Five Loaves, Two Fishes and Six Chicken Nuggets

by Barry Gibbons

  It is an enormous opportunity for the enlightened operator. It is in your hands – the ability to affect a fundamental customer attitude to your restaurant, using largely natural (and free) materials, simply by picking a target sense and deliberately trying to affect it positively within ten seconds of somebody – anybody – coming through the door.

  But there are pitfalls. Some senses are more easily affected in a positive way than others. Some are hard to affect positively at all, but easy to affect negatively. These I call dirty window senses – they respond negatively to things that are bad (dirty windows) but you don’t notice them if they are good (clean windows). If your restaurant tables and the floor areas beneath are left cluttered and dirty, it’s a huge and early strike against the place for many customers. If it’s all clean, it’s like a clean window – that’s how it should be. Nobody notices.

  It is possible, however, to make a strong positive impact within the same timescale. Simple things, like using a customer’s first name, can do far more to increase customer frequency and loyalty than discounting and ‘two-fers’ ever can. And don’t believe it can’t work for you in a big branded outlet. In one study we did in England, one member of a counter staff remembered 400 customer names!

  I’m kinda odd (would you believe?). I’m particularly open to being impressed by the first sounds of a place when I open the door. Does it sound friendly, busy, welcoming? Obviously, however, the main sense that can be assaulted positively for most people is that of sight. What do you see when you open the doors? That might be a welcoming ‘meet, seat and greeter’, but, if not, you need to monitor what’s in the sight line from the door and put something powerfully good in there.

  That’s the trick. Look at your place. Go outside and walk back in. Pick one sense and have a brainstorming session with your team. What can you do to assault that chosen sense positively in the first ten seconds? It might just be obvious and it might just be cheap. Get it right and it will be highly effective.

  As I said, first impressions are critically important to me. I can’t wait to see Basic Instinct II.

  36. Love thine enemy

  In an unnerving moment at the end of the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev’s smiling spokesman, Gennadi Gerasimov, taunted the West with the words, ‘We have done the most terrible thing to you that we could possibly have done. We have deprived you of your enemy.’

  What rubbish. We have managed to substitute a perfectly adequate new common enemy – and I do not refer to terrorism, the non-Christian world, SARS, AIDS, or any of those lesser ones. I refer, of course, to France.

  There are times when I despair of this planet, and this is one of them. Look, I’m a Brit, and we have been at war with the French (on and off) for centuries – the only difference being we now send soccer fans over in buses to flatten their cities. But we still visit, and that’s where we differ from the American nation, which has (essentially) pulled up the drawbridge. I love the place, so I’m going to outline a game plan whereby Americans can learn to do the same. It will stop all this ‘enemy’ nonsense. Right, here goes …

  Visit the place – but not in the way you normally ‘visit’ Europe. Limit your party to two or four people, and do not stay at a Best Western hotel or a Comfort Inn. These are fine brands, but they are not going to get this job done. Dig into the internet or Fodor’s and find a place with a maximum of twenty bedrooms and phone them up to fix the deal. Get to know the owners. They will speak English, and you can chat about rooms, facilities and price. You will be friends before you get there.

  Target your location. France is Old Europe. Go to one of its Old Cities – I recommend Nice – and stay in the old part of the Old City (Vieux Nice).

  Change your daily biorhythm. Sleep in later, eat later, have a snooze after lunch, and then go to bed later.

  Breakfast is mandatory – but not in the hotel. Walk to one of the squares and sit outside – in chairs and tables all facing out into the square. A large café au lait accompanied by a pain au chocolat will get the job done, and you will find your resting pulse rate dropping into single digits.

  After breakfast you are faced with choices. It’s the best time to wander around the flea market, sternly resisting the temptation to spend 145 euros on Napoleon’s personal barometer, but soon enough comes the time when you have to choose your meal plan for the day. After breakfast you will need two more meals – an A meal and a B meal, defined as such by the size, length and alcoholic consumption involved. Many French take their A meal at lunch, but I prefer the lighter one then. In Nice, of course, they invented salade niçoise, so that will do nicely – along with a glass (or two) of local rosé diluted with some mineral water.

  After a quick afternoon zizz (beach or hotel), it’s time to promenade – which can be translated as: walking up and down trying to look thin. When you are tired, repeat the breakfast formula, only this time with a pastis, and sit discussing how fat and ugly the other touristes are. This is also where you decide on dinner, which is your A meal.

  Now then, do not choose the dinner venue from your tour guide or any list of restaurant names. Read about the food that’s available locally and choose something you can handle that’s a bit different than your normal microwaved pap. When you have decided on an item, walk around the squares and look at the menus and the specials until you find it in a restaurant that is: a) busy; b) does not have a ‘tourist menu’ outside; c) is not overpopulated with Germans; and, most important, d) does not have photographs of the dishes posted outside. I’m not being racist about the Germans. To slightly misquote Jerry Seinfield, there is, of course, nothing wrong with Germans. But a restaurant that’s full of them will not get this job done for you.

