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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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citizens offering each other a lift and Uber disrupted the transportation industry reducing the word “taxi” to an historical reference.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.”

THE AGING TIDAL WAVE: How the baby boomers will SWAMP long term care

The Baby Boom Generation looms over the long-term care industry like a tidal wave. Every year for the next twenty years, 3 million of the 75 million baby boomers born between 1946 and 1964 will hit retirement age (Barr, 2014). By 2029, when the last round of "boomers" retires, the number of Americans 65 or older will climb to more than 71 million (Colby & Ortman, 2014). In other words, we are looking at a tidal wave of more than 30 million additional retirees in the next fifteen years.

Busy Life in London

Busy Life in London

How To Prevent Exhaustion

Success often turns to failure for the busy London young professional. Human resource directors at leading British companies and public sector groups believe that 30% of their London staff suffers from exhaustion. Work-related stress, depression and anxiety cost Britain f530 million a year, with workers taking 13.8 million sick days.

NON-PROFIT IS NOT NON-BUSINESS

As we work with nonprofit accounting departments helping to install the FAMCare Cost Tracking/Financial Module, we are noticing a notional bias that seems to pervade the entire industry and prevents nonprofit organizations from operating efficiently from a financial perspective.

The Bias

Because most nonprofit employees are focused on mission and not on profits, they do not feel the need to prioritize financial management. Perhaps the very title, nonprofit, changes the focus of everyone working in the nonprofit arena.

The Marriage of Technology and Social Work

The Marriage of Technology and Social Work

Today, social workers increasingly rely on digital tools. Online therapy, advocacy by social media, and earning an MSW degree online are just a few of the additional tech innovations that are evolving in social work. However, the social work profession reflects generational differences in acceptance of technology.

Global Vision Technologies’ mission is to help case workers leverage technology. FAMCare, our rapid case management software, has lightened the case load burden of social workers across the country by eliminating the need for complex filing systems, keeping all related case records in one place, customizing reports, and providing mobile access to all files.