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Play defense to stay alive
In Two Thousand and Nine during the Great Recession, we had a tough go at it. Our dining room was near empty every single night. In moments like that, people’s instinct is to get on the defense, to look at how they can start to cut expenses with, obviously, the first instinct, trying to find big, scalable cuts. What’s one big thing you can do that will save the day? Oftentimes not recognizing that raindrops make oceans and even if you don’t find one of those big cuts, it’s a culmination of lots of little cuts that can actually get you through the difficult times.
Play offense to thrive
Defense keeps you in the game, but offense helps you win the game because sometimes it’s those difficult times that give way to the greatest innovations. We wanted to cut expenses, but we also wanted to build revenue and do it creatively and then we engaged our entire team to do it.
In college, I worked at a restaurant. One of the things I would always hear when people were running desserts to the table was “low and slow.” Meaning, when you’re bringing out dessert, hold the plate low and walk through the dining room slowly. Most people aren’t inclined to order dessert, but if you do it in such a way that people see it, well, they start to crave it and your average check goes up.
During that recession, I thought a lot about low and slow and how we could collectively supercharge it. And so we added a dessert trolley to the experience. We pushed over a cart overflowing with delicious desserts. Dessert sale went up three hundred percent. Hold on to those ideas and you keep on doing them even when the going gets good again. You can find yourself running a much more profitable and successful operation than you were before the season of adversity even began. Some of the things that made us the most profitable in the good times are the things that we came up with during the bad times.