  We are coming up to the big finish now. If you have followed all the above, with plenty of local vin rouge, you will now feel French and be enthusiastically defending ridiculous agricultural subsidies and the rights of all male cabinet ministers to have mistresses without interference. The last big decision of the day awaits you – what to have as a digestif with your coffee. As to the latter, it’s mandatory – so don’t whinge on about decaf. You’ll sleep after this lot, trust me. Now, back to the digestif – and I suggest you trumpet your newly discovered Frenchness by upsetting your niçoise hosts by choosing a Calvados from Normandy. They’ll love you for that.

  When dinner is all over, pay your addition, leaving only a 10% tip. Any more and they will think you are mad. Do not smash the plates (that’s Greece). Shake hands with your hosts and the occupants of a few nearby tables, and with a cheerful ‘A demain, mes amis’ drift off into the warm Mediterranean night, with your woolly sweater tossed casually over your shoulder. Avoid soccer fans.

  When demain arrives, repeat. And repeat and repeat until you must go home.

  As you journey back, you can be satisfied that you will have accomplished two things. First, you will have only put on a bit of weight. This is because the French measure it in kilos, and you can’t put many of them on in a week. Second, you will have improved world understanding and helped the cause of world peace. And all for the price of a couple of hangovers.

  Santé.

  37. Road of least exposure

  After a lifetime of success in the PGA and then on the seniors tour, somebody asked golfer Lee Trevino – as his results started to tail off – if he was considering retiring. As he reflected on a professional life of golf and travel, his reply was: ‘Retire from what?’

  I feel a bit like that. It’s nearly a decade since I made a decision never to be directly involved in big business again … well, to be exact, never to work for anybody ever again. After a quarter of a century of impersonating Road Runner, I set myself some different goals with a different biorhythm – which I’m still pursuing.

  One of those goals was to educate myself. This might come as a surprise to some, considering I’d been to school, university and a blue-ribbon business school, and then had countless training and development courses in business. When I had time t
o pause and reflect, however, I found that all that that had given me was a one-eyed view of real history and a paper-thin, superficial analysis of the world around me. I decided to start again and deliberately built time in my life for the necessary reading, travelling, looking, and listening.

  I found out some odd things. In the space of a generation, our approach to the management and acceptance of risk has changed fundamentally. This is true in almost every aspect of life, and particularly so in business. If you had charged a classroom of young executives to come up with two words that captured the spirit of business in 1970, they would have said ‘Taking risks’. Now they would come up with ‘Avoiding risks’. Today, the business leader’s job is to corral half a dozen optional strategies and then pass them to an attorney to make the decision based on what I call the ROLE, or road of least exposure.

  This is understandable in a world of ludicrous potential compensation litigation, intense competition, and stock market booms and busts. I guess it’s a comforting approach. But, you know what – if you really want to win in your crowded, competitive market, it still won’t get the job done. It matters not whether you see your fight as one location against another on the street or at macro-brand level, the ROLE might see you safely in the pack, but it will not see you ahead of it.

  Am I advocating rushing out with untried food products or massive investment spends without diligent research? Not in the quick-serve industry, I’m not. But I am advocating a step change in a lot of our mindsets. During one of the better historic wars between England and France – the Hundred Years’ War – we, the Brits, had the nuclear weapon of the age. It was called the ‘longbow’ (and you need to read about it to understand how devastating it was). But we lost the war despite this advantage. The reason was odd but has profound relevance to this day. The longbow was a fantastic weapon, but only to defend. If you were attacked, it was brilliant, but it was next to useless to attack with – and the derived message is still relevant today. If your mind and resources are geared up just to defending, eventually – eventually – you will lose.

  It is all about your state of mind. Winners are not rash or stupid, but their minds are wired more towards the edge of the mental-risk spectrum. That mindset can manifest itself in product range, sales and marketing activity, the look of the place and – perhaps most of all – in the people chosen to work there. These minds obey only two rules: they are prepared to be different and they are prepared to upset a few people to attract a lot.

  This last aspect is critical. Today, almost anything you do in business that gets you noticed is likely to upset one faction of the population or another. A lot of business activity is, therefore, neutered of any possible offensive content. The result is that nobody really notices or remembers anything. You personally were probably exposed to thousands of brand sightings or messages yesterday. Can you remember even one? Precisely.

  The modern risk-taker understands and accepts that you cannot avoid the risk of upsetting some people if you are to do something out of the ordinary (a.k.a. distinct or memorable). In fact, if you are not deliberately taking such a risk, your efforts are likely to be stillborn. The risk-taker understands that such a risk can be manageable, and the upside of it is the opportunity to glue in a lot more customers to your concept. Today, frequency and loyalty are far more likely to be achieved by how you do business rather than by what you do.

