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.

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Economic Impact of the Meeting Industry

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In the last 20 years, the Meeting and Convention Industry has gone from being an ancillary service provider to the Fortune 500 to a major industry that contributes more to the GDP than the air transportation, motion picture, sound recording, performing arts, and spectator sport industries.

It is important for all meeting planners, whether you work for a large company or are a third party meeting planner in a small firm, to realize how far your industry has come and the impact you now have on the American economy.

PUTTING ON AIRES

My colleague, Mary Pat Baxter, was Hyacinth Bucket when it came to "Keeping Up Appearances". I should have suspected an awkward affair when she invited me to afternoon tea. I am not ashamed to admit that I am rarely invited to tea, let alone by a woman pretending to social status. Suffice it to say that my presence could perhaps have a diminishing effect on one’s standing among the best people. I am not a bore by any means, just a little clumsy when it comes to an intimate knowledge of the graces.

So, I foolishly accepted Mary Pat’s unexpected invitation and set about deciding the proper etiquette regarding a gift. I decided my favourite Czech pastry, Bublanina, would be a pleasant upgrade over the ubiquitous “Victoria sandwich” that stuffy hostesses seem compelled to serve at every tea. 

How to Calculate ROI for a National Sales Meeting

A CASE HISTORY

My company was about to introduce a new product and, since I am the head of corporate training, I was tasked with planning our national sales training event. It wasn’t my first time planning a corporate event, but it was my first company-wide national event. After 2 months of back and forth with a Florida based meeting planner, I had completed an extensive checklist and had developed a broad outline of the event. That’s when our CEO’s secretary called and asked me to meet with the boss and bring all my notes along.

Delicious Health Food an Oxymoron?

Plum Butter imported from the Czech Republic and Slovakia is not a sugar laden jam or marmalade typically used in the UK to sweeten all manner of otherwise bland foods. Plum butter is health food.

Fruit butters are made by simply slow cooking fruits like plums and apples down to a thick paste, the texture of dairy butter, then “putting the butter up” in sealed containers without additives or preservatives. Voilà, health food!

HOSPICE WORKERS DESERVE OUR GRATITUDE

My friend Evelyn passed away in a beautiful hospice room at the Mayo Clinic this past week. She was a member of Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation”. Raised on a farm in Indiana during the Great Depression, Evelyn spent her young adulthood filling munitions with gunpowder in a defense plant in Nebraska.

“Didn’t care to bring anymore innocent children into the world during the Depression or the war,” she once told me; “didn’t think it was fair.” She lived her entire life a spinster, as she referred to herself, earning a living and doing life’s chores without anyone to share the burdens.

The desert outside Tucson, Arizona is an unforgiving landscape inhabited only by snakes, scorpions, lizards, the occasional coyote, and Evelyn. She was tough on herself but easy on the natural world she lived in. “I consider myself a steward of the land,” she said. She allowed herself only the barest essentials and if she inadvertently ended up with two of something, she would quickly give one away. However, she never stopped nursing the cactus and agave and Palo Verde and Mesquite trees that surrounded her.

THE EFFECTS OF TRAUMA ON A STUDENT

An article in this month’s Social Work Today is a must read for all social workers practicing in the field of education. New research is uncovering the effects that trauma has on a student’s ability to think clearly. When traumatic experiences that children bring with them to the school setting aren’t identified, it can lead to a dysfunctional circular process of mutual re-traumatization in school. 

A MINOR'S RIGHT TO CONFIDENTIALITY

A THORNY ISSUE

The ethical standards in many areas of social work are still being worked through the legal system. A particularly compelling example of evolving standards concerns social workers’ response to parents’ request to examine their children’s counseling records. At the beginning of the social worker-client relationship, social workers routinely discuss with minor clients and their parents the minors’ right to confidentiality and possible exceptions. Nonetheless, in many cases social workers encounter ethical challenges when parents ask to examine their child’s records because of their curiosity or because of their relevance to legal disputes. 

SELMA: FAMCare Blog

SELMA: FAMCare Blog

 

I recently had occasion to see the new movie, Selma, the story of Martin Luther King's fight for the voting rights of African Americans. I expected the film to be the stirring story of the great man's inspirational leadership of the civil rights movement. It wasn't. Rather, Selma was the story of the persistent, courageous self-sacrifice of people great and small, black and white, who were willing to give everything they had, including their lives, for a humanitarian cause greater than themselves. 

Are You on a Star Trek?

The managers of residential care facilities we work with everyday report that the residential care and post-acute health care industry is changing at an alarming rate. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services has shifted its focus away from simply measuring volume, toward a pay-for-performance system focused on value and quality. The implications of this shift in payment processing and compliance procedures for management in post-acute care, nursing homes, and hospice facilities are vast, complex, and daunting. Managers are scrambling to measure quality outcomes, improve compliance, and emphasize the customer experience throughout their organizations.