I love Fox’s Kitchen Nightmares because of its insight into humanity. Yeah, it’s fun to watch shows about food, but Gordon Ramsay’s show is about so much more than that. He’s not just a chef — he’s a psychologist. He needs to break people from their instinctive path and get them to change. He needs to convince them that they can respond to their failure and turn it into a success. His lessons are valuable to all business owners that face challenges.
photo credit: brooklyn
Embrace Change
Convincing an owner that the business needs to change is usually step one. There has never been an episode where Gordon is flabbergasted that the place is unsuccessful. It’s never a surprise; there’s always a reason (usually plural). But the owners tend to fear change because they incorrectly evaluate the risks and rewards. Gordon has to convince them that prolonged mediocrity will not lead to success. The owner must change paths to succeed.
Stay Detached
Gordon is able to provide insight for the same reason that consultants are able to provide it to other businesses — they’re both detached. They are unencumbered by the distractions of history and see a failing business very simply. If you want to save the cost of a consultant, you can do this yourself. Avoid the delusion of past success and look at things simply: a restaurant works by selling food for more than it costs to produce. It’s that simple. It’s a single equation. Now build from there. Are people willing to pay for the current food? Are there enough of these people? Etc.
Continually Evaluate Your Assumptions
If you’re not detached, you’ll likely jump to a different set of conclusions than if you are able to stay detached. One owner switched to cheaper steaks to save money … but they didn’t taste as good so fewer customers were willing to pay for them. Another put his chef on too high of a pedestal … and the chef was running the place into the ground. These types of conclusions are tremendously dangerous, but they’re sometimes needed for expediency. As a business owner, you can’t labor over each decision you’re faced with, but when things get tough, you need to evaluate your old decisions.
Focus On The Basics
Thanks to the FDA, there’s one thing a restaurant has to be: clean. If you fail at that, it doesn’t matter how great everything else is, because you will be shut down. What are the absolute basics of your business? Are you a landscaper with dull lawnmower blades? When it’s time to rebuild, this is where you need to start. The goal of all businesses is to sell something for more than it costs you to produce. Make sure you have all the tools you need to do so.
Consider The Menu
Gordon always changes the menu — and he always makes it shorter. When faced with failure, the instinct of many is to try to do more — more dishes, more options, more choices. This never works. Gordon refocuses restaurants so that they can excel at single things instead of fail at many things. This is oftentimes the most significant change, but it’s the most difficult to make because it involves the restaurant’s identity. Should the pasta place evolve into a steakhouse because there’s less competition? Maybe it should. Should the ethnic restaurant embrace more modern dishes and techniques that are more approachable to patrons but don’t follow grandma’s recipe? Maybe it should. What’s on your menu? Get rid of what’s not working and focus on what is.
Do you watch Kitchen Nightmares for the same reason? Have I missed any good lessons? Leave me a note in the comments.
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). The Droid’s ad campaign made the phone cool. You can pull it out in a bar, and the person next to you will know what it is and hopefully be of the opposite sex and hopefully want to sleep with you. That’s what good advertising campaigns accomplish … more or less. The Nexus One’s online-only campaign didn’t accomplish this on the same scale as the Droid’s television campaign. 
ispotastory.com: Is Copying Digg Really The Next Big Thing?
Honestly, I don’t really get this. It’s been 5 years since Digg was founded. It’s been 4 years since Time Magazine declared user generated content its person of the year. The web has Reddit, Yahoo Buzz, SlashDot, Mixx, etc. and local clones like the Windy Citizen. What’s going on? Does the web really need ispotastory.com? At this rate, there will be more sites that allow user generated content than there will be willing participants in about 6 weeks.
User generated content was the web’s first big take on user generated traffic. The Digg model harnessed its reader to bring traffic to the site and it was wildly popular … in 2005. The web has evolved since then. Social media companies like Facebook and Twitter took the successes of Digg and abstracted them further. Discussion on the web could now happen in the reader’s own social sphere instead of the inside the greater Digg community. This was a huge shift and is now a pain-point for sites like Digg.
Sites like Mashable, CollegeHumor.com, FunnyOrDie.com, and BuzzFeed are the new revolutionaries. Mashable is very systematic and successful at covering socially-viral stories. CollegeHumor.com and FunnyOrDie.com make a business of creating viral videos. They’ve figured out what it takes to replicate viral content successes on the internet … and they don’t need small-time UGC sites to get exposure. CollegeHumor.com’s CEO even went so far as to say that the myth of users generating good content is the biggest myth of the internet. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed automates their viral coverage through their widgets — rendering the concept of pushing a button to ‘Digg’ something entirely useless and quaint.
So what’s going to happen to ispotastory.com? If they can climb up the radar a bit, maybe they’ll get bought by Reddit, but I don’t think that’s likely. Hopefully it’s a site built to serve a passion and the team has a wildly fun time giving it a go on the internet. Best of luck.