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.
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.”
Too often we think of our competitors as enemies we must keep at arm’s length. Primitive
instincts cause us to put distance between ourselves and competitors we see as a threat to our
business. Modern business thinking has evolved beyond instinct to an understanding that in
certain circumstances our competitor can often be our ally.
Product synergies are usually overlooked by competitors. Take a more careful look
Wishing doesn't make it so. However, the Walter Mitty side of your personality could be very useful to your organization. When you dream about a better way to do things, speak up.
Research provides strong evidence that, in order to innovate, nonprofits need to step back and look at their operations to better understand the gaps or opportunities in their day-to-day work. A strong understanding of an organization's needs ensures that any technology solution will really address the issues that the organization faces and open the door to innovative solutions.
How many of your clients do you know? When case managers are asked this question, their answers might surprise you. Some, of course, say they know all of their clients. Some answer that they know most of their clients. Some, on the other hand, believe that they don't truly know any.
Only professional case workers and supervisors have insight into the answers above. They know that the case load burden in Child Welfare, Juvenile Justice, and Domestic Violence, to name just a few, often prevents even the most diligent and feeling case workers from ever really getting to know the clients in their care.
“Football is one of the world’s best means of communication. It is impartial, apolitical and universal. Football unites people around the world every day. Young or old, players or fans, rich or poor, the game makes everyone equal, stirs the imagination, makes people happy and makes them sad.” ~ Franz Beckenbauer...the greatest German footballer of all time
5-A-SIDE:
“The rules of soccer are very simple, basically it is this: if it moves, kick it. If it doesn’t move, kick it until it does.” ~ Phil Woosnam...Welsh football player and manager