  My re-education exercise has shown me that this isn’t new thinking. It has worked in every historic age and in all aspects of society. Rather more surprising, however, is my finding that it is still relevant today and that the advent of a billion lawyers has not made it less so but more so. In addition, my own experience tells me that the modern quick-service business, at all levels, needs it more than most.

  For those who are interested, we, the Brits, are still, of course, technically at war with France. The longbow, however, has obviously been superseded by new weapons and tactics. Today, we send soccer fans over. They travel in buses, sing their songs, wipe out a couple of provincial French cities, and are back home for tea.

  Now that’s effective and efficient.

  38. Everything changes

  It is rumoured that Nevada has actually sunk by thirteen inches over the past five years on account of the increased per capita weight of visiting tourists.

  Now then, it is wise to treat all rumours, printed in books such as this, with a healthy cynicism – and that is particularly so in this case because I have just made that one up on the spot. But a recent visit to Las Vegas, the understatement capital of the planet, highlighted the fact that the All-American Butt is expanding fast.

  There is an added dimension that also needs considering – that the appropriateness of the Las Vegas tourists’ clothing is in inverse proportion to its size. We caught a show by the wonderfully loopy Rita Rudner who explained that Vegas residents (such as her) get anaesthetised to these sights – until one comes into view that simply can’t be ignored. At that stage she rushes up to the subject and – in a loud voice – demands an explanation.

  Yes, today we are going to explore the minefield of obesity and its relation to our quick-serve world – perhaps the big gathering storm on our twenty-first century radar screen.

  Like all objective contributors to the debate, I should start by declaring my position and biases. My position is that I had a 34” (86 cm) waist when I got married nearly forty years ago, and I have one today – and it has never changed. My pants have sometimes been tight, sometimes loose, usually OK, but always that size. My weight today is what it was when I played soccer seriously (although its distribution has altered a bit!). My biases reflect my belief that this has been down to a million choices I made over that period – choices to do some things associated with diet, exercise and lifestyle, and not to do others. In short, I drift towards the debate position that if you are fat, it’s a result of your decisions. It’s not an illness, and you should not point the finger of blame at quick-serves.

  I said I ‘drift’ towards that position. I qualify it by recognising that some obesity – some – is contributed to by external factors. Wealth, for example, clearly helps the cause of the thin. It is difficult to imagine Prince Charles, for example, as he goes about his role of adding zero value to the planet, getting tubby when he is served by personal chefs and footmen. Conversely, if you happen to be one of the few unfortunates who does not have a personal chef, and who adds to this tragedy by not having a home, a job and/or any money, it is likely that you will use any money that might come your way to get something big to eat. I can also understand that, living on Planet Stress, as we all do, some folk will seek solace in food as others do in other substances – whether they be in liquid, tablet or powder form, or made from leaves.

  So, what’s to be done about it? Despite my ‘qualifications’, I am strongly enough in my debate camp to believe the solution must lie with each individual, and not with macro-level government or industry solutions. I do respect the difficulty that must arise for some extreme cases – but I came across a paragraph in a book recently that might offer a different mental framework within which to address the challenge. The book is called Quantum Healing, by Deepak Chopra, and listen to this:

  If you could see your body as it really is, you would never see it the same way twice. The skeleton that seems so solid was not there three months ago. Ninety-eight percent of the atoms in your body were not there a year ago. The skin is new every month. You have a new stomach lining every four days … a new liver every six weeks.

  The skin is new every month? I don’t know – or care – how true that is (and if it’s true, how come the scar on my knee doesn’t go away?), but this is the sort of leverage we can use. Here’s a way into the challenge if you are seeking to get rid of big poundage. In my view, fad diets are useless, and if you are looking at shifting fifty pounds or more the task must look eternal and hopeless. But supposing you said to yourself, in the mirror, ‘Right, the next time my skin comes aroun
d, it will not look like this, and, what’s more, when my next skeleton arrives, it will look something like this …’ – at which stage you hold a photo of George Clooney or Catherine Zeta Jones up in front of the mirror. Now then, we have a plan. You have time, and you know that you do not have to do all the work – it’s all changing anyway, so all you need to do is steer the changes away from business as usual to something different.

  How do you steer? If you’ve given yourself three months, just follow Julia Child’s famous advice: Eat small portions, no snacking, no seconds, and try a bit of everything. Add to that my own rule when my trousers get tight – no carbs before dinner and alcohol on only two days a week – and I guarantee, when your new skeleton and third new skin appear in three months, everything will be completely different.

  I grant you, it will be a wee bit unfortunate if your start position is that of a tubby male and your end position is the Catherine Zeta Jones model, but it’s a start and I’m sure you’ll cope.

  39. Feeding people? What’s the problem?

  I have, of course, run restaurants. I have been involved, as an investor or as a variously ranked employee, with all sorts of different types. From a chain of precisely two Italian restaurants right through to the thousands of Burger Kings which served millions of Whoppers every day while I was captain of that particular ship.