but often to find a job, make new friends, and develop a feeling of belonging to their professional practice group.

Don't Forget To - VIDEO IT!

At Premier Meeting Services we are advising clients to revise their AV budgets to include a professional video production company. Like most meeting planners who produce continuing education programs and company training sessions, videotaping high profile presenters and breakout sessions is nothing new for us. But, recently, we have upped our game.

We realize how valuable a complete video record of every event is to attendees, clients, and meeting planners alike. Professionally produced video re purposes and magnifies an event as follows:

  • Educational sessions and trainings can be turned into webinars.
  • Customer interviews can become case studies....

TEAM BUILDING

The Essence

The legendary Notre Dame football coach, Knute Rockne said it all: “The secret is to work less as individuals and more as a team. As a coach, I play not my eleven best, but my best eleven.”

Vince Lombardi, no slouch himself at putting together great teams, said: “Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.”

Another football great, Joe Paterno, offered this insight: “When a team outgrows individual performance and learns team confidence, excellence becomes a reality.”

Henry Ford knew a little about building teams when he said: “Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.”

No one wanted to argue with Steve Jobs when he said: “Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.”