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Control vs. Collaboration
When I was coming up in my career, my dad would tell me about two different types of companies, restaurant-smart companies and corporate-smart companies. In restaurant-smart companies, he would say, you would get the best service because the people you were being served by were empowered to make the kind of decisions that were required for you to feel genuinely cared for. But they oftentimes weren’t the best businesses because they didn’t have the controls required to streamline their finances and ensure their profitability.
In corporate-smart companies, well those were the most profitable ones. But they weren’t where you went to find the most incredible hospitality experiences because the people you were being served by had no autonomy. They were just following a list of rules that had been written by people they never even got to know. He always challenged me to learn from both types of companies such that one day I could develop my own company that was both restaurant-smart and corporate-smart.
And what that requires is looking closely at the various moving parts of your business and trying your best to identify which ones are emotional for either the people you work with or the people you serve. Treat those in a restaurant-smart way and then identify all the ones that are not emotional. Systemize the heck out of those. If you can find that perfect blend of control and collaboration that is when you have a systemized, profitable operation that results in your team feeling empowered and your customers feeling cared for.
The Rule of 95/5
One of the ways that I’ve always managed my businesses is something I call the rule of ninety five-five. Manage your money like a maniac ninety-five percent of the time, such that you can spend the last five percent foolishly. I wrote that rule because in most businesses what gets measured gets managed. It’s very, very difficult to manage the return on that five percent when you’re investing it in relationships, in human emotion. But that doesn’t mean that the return isn’t there because that five percent, that’s when you give people a meaningful connection to you or your brand or the thing that you’re selling them.